How to Choose the Right Colors for your Product Marketing Campaign
When you are managing the marketing campaign for a product, there are a vast quantity of factors to think about before even getting started.
One of the important tips that product marketers and practitioners tout is to know your audience. Understand who you are marketing to and what makes them take action, and eventually buy your product. Ultimately, you want to capture the attention of your customer and have them continue to want to engage with your brand and product, perhaps even becoming an advocate for it.
A part of knowing your audience/customer is understanding what attracts this person and causes them to engage.
Understanding the Basics
Visual attraction in customer behavior is very much tied to the color or combination of hues that you utilize in your product marketing campaigns. Your choice of colors and their usage in your campaigns allow for your audience to instantly know who you are, what you do, and what you’re about. Keep in mind, however, that this can work both ways, as poor decisions around color can drive people away or send the wrong message! Color invokes emotion. Consumer behavior is tied to emotion, so it is logical to study the emotional reactions that particular hues invoke in the minds of your target audience.
The conversation about the importance of color choice in a product marketing campaign cannot go far without deciding on the different methods or channels that the campaign will include. While the product marketers that work on large-scale projects tend to focus on the digital aspect of a promotion plan, some still put a large stake in traditional marketing formats such as billboards, product packaging and other tangible messaging formats. Deciding on mostly digital marketing strategy including website and social media branding brings other dimensions to print marketing. The response that potential customers will have with a traditional marketing campaign has essentially been broadened by online and digital methods, still invoking quick responses and making or breaking a potential customer relationship.
Evoking Emotion
Once you know the specific audience that you are targeting, along with the marketing formats and channels that will connect you to that audience, now you must ask: how do you want your product to make your audience feel? Are you the product marketer for a new line of healthy frozen meals? You’d probably want your potential buyer to feel welcomed and warm, so green would be a good color to use. Do you market investment software and want to make people feel empowered and confident? Red is the way to go. Want to grab a buyer’s attention and invoke energy and happiness? Choose yellow as a color for your product, but in small quantities, so as to highlight qualities, rather than irritate the eye.
All colors are said to generally correlate with particular human feelings and action. Using the correct amount of a particular color in your marketing campaign should be a priority as well. Working with a designer, it is recommended to choose the right combination of colors for your branded materials. Your designer should know which colors work with one another and will be able to work with you on options for what you will ultimately use for your product’s color palette. Combining one primary color with two or three complementary hues, based on how they work with each other is a tried and true strategy.
Proper Combinations
There are a host of color resources available to those who are trying to figure out their primary and complementary color combinations. The majority of them note that blue is the favorite color of all audiences, both male and female. It invokes a cool feeling of trust and safety. You might think that choosing blue for your product should automatically be your choice from learning this fact, yet that may not be the case at all. If the blue is too dark, it can come off as abrasive or even stodgy, while a lighter shade of blue might look too friendly or even too childish to represent your product. It is also wise to remember that color is contextual. You might want to buy a light blue can of air freshener, but that color would probably not work for the interior of your new car.
Experienced content creation professionals also warn marketers to think about the legibility within the colors that are chosen in campaign for your product. If the colors you choose are both light and somewhat muted, messaging might not be clearly seen. Alternatively, if two colors extremely contrast with each other, that could lead to eye strain. There is a significant portion of people who are color blind, and cannot distinguish between red and green, so using those two colors as a pair should generally be avoided.
The Takeaway
Many details go into deciding what color or colors should be used for an effective product marketing campaign. The best way to gauge what works is through continuous testing. Measuring the impact of your campaign colors will allow you to make changes along the way and market your product successfully.