The Psychology of Colors in Content Marketing | Marketing Insider Group

In turn, sites that rely on content marketing tactics like blogging need to use images to help break up the text and give their readers’ eyes a break. But there is another way to utilize images to make your content strategy even more effective, through the psychology of colors. If you are looking to boost your conversions, here some tactics for using images to do so.

Controlling Their Emotions

There is a definite psychology of influencing consumers emotions through colors. You can see it in advertising from major corporations and how they want people to think of their business. Each color invokes unique emotions and responses that you can use for your advantage. Here are a few popular ones to consider.

Blue

The color blue is linked to having a calming effect and is generally liked by everybody. If you want your audiences to consume your content in a logical manner and calmly, use the color blue. This is a useful tactic if your tactic is to appeal to their analytical side instead of their emotional side.

This color is also useful if your product/service is connected to something distressing. It’s why commercials for things like medicine have a lot of blue in them. They want to instill that their product will bring them peace and relaxation.

Having a blue background and images with a lot of blue will calm down your readers and, hopefully, prevent them from frantically scanning your page. Be sure that your content matches that tone by still being relaxed and soothing.

Red

Red is associated with a lot of different things, all of which are the opposite of blue. It’s also a highly popular choice in the world of advertising and marketing. Red has a passionate effect on viewers, leading to more impulsive and possibly irrational choices. It also relates to emotions like love, anger, danger, passion, appetite and power.

If you want your target market to get passionate or riled up about something, include a lot of red. Making impulse decisions is a lot easier in this frame of mind, which is why a lot of fast food and luxury items use the color red in their advertising.

If your target market goes through the buying process very quickly, red is a powerful color. Not only will they associate your product as one of power and authority, they’ll be more aggressive in their purchasing.

Other Colors

Red and blue have the most profound effects on consumer buying habits, but we’ll briefly mention other major colors below. Combining these colors with the above-mentioned ones can help further shape what your visitors feel in conjunction with your content marketing.

Green is associated with life, growth, and health. It’s useful for giving a product a positive and renewing feel, which is why it’s often used alongside the calming effect of blue.

Black is a bit harder to pin down. It includes a wide range of emotions like: professionalism, luxury, mystery, and power. It can also give a negative connotation to the subject matter, for example, a black list or things of an occult manner. It’s also worth mentioned that a black background with white text is hard on the eyes and can easily push away visitors from a site.

White, on the other hands, gives a feeling of purity, professionalism, and trust. It’s why popular news sources opt for a white or slightly gray background. Too much white though can give a sterile or uninteresting feel to a page and requires splashes of color to make it interesting to the eye.

Yellow brings connections to happiness and lightheartedness. It catches the eye and gives a feeling of creativity and positivity. Connecting it with a positive message in your content leaves viewers in a good mood, which connects that feeling with your site.

Learning to Influence Consumers From Corporations

You can learn a lot about a business from their logo, especially massive corporations. The rest of their branding, marketing, and even physical stores all push the same message to their consumers.

Let’s look at Target as an example. The majority of their colors they use are red and white. Red gives a feeling of passion and power to their consumers, while the white is purity and intelligence. This color palette is used in the logo, their ads, even in the stores themselves. They want their consumers to making decisions quickly in their store while feeling smart doing so like they are getting a good deal by being an aggressive shopper.

Corporations have even gotten so good at this that they even use the type of lighting in their store to influence shoppers moods. Starbucks use a dim, but warm colored lighting, to make you feel comfortable and want to spend time there relaxing. You don’t see pale fluorescent lights in the coffee houses, as they would give more of a corporate and cold feeling that would drive people out. Conversely, a busy fast food place has harsher light, encouraging you to simply eat your food and go so they can free up space for more customers.   

Guiding Consumers To A Specific Action

Utilizing colors can help encourage people into making choices you want them to make. Want them to take them time reading a specific article? Include blue and white colors. Looking for them to click a call to action button quickly and fill out a lead gen form? Use red to encourage impulsivity.

Colors send subliminal clues to visitors of what you want them to do. Combine these with other prompts, like text on a CTA button, to further encourage them to follow the path you want them to take.

Have some thoughts about the psychology of colors and how they impact marketing? Have you run an A/B test simply changing colors on a page and want to share the results? Let us know in the comments below.