Choosing the best colors for advertising is a task that requires balancing originality for your brand and familiarity with customer expectations and emotional responses. Familiarizing yourself with influential design principles of color can help you make a more effective choice. Colors are typically divided into hot and cold varieties, which serve different types of businesses and marketing messages. Your first consideration should be what impression you wish to give your customers and how you would have them feel when they think about your business, product, or service. Then select your color scheme that complements, rather than strays from, your existing or desired business image.
The best colors for advertising depend on a marketing message and how it ties into brand image. It's good to keep target audience responses in mind as well. Colors have different cultural meanings, and cities everywhere consist of a mix of populations with different cultural backgrounds. Most choices will require at least some compromise, but it's best to avoid any glaring problems that may jar the expected sensibilities of a target audience.
For more energetic messages, hot colors like orange, red, or yellow may serve. Conversely, cooler colors like shades of blue convey credibility, which suggests security and authority — an attractive choice for numerous corporations. Earth tones like browns and greens may serve more familiar or environmentally conscious marketing messages, such as for residential contexts or informal small businesses. Darker colors often suggest stability and reliability, and may be used for operations like banks and law firms.
Many hue and shade differences have their own psychological and emotional suggestiveness. Choosing the best colors for advertising is a decision that may also be influenced by quality differences between print and digital communications. They may also be affected by reproductions and manipulations to the final medium. Make sure you get a firm understanding of the reproduction processes employed and know what differences, if any, to expect between media.
Colors can conjure an intuitive and immediate reaction from people. This embodies a direct emotional connection with potential customers, so it's important to understand design influences when selecting the best colors for advertising. People may not be aware of the influence of color, but done well, it can add a real sense of credibility to an advertisement or a graphical or visual message.
Matching colors may also provide a unity of design within the context of your brand communications and Web site. People may more readily associate the advertisement as a part of your Web site architecture. In terms of emotional marketing, colors can tie together associations between a product or service and a desirable feeling that generates a purchase impulse.
Consulting with a design professional can help illuminate the best colors for advertising a particular message. Web sites also exist to help designers mix and match complementary hues in creative combinations or palettes. Choices of color can make the difference between whether a target customer perceives your business as a small, friendly local enterprise or as a midsized or larger company. When uncertain about the best colors for advertising, research other businesses in the same field to get some general ideas of the types of colors that your target customers may respond to or expect. You may discover that certain types of businesses often use similar patterns of color, in hot or cool shades, to send a congruent message to customers.
