Colours, Theming and Design

Please Note: This is a transcript of a 20 minute webinar. You can watch it here.

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Today I want to talk about the effective use of color in your advertising.

So the WHY..

Why would you want to do this?

The reason is because you want to speak directly to your perfect prospects and you need to allow your marketing materials to do that.

If you're not going to allow them to absorb what you have to offer, they're never going to buy from you.

You have more or less three seconds to communicate your offer.

That's not entirely true because some people will stick around for up to five seconds or even 10.

But the vast majority will just have a quick split second, look at your content, and then they're gone.

Like for instance, think about when you're looking through your emails for the day, you've got 10 new messages or 50 new messages, depending on how many lists you're subscribed to, or how many clients you have.

You scan all the subjects and you, the ones that catch your eye, you click on it and you have a look for, and then you have like one to two seconds when you quickly scan the content of the email and you decide whether it's worth reading more of, and more often than not, it comes down to the presentation.

Cause if you received an email with a black background and white text, it would be very hard to read.

It would look shady.

You wouldn't go anywhere near it.

In the most part, unless you were expecting an email of that kind from a client or a black hat hacker, which is just happens to be in contact with you.

Okay?

So you want to get their attention before something else does.

That's the easy part.

You use balanced colors, lots of white space (not too much) but the more white space, the better, because it allows them to focus in on your content.

Now we're going to talk about that in a moment.

And the last thing is to be clear and they will likely consume everything you have to offer.

If it's challenged to read your content, people are busy.

They don't have time to sit and work out the algorithm to why you've written your content that way or what your actual messages.

So anyway, let's move on.

How do you do this?

So the first little principle I want to give you, is to frame your offer..

Frame your content, frame the key parts of your promotional material, in TWO millimeters or more of white space.

So say if you have a picture of a Hoover, you don't want to cover it with a black or deep red color behind, unless that's the theme of your overall campaign (probably a bad idea).

Frame the Hoover with a little bit of white space, imagine a picture frame that has a little border around it, it's usually white or a light colour (depending on the color of the picture itself of course).

Make sure there is at least two millimeters of white space around your content or your offer or your product that allows, the eye, your a prospect to relax and focus in on what you actually have to offer.

Instead of just seeing a big mess of items on a page or a piece of paper and thinking too much information I'm going, okay, next choose colors that work with your offer.

So if you have back to the Hoover, if you have the Hoover, for instance, the colors that are not going to work for that are contrast in colors, vibrant colors, and what just choose things that compliment each other.

You don't want colors that work against each other.

You just want everything to work together.

Anyway, I'm going to give you some examples of this soon, let's move on.

Keep your main design themes to three or four primary colors, and less really is more.

You want to stick with your brand and color.

So if your company is blue or your company's green stick with those colors, use different shades of green, different shades of blue, whichever match your brand and the product in which you're offering.

However, if you are offering to a different type of market than you normally do, be willing to test because without testing and measuring, you'll never know if you're doing the right thing, you have to test and measure always.

And the last thing here is start using your designs.

Oops, that's not the last thing.

Start designs using dark text on a light background.

It's very hard for our eyes, even though we're getting more used to it now with frequent usage, it's very hard for our eyes to focus in on light objects, within a dark surround.

So where possible, if not like your general rule of thumb, always start your designs for marketing flyers, promotional material for your website, using a white theme with dark text and dark elements like your photos.

So if you're selling fire extinguishers, you don't want to have a red background because the fire extinguisher itself is usually red.

Unless it's a chemical one, what's your blue or black, or I don't know, I'm not in the fire extinguisher business, but I've worked with people.

And the last thing is use colors that do not contrast with each other.

And here's a perfect example.

This is bleach.

We all know the bleach bottle in Europe anywhere.

I don't know about the U S I've never bought bleach in America.

You, the, the cap is a super vibrant, deep, like alerting red, like a warning sign.

And the bottle is a super solid, deep blue, dark blue, those two colors clash with each other.

The first time I noticed this was when I was in high school and I was at my dad's house making some, a sandwich late at night, and they had a light blue wall kind of greeny turquoise blue wall.

There was a bottle of bleach in front of it.

I don't think it was dumbest us, but same thing, exactly the same colors.

And what I noticed was I had this kind of strobe effect in my eyes.

And it was because of the most, the intensity of both of those colors together against another blue background made it super intense.

So don't do that anyway.

Here's some examples:

This is AliExpress.

We all know AliExpress.

Now the main thing I want you to have a look at is the slideshow here.

Just ignore the rest.

You can see the nice use of color that they've done here. Just to separate the categories.

And generally you will see them using that rule of not having more than three or four primary colors.

So let's just press play here.

So this is orange with white text, white product, black product, great product.

They're all, it's under four colors here.

We've got orange text on a light gray background with three or four other colors.

Again, it keeps to the rule of keeping things simple.

Okay, Here.

Nice and clean.

You can see what products they're offering.

You can see it's related to cooking because it's set in a kitchen handled by alley express.

Again, less than four colors, less than four colors.

They're using white text on a dark background, but it's because they're focusing on the product, the text as a secondary, they want the person to capture the product in their mind before they look at the text.

Let's this is a good example of, for me of not what not to do, because here it's just a mess.

It's very dark.

It's very strange.

It's obvious they're selling sportswear, which maybe is the, the goal, the end goal, but it could be done so much better if they did just use clear images and less darkness.

Again, same thing.

They're selling watches.

They're not selling the beach, like the beach.

What does the beach have to do with watch?

It's just a nice background that complements the colors of the watches and it frames them nicely white text on a dark background again, because the product is popping out of the page.

If they use dark text, it would detract from the power of the product being there.

Okay.

Let's have a look at eBay.

You made don't do it.

How I particularly, how they don't do it in a way that I think is particularly great, like from experience.

I'm sure it works for them because they're a huge corporation.

At the end of the day.

They can't really do much wrong because they have such a strong following.

But look at the colors they've used.

So we've got two blues, a green and a turquoise or a light blue.

So they've essentially used, they've essentially gone on to adobe.com and then gone to the color wheel.

Adobe created a color wheel where you can insert the color, which you wouldn't want to start with.

Then you choose.

Then it tells you all of the other colors that are related to that and compliment it within the different categories that you can choose.

And there's lots of different technical categories.

You can choose that, but it seems to me like eBay have literally just gone onto this website and put in their main color or three or four main colors.

Then they've just used every single one of them at the end of the day.

It's good usability.

There's lots of white space.

People can focus on the products.

They can see the products.

It's just a little bit, Hmm.

Not exciting for me anyway. What if we got Amazon?

If we have a look at this Amazon slideshow, clean white background framing, the offer mother's day, this is taken in Spain.

So the Amazon defaulted to Spanish in this instance, everything's framed now here.

Here's a perfect example of contrast in colors, like the bleach bottle we talked about before this color and white do not work together at all, but what is the effect of looking at this super striking hard to focus on free trial for 30 days?

I'm sure that gets lots of clicks, even though it's super ugly.

What else have we got an Amazon?

And there's another one that's kind of contrasting as well. [Inaudible]

Shoes

Overall.

Amazon does it very well.

And I'm sure they've put a lot of thought into all of these things.

Okay.

Let's move on.

This is more of what, what not to do and what to do.

These are too big.

Computer companies are reasonably big computer companies.

One of them is much bigger than the other.

They were started around about the same time.

The first one more computers were started in 2003 and Ebuyer was started in 2000.

Personally, I've used both of these companies and I haven't chosen them for any other reason than I have experienced with them.

And I've used their services.

Now let's look at both of their websites. Look at more computers.

They've gone completely over the top with their branding.

Like you've have more computers, more gaming, more electricals, more office, more phones.

That's nonsensical.

There's absolutely no reason to do this.

People.

Either people want to buy computers, game games, consoles games, they want to buy electrical stuff.

They want to buy office stuff.

They want to vote by mobile phone stuff.

They don't want to be overly branded.

Like you can buy all of these things from you by your.com, but they haven't gone and separated their site into loads of different sections they've worked at altogether.

And if you look, which one of these do you think is the most successful, it's blatantly obvious.

It's the one who's using color.

Who's actually balancing their color properly.

They've pretty much copied each other.

I would imagine that.

Yeah, [inaudible] because they're more focused on marketing and customer service.

Well, actually, no, that's not true.

They're more focused on marketing and keeping up to date with everything.

More computers are a traditional company they've they are certified by the queen.

Don't know if it's their company specifically more computers or it's their mother company, but they are certified as suppliers of technology to the United Kingdom by the queen.

So I'm sure that they rest upon that quite a lot.

The difference in these two websites is immense.

The usability here did, you know, we also sell, nobody wants to be sold.

So again, that should be removed for starters buyer.

You don't see anything like that.

They don't want to sell you anything. They're just there to support you.

These buttons.

They're very nice, but what are they [inaudible] put their labels underneath on more computers.

You actually have to hover each image to see what it is.

The usability of this website is terrible, absolutely terrible. And they have everything in place.

They just haven't gone the extra mile and done the research, looked at the figures and then adjusted their website based on how customers are using it.

Maybe they are, maybe they just don't have anybody that knows what needs to be done in this dependent.

However, at the end of the day, number of speak EBS, yeah.

Has over 200 employees.

Remember these were both started at the same time, year, 2000 for your bio and more computers, year, 2003, but more computers is certified by the queen.

And to me, I figured that would be why something, but what it seems to be is anything company that's certified by the queen or the whatever the Royal family or the, her Majesty's government in the United Kingdom have very old school websites.

They don't keep up to date with technology.

Like they sell technology, but they don't keep up-to-date on the cutting edge of design and marketing.

They just are there, their certificate died, respectable, done.

It's like getting a knighthood like sir Sean Connery.

So Sean Connery gets the, not just because we know him in all the James Bond movies and the countless other movies he's been in because he is a star.

He is knighted by the queen of England.

Anyway.

So these guys everything's just cryptic and difficult on more computers, but an easy buyer you want to get somewhere like it's just obvious.

They're focusing on selling you a laptop.

Wow.

Giving you a laptop for an incredible price on more computers.

They're just offering the new Samsung galaxy which is on every single foreign website, every single review website that I've looked at recently, it's always this advert.

They haven't put any effort into making their own actual ads.

Ebuyer incredible company.

As far as marketing goes really, really impressive.

Okay.

So, action.

How can you implement this in your own business?

So let's review your existing branding, your website and your promotional materials and anything else you're doing.

If you're doing direct mail that comes under promo materials, make sure, sure.

Everything is nicely themed to your company and not just colors for the sake of colors.

Oh, that looks nice. Perfect. Let's do that.

Give your design and branding purpose.

Identify what can be simplified now while you're reviewing your info, while you're reviewing your existing state of organization, whatever, then implement the principles we've talked about here today.

You can just go back to the start of this video.

I'll stick some bullet points on the post, on our blog and you can go from there.

It's not difficult to implement this stuff.

It just, eventually it becomes just common knowledge and you're like, Hmm, why did I do anything else before jewel readership, this isn't technically color.

However, it is also, it depends on how you use this, but yeah.

Remember there's always two types of people.

There's the people who just want to go, boom. And know what you're talking about, what your offer is, what your service is, what your problem solving, solution is those people.

They just want to see big words that explain everything in five to 10 words, maximum, fewer, the better.

And then you have the more analytical people….

The people who read all of the terms and conditions of a contract before they sign it, you want to have all the information that type of person needs also in your advertising.

And when you do have these things, you're, you're appealing to both types of people.

You're the person who just wants to quickly scan your content or your offer or your information.

They can, they can just go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, read all of the subheadings, the main title, and then the subheadings.

And they have an idea of what you're offering.

If they're interested in what you're offering, they might read a little bit more generally in my experience or our experience.

They won't read very much more.

They'll just take action if they want it.

So always the last thing always keep your finished design, simple and clean.

Keep the graphics and the text as simple and clean as possible.

Just get out your message, help people where you can and keep them, keep your company or your service in their minds.

So when they do need you, they will come to you.

But if you're just, however, if you're just gonna do this one or two times, it's not gonna work for you.

You might get some leads.

You'll probably get some extra leads.

Well, no, you will get extra leads over your normal designs because you'll catch the attention of more people by having a clean, accurate, concise design.

And by not using too many colors, like even on this page, we've got, I don't consider a white or black, a color.

Really black is technically a color that white is just background.

It's a foundation.

So we've got blue, we've got red and we've got black.

We've essentially got three colors here.

We've got gray, but that's just another shade of black.

I just used gray because it's kind of invisible and you read the focus on the content and then you see graphics and texts afterwards.

Okay.

Thank you very much for watching.

Find me on the social networks, have a great day.

Any questions? Give me a shout.

And if you know somebody who might find this content interesting, please share the link with them.

Thanks very much,

Matt Wilkinson out!