Marketing Solutions for Highly Skilled Professionals

Color and font are two elements of marketing and advertising that can really make or break a campaign. 

Some studies appear to indicate that people have different preferences and different reactions to varying types and uses of color and text in advertising and informational campaigns.

Colorful oil paints on a canvas

Our brains evolved to enjoy colorful and playful design, but we are so overloaded with information and attention-seeking advertising, that excessively bright or complicated visuals can induce complete shutdown in the wrong context. 

Creating effective marketing is a very nuanced and rapidly evolving enterprise. It seems that where a lot of people get into trouble doing their own marketing is trying to find pat answers to the immediate problems instead of trying to understand the broad strokes of human decision making and attention scarcity. 

When I’m creating marketing I try to resist my immediate impulse to make something that appeals to me personally and sit with some questions first. 

Who am I talking to?

Am I primarily singling out one generation over another? Different age groups have different color and font preferences and comfort levels.

Am I talking primarily to men or to women? Women tend to prefer more colorful, visually interesting layouts, and men are more likely to respond to darker or neutral colors and less busy layouts.

Then again, men who are looking for a service that feels more feminine to them (like social media marketing) are going to feel good responding to what they perceive as feminine-looking advertising.

A variety of type blocks with different fonts

What am I interrupting?

Marketing is asking for someone’s attention. Are they walking across campus? Driving to work? Having some downtime scrolling FB? Reading a news article? Thinking about what people are doing and how they’re feeling can help you make choices about how you interrupt them and how you use their time once you’ve got their attention. 

What am I selling and how do people feel about it?

If I’m selling pizza, I want people to feel hungrier than they already are and I want them to pick up the phone and order a pizza, so I would make sure that people see something delicious that feels like it’s about to get in their mouth and I want my pizza place’s phone number to be big and easy to read. Maybe I even want the number to seem like it interrupts the pizza’s path to their mouth. 

If I’m selling tax preparation, I want people to feel just a little anxious about this task and then I want them to see calling or emailing me as the escape hatch or comforting relief from their anxiety. This might mean big dark angles in the background and soft warm shapes around the spot where they click to call or email me.

Accessibility

No matter who your audience is, it’s always important to make sure that your text is legible and easy for people with visual impairments to decode. Don’t leave money on the table by failing to serve a rapidly growing demographic of wealthy elders who need san serif fonts, type large enough to see well, and who use accessibility tools like screen readers.