Why Your Ideal Client Determines 90% of Your Brand Color Choice

WHY YOUR IDEAL CLIENT DETERMINES 90% OF YOUR BRAND COLOR CHOICE

I'm excited to be chatting with you today about why your ideal client determines about 90% of your primary brand color choice. This can be a little bit controversial, but I don't care. I found it to be true, and I'm excited to share it with you today. 

If you have not yet checked out our our Color Quiz, I want to encourage you to do that because that is going to give you some great hints as to where to move forward with your branding.

Before we dive in, if you can I want you to grab either the notes on your phone or a sheet of paper and a pen. It’s important, no matter where you are with your business, that you're able to see if there are some gaps when it comes to your ideal clients. Often we get into this stage of training with color psychology, and there is a big gap.  People want to rush through it to get back to the color, but we can’t do that if you don’t have clarity on your ideal client.

We will discuss:

• Your ideal client is the hero
• Selecting your primary brand color with your ideal client in mind
• Creating attraction to your messaging through color
• How color psychology can help you to make an impact

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YOUR IDEAL CLIENT IS THE HERO

There is a book that came out a while ago that I’m sure you’ve heard of, Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller.  This book was so revolutionary because it introduced the concept that your ideal client is the hero of your business rather than yourself.  This was a huge kick in the pants to all the ‘90s and early 2000s marketers who had been making it all about them, their Lamborghinis, their big houses, and making people want to become them. What Donald was saying, based on all his years as a screenwriter, was that it’s about the hero’s journey and the client is the hero of your brand and business. 

This is the same thing I love to teach when it comes to your branding.  Your colors shouldn’t have much to do with you, and they should have almost everything to do with your ideal client.  We’re talking about this today to switch your thinking, and you may realize that everything in your brand needs to change. And I don’t say that to intimidate you - I say that to excite you! It’s a simple but impactful way to build your business.  Changing a product or service or a lot of your key messaging would be hard, but switching out a color is not hard - even if you have to redo a photoshoot in the grand scheme of things.

So with that notes app or sheet of paper, I want you to start writing out what you know about your ideal client.  I don’t want this to be general.  I want you to think based on an actual customer.  

• Who are they? 
• What is their age range? 
• What are their aspirations and goals? 
• What are their struggles? 
• What are their pains? 
• What do they love? 
• How do they learn? 
• How do they feel? 
• How do they approach things in life? 
• What are some of their beliefs?

SELECTING YOUR PRIMARY BRAND COLOR WITH YOUR IDEAL CLIENT IN MIND

These are important questions to understand, because the big question when it comes to choosing brand colors is how you want your ideal client to feel the first time they see your brand.  When they first see you, what do you want them to feel?  When someone is coming across you on social media, in an ad, through a referral, on a summit or a podcast, on a stage, or on your website, that is their first impression of you. It is your first opportunity to impact them visually.

We know commercials are doing this all the time.  Movies, stores, and advertisers on social media are doing this all the time.  Why aren’t we doing it? We can use our powers for good, right?  We should know exactly what we want the ideal client to feel the first time they interact with our brand, and our knowledge of color psychology can help us to choose this color intentionally.  We can understand all the positive and negative ramifications of the color understanding with absolute certainty why it is the right color.  We can rest knowing that whenever that ideal client sees us, they will know that we are their person.

I can’t tell you how many times I jump on a call with someone and they say they saw me and they just had a feeling of natural trust or they knew I was the teacher for them. Well, that is almost 100% because I have put all this thought and work into my brand.  I know that is how I will make the right people feel, and that’s exactly what happens. 

 That is why I want you to understand this concept when it comes to your brand, and especially to your primary color.  We want that primary color to be the color our ideal clients are attracted to and the one that makes them feel the right way when they first see us.

We are trying to limit those touch points. Instead of needing 10-20 touch points before someone makes a purchase, we want to shorten that significantly.  Our visuals, therefore, should have very little to do with us.  As Donald Miller pointed out, our brand is really all about our ideal clients.

CREATING ATTRACTION TO YOUR MESSAGING THROUGH COLOR

That idea really transformed my mindset.  It took a lot of the weight and pressure off myself when determining my brand visuals, because it wasn’t about me.  You can get into tonal color harmony, and that is where your personality comes in.  For the most part, however, it has very little to do with us.  That is why I saw it’s 90% about them, and 10% about us.  I’m being a little generous, and I would venture to say it’s closer to 5% or less about us. It’s really all about supporting them.

It’s about them coming to our homepage on our website and feeling supported, seen, and at home.  It’s about them seeing us on a summit, livestream, webinar, TEDx speech, or whatever it is and feeling really attracted to our message.  Instead of just wearing black and making ourselves work so much harder to get someone’s attention and understand us and our offers, we could just put a different color shirt on and they would understand instantly.  Why would we not want to do that?

Looking at bigger brands, using Albertsons as an example, you can see that their branding is predominantly blue.  That would be like the CEO, the owner, the biggest financial investor, or whoever else at Albertsons being like, “I don’t feel like that color reflects me very well. That’s not my personality.”  Of course, everyone on that board would tell them that it has nothing to do with you. 

It has to do with what attracts the customers. 

This is true of everything, and some of the people who are most educated about color psychology are the people are those who run the medication commercials.  It would be like them saying, “Well, I invented this. Why is this not more reflective of me?”  But it’s not about them.

HOW COLOR PSYCHOLOGY CAN HELP YOU TO MAKE AN IMPACT

Sometimes I hear, “Well, Michelle, it isn’t always about selling.”  I’m not saying that you’re not absolutely incredible, and I’m not saying that you can’t help someone to change their life.  I’m not saying you don’t have impact and uniqueness and an incredible, selfless nature. 

But if you want to stay in business, you need this perfect pair.  You need someone to be able to recognize that you are their person.  You can help them faster, serve them faster, attract more revenue faster, and give back to the world.

I think our entrepreneurship space really sucks at giving back, and I can’t believe how few people actually give back in their businesses.  They keep it all for themselves, and it just makes me go, okay, well, then don’t say you’re an impact maker. Don’t say you’re here to change the world. What you’re really here for is to get enough clients to make all the money that you want, and then keep it.

If you want to impact the world, you have to give back. I don’t care where we’re at on our income scale - it can be $1.  When I first started, it was $1. Now it’s closer to 10% every month. So, if you really want to make a difference, think about how much more powerfully you can do it with color psychology.  If you’re going to be in my world and learning color from me, I will always tell you that you’re going to see growth and I will ask what you are going to do to impact your clients and your audience and how you will give back. 

I have been given these gifts through study, and and my personal belief is that God wants me to get this message out there.  I want you to go, “Wow, I was attracted to her sphere to learn this stuff that is so powerful about color and the colors that were put here on this earth.” I'm also going to continue forward and spread that message about giving back and do that myself. That's how we truly change things. That's how we'll change this industry. That's how we'll change our local cities. That's how we'll change our countries. That is how we will change the world. 

So little rant there, hope you were there with me for it. We'd love to hear what you thought of today's episode, and specifically about how your ideal client has everything to do with your primary brand color choice. I'm excited to be here this season to help support you with figuring out what that color truly is.