When it comes to branding, color isn’t just an aesthetic choice—it’s a strategic tool. The right color palette can shape perception, build brand recognition, and even influence consumer behavior. That’s why digital marketing experts stress the importance of thoughtful color selection. It’s not about picking what looks pretty, but aligning visuals with your brand identity and audience expectations. In this guide, you’ll learn a step-by-step process to select brand colors that look great and tell your brand story in the most compelling, intentional way possible.
Step 1: Understand the Psychology of Color
Before you even begin selecting colors, it’s essential to understand how color affects perception. Color psychology plays a powerful role in how people respond to brands. Each hue evokes different emotions and associations, often without the viewer even realizing it. These emotional reactions can guide trust, loyalty, and purchasing decisions.
For example, blue is commonly linked to trust, security, and professionalism. It’s frequently used by banks, healthcare companies, and tech firms for precisely this reason. Red, by contrast, suggests urgency, power, and excitement—think Coca-Cola or YouTube. Green connects to health, sustainability, and growth, while yellow radiates energy and optimism, albeit with a need for cautious use. Purple leans into creativity and luxury brands, black conveys sophistication and control, and white communicates simplicity and cleanliness.
Understanding these common color associations allows you to create a visual identity that resonates emotionally. You’re not just choosing colors—you’re choosing how people will feel when encountering your business and how to evoke feelings through your brand.
Step 2: Analyze Your Brand’s Core Values and Target Audience
Your brand’s identity should be the foundation of every color choice. Think about your mission, vision, and brand personality. Are you bold and disruptive? Or reliable and nurturing? These traits should align directly with the emotional tone set by your colors.
If your business promotes innovation and forward-thinking, vibrant teal or electric blue might support that message. A brand built on compassion and trust might lean toward calming colors like soft greens or muted blues. The goal is to match internal values with external representation.
Equally important is your target audience. Who are they, and what do they value? Consider demographics like age, gender, and income, but don’t stop there. Dive into their emotional preferences and cultural background. A younger audience might respond well to bright colors, while a more traditional market may find comfort in neutral colors. Cultural associations matter too—red might signal danger in one context and prosperity in another.
Choosing colors with your values and audience in mind ensures that your visual identity is attractive but also authentic and impactful. Coupled with good management of customer reviews, it leads to greater performance and brand reinforcement.
Step 3: Assess Industry Standards Without Imitating
Once you know what your brand stands for and who you’re speaking to, it’s time to look outward. Investigate what colors dominate your industry. This benchmarking process helps you understand what consumers already associate with your type of product or service.
Take the tech industry: it’s awash in cool colors like blues, grays, and whites—colors that suggest reliability and intelligence. Food and beverage brands often favor reds, oranges, and yellows for appetite stimulation. If you’re entering a market where specific colors dominate, using them can help customers understand your offer quickly. But there’s a catch.
You don’t want to blend in. Differentiation is vital. Find ways to acknowledge industry norms while creating something distinctive. This could be through choosing a slightly offbeat shade, pairing an unexpected secondary color, or using your entire palette in a visually fresh way. The idea is to appear relevant without cloning your competitors.
Being aware of your industry’s color wheel allows you to break rules with intention and create a color identity that’s both familiar and unforgettable.
Step 4: Choose a Primary Color, Secondary, and Accent Color
A well-structured brand color palette does more than look nice—it functions strategically across different brand applications. The best way to organize this is by assigning roles to three key colors: primary color, secondary color, and accent color.
Your primary color is the visual heart of your brand. It should appear most often and be instantly associated with your business. Think of it as your logo’s anchor, your website’s dominant shade, or your go-to background color.
The secondary color provides flexibility. It supports the primary by offering contrast or variation. It might be used in headers, secondary buttons, or promotional material. This color keeps your visuals dynamic without confusing.
The accent color is where you draw attention. Use it sparingly for calls to action, highlights, and subtle emphasis. It should pop against the other two colors while feeling cohesive within the palette. Balance is everything.
Ensure your palette adheres to accessibility standards—contrast ratios for readability, sufficient differentiation for color-blind users, and consistent usage across all channels. Tools like Coolors, Adobe Color, or the WebAIM contrast checker can help you refine and test color combinations that are evenly spaced and accessible.
Step 5: Test Colors Across Touchpoints and Mediums
Even the most perfect brand colors can fail if they don’t work well in practice. That’s why testing is essential. Start by previewing how your chosen palette looks in various environments—digital screens, printed materials, signage, packaging, and social media platforms. Remember that color appearance can vary drastically between devices and lighting conditions when choosing brand colors.
For instance, a color that feels vibrant on your desktop monitor might look dull or washed out on mobile or in print. Similarly, contrast issues might only become apparent when viewed on a darker background or when scaled down.
Go further by testing color usage in real-world applications. Try different button colors in email campaigns and measure click-through rates. A/B test landing pages with varying highlight hues. Observe which color choices drive engagement and conversions.
Remember qualitative feedback—ask your team, customers, and even strangers what certain feelings your color choices evoke. Insights from users help reveal whether the palette truly communicates your brand’s essence or needs refinement. Testing is where theory meets reality. Use it to validate your direction and optimize your color strategy for maximum impact.
Step 6: Build a Brand Color System and Brand Guidelines
Once your palette has proven itself, it’s time to formalize it into a brand color scheme. This step ensures that every person who touches your brand, from graphic designers to the design team, uses color consistently and correctly.
Your color system should include exact values: HEX color codes for web, RGB for digital, CMYK for print, and Pantone codes for specific production needs. This ensures your colors stay uniform across all formats and platforms.
More importantly, define usage guidelines. When should the primary color be used? How often can the accent color appear? Are there specific pairings to avoid? Include examples of good and bad usage. Also, provide variations for different backgrounds and accessibility considerations.
Your brand guidelines should also account for digital elements—hover states, gradient options, button colors—and print considerations like paper finish and ink limitations. Consider including responsive guidelines for mobile-first design and social media templates.
This documentation protects your visual integrity, speeds up creative workflows, and builds a more professional, cohesive brand experience across all customer touchpoints.
Step 7: Reevaluate Over Time Based on Performance
Choosing the right brand colors isn’t a one-and-done task. Like every aspect of branding, it should be monitored and refined over time. The market evolves, trends shift, and your audience may respond differently than expected. That’s why ongoing evaluation is essential.
Use analytics to track how well your colors are performing. Look at engagement rates, conversion metrics, and even direct feedback to assess whether your palette achieves the desired results. If your brand recognition is improving and customers respond positively, that’s a strong indicator that you’re on the right track.
However, if things feel stagnant, it may be time to experiment. This doesn’t mean a complete rebrand. Sometimes, minor tweaks—introducing a new accent color, adjusting saturation, or optimizing for mobile—can make a significant difference.
Maintain flexibility while protecting consistency. Any changes you make should still align with your core brand identity and not confuse existing customers. A strong color system adapts strategically, not reactively, to your business’s evolving needs. Consider tweaking your different shades, trying triadic colors, or integrating green, brown, or dark blue for enhanced depth and variation.
The Get The Clicks Difference
At Get The Clicks, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Our approach is rooted in understanding your unique business, brand personality, and target audience before crafting a strategy. Whether defining your brand color palette, refining your visual identity, or seeking the perfect palette to build an emotional connection, our expert design team brings insight, creativity, and precision to every project.
We combine proven marketing principles with intuitive color theory to ensure your brand colors look great and work hard to build trust, boost engagement, and increase brand recognition across all channels. That’s the Get The Clicks difference: strategy-first, results-driven, and always aligned with who you are as a brand.
Boost Your Brand with Get the Clicks
Ready to turn your perfect palette into a powerful branding asset? We help businesses create unforgettable brand identities that drive engagement and conversions. Let’s bring your vision to life, one perfectly chosen color at a time. Contact us to explore brand color palette inspiration and unleash your self-expression with the right combination of various shades, different hues, and colors.
A graduate of Full Sail University with 20+ years of SEO and web design experience, Neil handles all things SEO and tech here at Get the Clicks. He also splits his time with our sister company, Ecodelogic as a Project Manager for our development team. He loves football (he is a misguided Patriots fan) and dogs. As you can imagine, he keeps up with the needs of our clients and keeps us all on our toes!