Your brand is the first thing potential clients see when they view your business online or in person. Making a good impression is key for booking more appointments and building lasting relationships with clients.
There are many different elements that make up your brand. Some examples include your website, logo, fonts, marketing materials, the tone of voice in your social media captions, the design of your treatment room, POS displays and retail merchandising, and of course, your brand colors.
In this post, we’ll be going over why it's important for estheticians, eyelash extension specialists, manicurists, hair stylists and other beauty and wellness service providers to define their brand color. We’ll also give your actionable steps to choosing your brand colors so you can start building your bad a** beauty brand.
What Do We Mean by “Brand Colors” or “Defined Colors”?
When it comes to marketing and branding your business, saying your brand colors are green, white and yellow isn’t going to cut it. There are many different shades of green, yellow and even white.
Using specific, detailed colors will make your business stand out to potential clients. If you use a different shade of green in all of your marketing materials, your brand will look sloppy which will lead to distrust from your customers. PRO TIP: Consistent branding and color usage makes you more trustworthy to clients.
Instead of green, white and yellow as brand colors, a more effective description would be kelly green, true white and dandelion yellow.
Don’t worry if you don’t know all of the ways to describe a color, keep on reading for steps on how to choose your specific colors.
Why is it Important To Choose Brand Colors for Your Beauty Business? How Do You Do It?
Think about a business that you’ve been to or a social media profile you’ve seen recently that you really liked and immediately wanted to purchase a service or product. That business most likely had a defined brand and consistent colors used in all of their marketing. As a beauty service professional, it's important to also have defined brand colors.
No matter if you’re just starting out building your dream business or if you’ve been at it for a while, it's important to have a strong brand foundation. This means defining all of the elements of your brand. Choosing specific colors for your brand is one of the most important elements to define since you’ll be using these colors in almost everything you create for your brand (think business cards, service menus, websites, signs, etc.).
Keep in mind that brand color choice doesn’t have to be a complicated, serious matter. The most important thing to think about is this – how do you want your target clients to feel about your brand and what words do you want them to use to describe your brand? If you can answer these questions, then the rest is just execution 👏
Check out a few examples of how to answer these questions:
“I want my target audience to feel peaceful when thinking about my brand. They will describe my brand as tranquil, relaxed and refreshed.”
“My target client will feel pampered and boujee when they come to see me. They will describe my brand as glam, luxe, professional and high-quality.”
Define Your Brand Words
After you’ve answered these questions, pick out two to three adjectives from the answer. These words are your brand essence. You’ll use these words for color inspiration. In the examples we’ve given above, you can already start to envision what colors go with each brand.
The first example probably makes you think of blue and white – fresh white towels, a calm blue sea, a soothing waterfall..you can picture it so easily, right?
The second example makes you think of precious metals like gold or silver, and elegant colors like black and white, or maybe even jewel tones like ruby or emerald.
Using brand words to give you color inspiration is a great place to start. Remember, getting even more detailed and specific with your colors is ultimately the goal. So we’ve outlined a few ways to do this.
How to Define Your Colors with an Inspiration Photo
If you’re a visual person or like looking at Pinterest for inspiration, an easy way for you to define your brand colors will be to find a photo that represents your brand. Spend some time scrolling through Pinterest and save any photo that stands out to you.
Once you get several photos that you love, narrow it down to one that is the best representation of your beauty brand. Colors from this photo will become your defined brand color palette.
This online tool will help you define your palette and get specific details of your colors – the shade names and color codes (digital representations of your colors). PRO TIP: after you upload your inspiration photo to the generator, you can adjust the specific colors to get your perfect palette.
These color codes are the detailed, final colors of your brand. You will use these colors when creating marketing materials, social media graphics or any other brand element.
More detailed information on color codes can be found in this article.
How to Define Your Colors with Premade Color Palettes
If you feel more confident in what colors you want to use, you can search through premade color palettes. Plug your brand word inspiration colors followed by “color palette” into a Google or Pinterest search and you’ll find endless possibilities.
Once you find a color palette that speaks to your brand, see if the color codes are mentioned. If you can’t find the exact color codes, you can use the Coolors app to get the final detailed colors of your band.
Choosing your brand colors is one of the first steps in building a successful brand. Using this approach will help you make sure your final brand colors are effective and authentically represent you and your business.
If you’re looking for more information building a business, make sure to keep up with this blog series Building Your Beauty Business. We will be talking about all things business to help you make your dream business a reality.