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CopyDoodles Lunch & Learn 8/17/11 – “It’s All About Color”

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Lunch & Learn Important Links:

Lunch & Learn Transcript:

Hi everyone, we’re going to get started with today’s first ever CopyDoodles Lunch and Learn. Today’s topic is going is It’s All About Color.

Today I’m going to just be covering color and the use of color and the CopyDoodles Access Club and a few other things that I’m going to talk about in a bit. A few side notes, I will be taking any questions at all at the end. So, if you have anything that you want to ask me feel free to do so throughout the webinar simply by clicking on the question box on your webinar screen and typing it in there.

Then also, next week’s topic, since you are on today’s webinar you are already pre-registered to attend the Not So Secret Secrets of CDAC, where I’m just going to be talking about a few things that you might not know about using the CopyDoodles Access Club, and some really quick and easy tips and tricks that you can use to maximize your investment.

Additionally, tomorrow is our CopyDoodles Success Webinar with Charlie McDermott. He will be speaking about three tips for creating stand out marketing. That is tomorrow at 2PM Eastern. [NOTE: This webinar is over. If you would like to view the transcripts please log into CDAC and access them under the “Resources” section]

You don’t have to go there now because at the end of this webinar I’m actually going to be giving you this link again so that after the webinar you can sign up for this one.

Every week if you attend my Lunch and Learn webinar you will be able to access our Member-only Deal of the Week. Today’s Deal of the Week is so exciting. You might have received a few emails about it already, but our Deal of the Week are free CopyDoodles. [NOTE: This offer is now over. You can access FreeCopyDoodles by signing up for them at www.copydoodles.com] Again, I’ll be showing the link for the Deal of the Week at the end of the webinar too, after the Q&A, so that you can go to that right afterwards.

Today’s topic is It’s All About Color. If you have to leave for any reason or if you just want to follow up with any of the tips that I’m going to be giving you today, I’m also going to be giving a replay link of this webinar at the very end of the webinar, so make sure you stay tuned for that. You can bookmark it in case there’s any webinars you might miss. We’re going to post all of those videos the day after and then we’ll also put the transcripts up there too. You can get any links or any other information you might need.

We’re going to start each Lunch and Learn session with an introduction into the Big Three. The Big Three are the three important topics I’m going to cover in today’s webinar. Today the reason why I chose to talk about It’s All About Color is because color is a very near and dear subject to me. Before I started working with Mike I did do a lot of work in fashion, I designed toys for a while.

My job at my last position was to look at color. I did that probably 70% of my day. I would just look at colors. I would see which colors matched together. I would see what colors didn’t work and stuff like that. So, it got pretty intense and I probably know a lot more than I should about color and I probably drive a few people crazy when I talk about how color should match and how important it is. Today you’re going to learn a little bit about that, and also some tricks of the trade that you can use when putting CopyDoodles on your marketing pieces.

Today’s big three are:
1.) Which colors you should use to grab attention and make an impact.
2.) The number preference for color and the top six best colors to use.
3.) How to update and use color in the CopyDoodles Access Club, including some important shortcuts that you should know about.

What colors should I be using? Now the real question that people should be asking is, “What am I trying to make my customer do with my marketing?” So, “How do I want my customer to feel when they’re reading this piece?”

Because color is really closely tied in with the way we feel, it’s very important to use the correct colors in your marketing pieces. Think about it, when you go to a spa you don’t see bright red and yellow colors because then you’d never relax. You see soft colors, calming colors: blues, greens, neutral colors, stuff like that.

You might be thinking, “What the heck is she talking about?” But, what I’m talking about is that color has a huge impact on the psychology of how we think and on the things you’re sending out to customers. For example, like I stated before, blues and greens are used for spas; these colors are soft, they’re relaxing. They remind us of the outdoors, of being at the ocean.

Reds, oranges and yellows, these are hot colors that energize. We use a lot of reds and oranges when we create marketing pieces, when we use CopyDoodles, just because they call attention. They energize. They’re a warning. Other colors that grab are red, yellow, black, orange, colors like that just that stand out when you put them on a piece of paper.

We can actually go even more in depth, because certain colors actually evoke certain feelings when people look at them. Think about your home. If you were to paint one of the rooms in your home blue, think about how you would feel if you sitting in that room as opposed to if you painted the entire room red. You would have a different feeling just by being in that room with that color than you would being in a red room.

Black exudes authority and power. Red evokes the feeling of warning, stopping, it’s the most emotionally intense color and it’s also the most eye-catching. Blue is the color authority. Green is the color of money and wealth. You can actually see, I’m going to show you a few popular companies in a minute, but a lot of companies use blue and green in all of their marketing efforts, in their logos and stuff like that, just because they want you to feel loyal to them. A lot of financial companies use greens because it exudes money and wealth. Yellow is a very optimistic color. It’s very happy. People tend to feel happy when they see that color. Purple is the color of luxury, wealth, and sophistication.

Think about popular businesses today, what types of colors do they use? I can tell you my favorite color is hot pink, but I don’t see very many business using pink, whether it be in their logo or their marketing pieces. Well, other than Dunkin’ Doughnuts, but they have got orange in there too. It’s bright and fun. They’ve been doing it forever, people recognize it. What we see a lot of are blues, reds, yellows, and greens. It has the trust factor, the wealth factor, and they’re also attention-grabbing.

Then I also put this logo here at the bottom, for the Ralph Lauren Purple Label, just to call attention to his most expensive label, this is his highest quality label. Like I said before, purple exudes luxury, wealth, and sophistication. You can see why he chose not only to name his label, Purple Label, but to use this color in his marketing.

I want you to keep this all in mind when writing your copy and when choosing your CopyDoodles, not just for logo and business purposes, but it’s also important to think about how you want your customers to feel when they’re reading your marketing pieces, when they’re going through what you’re writing to them, and the way you want them to interact with your business and anything that you’re sending out to them.

What CopyDoodles colors are best? I get this question actually a lot. A lot of people just use red on their marketing pieces because it calls attention, but I do get a lot of people that ask me what colors are the best to use. So, here are the top six colors to use. This is all just based on research that’s been done to show color preference of consumers. This is in order of 1-6, the most popular colors that people have. Number one, people like the color blue, and then moving down to red, green, violet, orange, and yellow. So, you can use pink, you can use the lighter version of purple, but these are just, depending on what your marketing looks like, or what you want people to feel when they read it. These are just the top six colors that people prefer.

Moving on I’m going to talk about using colored CopyDoodles. I’m going to show you a really quick demo on how you can set up the CopyDoodles Access Club for your own preference, along with how you can choose new colors. So, let me just open up the Access Club.

Here is my version of the CopyDoodles Access Club. We do have some niche versions available, if you’ve heard of those. That’s why mine might look a little different than yours, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that we have a really great section on the CopyDoodles Access Club where you can set a default color of the CopyDoodles that you want to download.

If you actually scroll down to the bottom of the Access Club you can choose any of these 20 colors to be a default color so that whenever you download a CopyDoodle you don’t need to change the color at all, it will always download in that color. If you haven’t changed anything at all in your settings, then you are probably already set up to constantly download in red. That’s just the way that we set it up when we set up the Access Club, everyone’s default color is set to red. But, if you want to default to purple, all you have to is click on it and it will actually change your default CopyDoodles’ color to purple, once you scroll down. So, as you can see anytime I download, my downloads will be in purple, unless I change it, which I’ll show you how to do in a moment.

Another really cool thing that you can do is you can set your color by numerical RGB values. Now, if you’re not a designer you might not be familiar with RGB values, RGB stands for red, green and blue. It basically just means the amount of red, the amount of green, and the amount of blue that are in a color in order to make it the color that it is, if that makes sense.

This purple color has 170 red, 50 green, and 255 for blue, so that is what makes it this purple color here. If you want your colors to match your marketing piece, of if you just want to use a particular color, then you can actually set your numerical RGB value so that you have a default color that downloads in that color.

If you’re not sure how to even find an RGB color code, it’s really, really simple to just go into Google and google RGB color codes. A ton of websites will come up with lots of different RGB color codes that you can see thousands and thousands of colors that you can choose from.

I’ve chosen a site, let me just go to it, that I thought I was really helpful. This is just one that I’ve pulled up on Google. As you can see, you can download CopyDoodles in any of these colors. So, you’re not just limited to the 20 colors that are on the site. There’s turquoise, there’s emerald green, there’s dark olive, there’s khaki — anything you can imagine is here.

Let me just show you how you set your RGB code. At the very top of this list you’ll see the hex color, that is the HTML color code that you can use, maybe when you’re creating a website or something like that your designer might use that code, and that is also a code for this color.

Here’s the RGB values — red, green, and blue. You’re going to write down these numbers and you’re actually going to put them into the CopyDoodles Access Club to create the color that you want.

I’ve pulled up the colors for turquoise, let’s scroll down here. I’m going to change my color to turquoise here. I’m going to go back to the CopyDoodles Access Club, where it says, “Set by numeric RGB values,” I’m going to choose red — for this turquoise, there’s no red in it. So, it’s “0”. The number for the green is “245,” so, I’m going to scroll up to 245, I’m going to choose that. Then the blue is set to “255,” so it’s already at that. I’m just going to leave it at that. I’m going to press, “set default color.” Now my default color is set to turquoise.

If I want to download a CopyDoodle, let me choose one from TomDoodles. Let me show you now how my CopyDoodle will download in that turquoise color I wanted. I’m going to choose the 100%, as you can see the turquoise color I choose as my default comes up. I’m just going to scroll down. I’m not going to mess with any of these colors here. I choose what I want to generate it for. I like to use a PNG, so I’m just going to press, “Download.” I saved the file to my desktop, as you can see my CopyDoodle downloaded in turquoise. I can place this on any of my marketing pieces to match it.

I’m just getting a few questions in, I just want you to know that I’ll answer all questions at the end, unless they pertain to exactly what I’m doing right now. Just stay until the end and I will answer all of your questions, I promise.

Next, I just want to really quickly show you, if you’ve never changed any of your colors in the CopyDoodles Access Club, if you’ve never changed the color of a CopyDoodle, I just want to really briefly show you how easy it is to do that, without the whole default thing that I’ve just showed you.

So, we have 20 different colors available. You can actually highlight over of these colors and it will preview the color for you, but if you move away from this it will remain that color — that does not mean that you are downloading in that color. You actually have to click on the radio button, here, at the bottom, in order to choose the color you want to download in.

So, if I would like to download in hot pink I would click on the radio button and that means I’m downloading in hot pink. The color over here will also change. If I want to download in blue, I click on the blue radio button and then the color on the left-hand side will change to blue. Then I press download, save my CopyDoodle, and it’s downloaded in blue. It’s as simple as that.

Now, going back to setting default colors in the CopyDoodle Access Club, there’s only one section of the CopyDoodle Access Club where using a default color will not work. So, I’ve defaulted to turquoise and I will always download in turquoise, unless I change the color here. But, if I want to create my CopyDoodle using the CopyDoodle Generator, I have to actually put in the HTML color, which I showed you the HTML color code, the hex color code right here. So, you actually have to put in this number if I wanted to create my own CopyDoodle.

David asked a question, he wanted to know if it will then go back to the default color if I choose a CopyDoodle color on this page? Yes, it will. So, let me just go to this CopyDoodle. So, as you can see, it automatically downloads in turquoise.

If I choose purple and I wanted to download in purple, then it will download in purple, but if I want to chose another CopyDoodle or I now want this to download in turquoise again, I’m actually going to have to go out and back into the CopyDoodles, so I have to click out, and click back in to get that color that I defaulted to, if that answers your question. No matter what your default will always stay that color, but if you do change it that’s fine.

Going back to the CopyDoodle Generator, if you do want to change to use any color in the CopyDoodle Generator, just the way that it’s set up, because you’re typing in your own text, maybe I’m typing in my name as my signature or something, just the way that it’s set up because it’s creating the CopyDoodle right here on the page, you will need to, again, type in your default. You can either use this site that I have here, or a similar site to pull up the hex color, the default color, but a really helpful resource to use is actually this website, which is http://html-color-codes.info If you google ‘HTML color codes’ this actually comes up as the first selection.

Here’s just a color chart that will come up. If you click on any of these colors it will actually just give you the HTML color code. As you can see I can get all of these color codes, they’ll actually line at the bottom here. If you’re doing a project where you want the colors to match this is a really great place to choose a couple of different colors and make sure that they match before putting them on your marketing.

Say I wanted to download my custom CopyDoodle in this light green. I’m going to copy this code here — you do not need the number symbol. I’m going to then paste the code right here in this HTML color box. I’m going to choose ‘use color’ and it will automatically change my CopyDoodle in the preview to the color that I want. When I generate the CopyDoodle it will also download in the chosen color.

It’s really as simple as that to change all the colors in the CopyDoodle Access Club, like that. It’s really, really simple. You don’t need a graphic designer or anything like that. You can choose anything that you like.

That’s it for my demo, but I just want to note that this is really important, playing with color can be a lot of fun. I find it a lot of fun. I like to use different colors that aren’t in the Access Club, and it’s especially fun in the CopyDoodle Access Club, but don’t use too many colors, because if you use way too many colors you can end up looking like that horrible holiday sweater that you see at parties. You can look like the super-scary clown that I put up on this slide. Your marketing can look like this. You don’t want it to look like this. You want it to be appealing to your customers.

What Mike and I tend to do with all of our marketing pieces, we choose one color to do all of our CopyDoodles in. We do this because if you think about the reason why CopyDoodles was created, it was created to make it easy to put handwriting on your marketing pieces.

If you were actually to do this physically by hand to each of your pieces you wouldn’t get out all of your smelly markers or your Sharpies that you had in your office, lay them on your desk and go about coloring your marketing, you would choose one and you would write all the quick notes that you had to your customer on it, and you would send it out. You wouldn’t take the time for each piece to use different colors. So, just stick to one color, keep it easy, and your marketing will look great. It’s really not that hard. It’s a lot of fun to play around with. I think you’ll probably do great.

Before we get to the Q&A I do have two questions for you. So, I’ve never done polls before, so I’m going to attempt. My first question is for future CopyDoodle Lunch and Learns what topics would you like to see most on the CopyDoodle Lunch and Learn?

So, choose if you’d like to see:

* CopyDoodles How-to Basics — you can choose up to three. How-to Basics, which is what I just showed you, how to use color.
* If you’d like to see more advanced things, like how to do things on your websites…
* Or guest interviews where I can interview people and they can tell us more about marketing with CopyDoodles.
* New tips and ideas for using CopyDoodles — this would include anything that’s new in the Access Club, just kind of showing you everything that we add in, it would show you new templates and stuff like that.
* Then the last one would be examples of using other people’s marketing.

I’m just going to leave this up for a little more time, so that everyone gets the chance to vote. If you haven’t voted, get them in right now, really quickly. OK. I’m going to close this poll, now that everyone has voted.

I just have one more question, which I hope you guys like this, so what did you think of today’s webinar? Did you like it? Was it a little too basic, or was it a little too advanced for you?

OK. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining me today.

[Q&A not transcribed]