The Tertiary Colors of Your Mix and Match Marketing Plan

If you are just stumbling across this post or you are participating in the Ultimate Blog Challenge, thanks for stopping by. This post is the third in a series on Mix and Match Marketing Plans. You can’t start to build a marketing strategy without learning what your primary colors are, so make sure you read this post on the primary colors of marketing. Then we add to that layer to create our secondary colors of marketing, which are all about beginning to connect with clients.

I am having fun with this idea; I know marketing isn’t always fun. I straddle the world of art and the world of business. I am definitely a right-brained, creative entrepreneur who has struggled with structure or seeing things in a linear fashion. I am trying to make creating a marketing plan fun. My clients dread talking about marketing strategy and planning – it feels overwhelming, exhausting, there’s no guarantee it will work and they don’t know where to start.

So I am developing this idea of Mix and Match marketing plans based on the color wheel. The image above is of a collaged color wheel I created above for an art class on color. It was a super fun project and I loved how the colors flowed into each other. The challenge was to make sure that the primary colors were clearly defined. They are the core of everything! In art and in marketing.

Here are the primary and secondary colors.

The tertiary colors combine a primary color and a secondary color, look at this image of the primary and secondary colors that I shared as a blank slate for you to start playing with in the last post – it clearly shows primary and secondary together. This is when art and marketing start to get more fun. It still has to start with your primary colors, but now you get to start playing with different marketing tactics that make sense for your business and creating many different shades of what works for you.

This color wheel shows all three layers of colors.

Take a deep breath, all those colors might fill a bit overwhelming. It’s pretty easy to start filling those spaces with marketing tactics and tools, isn’t it?

Here’s the trick – when you stay focused on your primary colors, the mixology makes more sense. Remember that our secondary colors were about how we connect with our prospects. The tertiary colors are diving deeper into the psychographic and demographic details of our prospects to understand more about who they are and where they are spending their time. The secret to marketing success and to profitable lead generation is understanding our target audience and what their challenges are (red + blue.)

Here are the tertiary colors by name:

• Red-orange
• Red-purple
• Blue-purple
• Blue-green
• Yellow-green
• Yellow-orange

Rather than make this post too much longer. I am just going to touch on one tertiary color and over the next several posts will dive into the other mixes for your mix and match marketing plans.

Notice that the tertiary colors are a blend of a primary and a secondary color. Let’s start with red-orange.

Red = your ideal client(s)

Orange = is a combination of red (your clients) and yellow (your unique genius).

So red-orange gets a double whammy of attention to your ideal clients. On a marketing plan, this would equate to the tactics you use to get generate more referrals. This might include tactics like:

1. Asking existing clients for referrals
2. Attending networking events where you will get referrals
3. Building strategic partnerships with other entrepreneurs and business owners who target the same market as you

Your marketing should include all three of these tactics. Referrals to your ideal clients are an awesome way to build your business!

Tomorrow I will be taking about red-purple. Any hot guesses as to what marketing tactics I will focus on? Share them in the comments below.

I promise that by the end of the Ultimate Blog Challenge, you will have created your own colorful marketing plan masterpiece, one color at a time!

Happy Saturday – I am headed back to the craft room for some Saturday afternoon play time!

© 2014 Dr. Minette Riordan. All rights reserved.