Footer widgets enclosed in a colour bar to separate from the rest of page

You can use CSS to style the footer area. In your theme’s custom CSS panel, use the following:

footer.footer-top {
  background-color: #f2f2f2;
}

For the footer text, you have to hook into the footer to add your custom text. In your *child* theme functions.php or custom plugin (try Pluginception), use the following:

function custom_footer_text() { ?>
	<span>This is text.</span>
<?php }
add_action( 'bp_footer_left', 'custom_footer_text' );

Thanks! The first part worked!
The second part was a bit too complicated for me so I’ve decided to abandon it. Nevertheless appreciate the assistance!

Hello – I have tried the above code (the first bit, and it does change the colour to the side of the footer, but not the colour within the footer. My site is bigfootcc.co.uk and I wanted the footer to show in black but it remains in white. Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong? thanks.