How to build a great portfolio as a creative
Job boards and referred roles have something in coming; 8 out of 10 times, you’re required to submit a portfolio. A marketer’s portfolio is like Merlin’s suitcase of spells, a home for all the magic tricks you’ve been able to pull off throughout your marketing career. Think of it as your brag document where you list out all that you have worked on, the contributions you made to a project and your accomplishments thus far. However, a quick study will expose that a lot of creatives are not really certain how their portfolio should look or what it should contain. That’s what this article is here for; to show you how to build a marketing portfolio. Especially one that you can be proud of.
Steps to take to build your marketing portfolio
1. Figure out the platform of choice
There are a host of free and paid marketing portfolio websites out there that you can easily utilise. If you have a personal website, you can as well dedicate a page on it to this. However, if you’re looking for a free and simple solution, we’ll recommend creating a Google Slides or Canva document. These tools are easy to use, and you can download your portfolio as a pdf document or share a link to anyone you want. For a portfolio that is more tailored to your career as a creative and marketer, we recommend you check out Smarketers’ portfolio for creatives. This template will help you organise your work in a way that highlights your skills and achievements in your previous roles.
2. Contextualize your experience and add some data
When creating your marketing portfolio, you want to ensure that you have cold, hard data to back up your claims. So whether you’re a content creator, social media manager, marketing data specialist or product marketer, you need to show it all off. Make sure you clearly express your role in each project, give context and always include the results of your efforts. Use sentences like “I grew the ABC brand page from 1% to 15% in 3 months.” If it was a team’s work, detail which part of the project you were in charge of or assisted with and how your role contributed to the project’s goal. This will give whoever sees your portfolio a good idea of how much impact you made on the brands you’re working with. If you are a beginner without experience, your portfolio should include mock projects that demonstrate your skills to potential employers.
3. Document everything
It’s important to back up your words with visuals. Take screenshots of the things you did or the assets you created and include them in your portfolio. Did you write high ranking blog articles? Include the links. Did you write copy or highly anticipated newsletters? Did you create social media graphics or social media calendars? Did you grow the engagement rate or follower count? These metrics and skills are absolutely critical to a marketer, so make sure you do not neglect to add them to your creative portfolio.
4. Add your reviews and feedback
Last but not the least, if you’ve received great feedback on your work, whether directly or indirectly (indirectly meaning other people outside of your employers complimenting your work), make sure to include it in your portfolio. Your glowing recommendations and reviews can serve to boost your rep when your portfolio is in front of your potential employer. It also reinforces your work and casts a positive light on your person, in general. This is especially applicable when the reviews cover not only your work, but your personality and culture fit.
We hope that this article serves as a beacon guiding you to build a totally bomb marketing portfolio. We can’t wait for you to create a shiny portfolio and secure the bag while at it! 😉
If you have any questions, join the Smarketers Hub community to find other like-minded marketers at various levels in their career, willing to help you figure things out. See you there!
