Your Design Portfolio is a Treasure Trove of Marketing Content.
Let me show you how to maximize if fully!
What if I told you that one well crafted design project portfolio could be the whole foundation of your marketing strategy for an entire month or even more. It’s true. From that one portfolio you have content necessary to create an entire month of marketing content, and in this blog post I am going to show you how to do it.
The Well-Crafted Design Portfolio
In case you missed my blog post, Elements for a Powerful Online Interior Design Portfolio, I thought I would start by sharing just what a well-crafted design portfolio provides.
Every design you create has a story, and it is up to you – the genius behind the design – to tell that story well.
Yes I realize that even some of the most accomplished interior designers only share images of their projects, but they also have a large audience behind them. That matters, because with that audience they already stand out above others in the industry.
If you want to stand out you have to do something different than what everyone else is doing, so why not share the details behind your designs?
A design portfolio crafted to share these elements, will bring your project to life, and help you begin making a REAL connection with your audience. It helps paint a more clear picture of who you are, what you provide and the amazing designs you create. And as a bonus it becomes an incredible bank of content you can repurpose in a lot of different ways helping you market yourself more effectively.
Here are the elements I recommend adding to your design portfolio projects…
- Project Name & Summary
- Project Category
- Project Location
- Client Vision
- Design Concept
- Unique Design Elements
- Design Challenges
- Client Reactions and/or Testimonials
And to learn more about how to structure this I recommend you check out my blog: Elements for a Powerful Online Interior Design Portfolio.
Now let’s focus on marketing!
Step 1: Write a Blog based on your portfolio
Blogging is an excellent way to add fresh content to your website, and as an interior designer, you have a lot of content waiting to be expanded upon through your design portfolios.
Your blog is the perfect place to tell the more personal story behind your designs. It’s an opportunity to go beyond the technical details of your work, and share a behind the scenes look at what you do.
Share what sparked your creativity – whether it’s the vibes from Feng Shui that got you going or the client’s impressive bourbon collection that fueled some seriously inventive design solutions. And don’t hold back on the fun stuff, share those funny anecdotes about challenges faced or reveal how you stumbled upon that gorgeous statement piece at a local flea market.
Finally, a blog is an excellent place to share those “before” pictures I recommend leaving out of your portfolio. Want to know why? Check out my blog Developing a Strong Interior Design Portfolio.
Step 2: Convert Your Portfolio/Blog into a Case Study
Having a few case studies on hand that you can share with potential clients is just another way to showcase your dedication to creating a positive customer experience while also sharing your knowledge and expertise.
Case studies can
- Establish trust with potential clients
- Share data driven examples of your expertise
- Illustrate your problem solving skills
These case studies could be printed in a visually appealing way that you take with your to on-site client meetings, turned into a presentation you use during networking events to showcase what you do, or displayed in an equally visually appealing way on the pages of your website.
(I give you the tools to do this in our FREE course Design Unveiled: The Ultimate Portfolio Crafting Course, available in the Creative Vault!)
Step 3: Create Social media posts based on your content
Social media is one of the quickest and easiest ways to grab the attention of your potential customers. Every element of your design portfolio has the potential to become a social media post. From initial conceptualization to the final design, every piece paints a picture that shares the story behind the work you do. There is literally an unlimited amount of posts just waiting to be created! Here are a few examples…
A Project Overview Slide Show:
- Create a new slide for each element of your Project overview from the eye catchy title to client reaction.
- Add in images of the finished project to better capture the full overview
Project Name & Summary:
- Creating a “Coming Soon” post with strategic sneak peeks of the project images
- Share along with a slide show of your top 5-6 project images
- Share in a video reel of your top 5-6 project images
Project Category
- Share a sampling of projects from each category in a slide show or reel
- Use your categories to create a series “A look at what we do” posts including brief descriptions of the categories of your work, again sharing samples of your work
Client Vision
- Highlight examples of the clients vision through images while sharing their vision in the caption of a social media post
- Write a long post story about the clients vision and share the mood boards and renderings that inspired the final design
- Create a series of “Bringing our Clients Vision to life” where you highlight their story in a more intimate (and professional) way
Design Concept
- Create a series of “Design Concepts we LOVE” that shares your greatest inspirations
- Highlight a particular project design concept while sharing details to your process that brought it to life
- Share a long post story about your more creative design moments, while sharing visuals that capture the moment
Unique Design Elements
- Create a “did you know” series about unique design elements that educates your audience about elements they may have and want to enhance
- Create a slide show or reel with images of unique design elements from a particular project or series of projects
- Share a long post story about how you approach specific design elements such as detailed lighting plans and artistic accents
Design Challenges
- Share a long post story about some of your most unique design challenges, and your innovative solutions
- Create a slide show or reel highlighting design challenges you’ve faced
- Create a highlight in Instagram specific to design challenges you encounter
Client Reactions and/or Testimonials
- Share a long post story about how you felt when you saw your clients reaction to their finished project
- Create a video sharing how you felt when you saw your clients reaction to their finished project and share it as a reel or on your feed
- Take the best snippets of your testimonials and share through visual social media posts
By breaking down each design portfolio into sections, you easily have one to two pieces of content a week you can share!
Step 4: Email to your subscribers
An email to your subscribers is an opportunity to share an even more intimate look behind-the-scenes of your designs. Think of it as writing a letter to a really close friend, and share more about the struggles and triumphs you encountered while also inviting them to your website to see the amazing work you accomplished.
By breaking your project down into segments, you could create a new design highlight each month, sharing a little of the story behind the design each week. (You could use your long posts from your social media content as the basis for these emails!)
Not only does this give you easy content to share with your subscribers, it also invites them more deeply into your world.
Let’s recap your Marketing Content Potential…
As you can see there is a lot of content to be created here. By just using what I have listed above you can easily have
- 1 portfolio
- 1 blog post
- 1 Case Study
- TONS of social media posts
- 4+ emails to send to subscribers
The best part is that you can save all of this content to be re-shared, or revamped and used again in the future when time is short and you need content.
