When you’re ready to hunt for a job in the digital marketing sector, you’ll need more than a resume. A strong, attractive, and easy-to-navigate digital portfolio showcases what you can do, your skills, and your past work. Let’s dive into what it takes to create a dynamic digital marketing portfolio.
Having a digital portfolio helps show your professionalism and increases your visibility. It also makes it easier for you to stay on top of changing trends, gives you the flexibility to update it whenever you choose, and keeps all your work together in one place.
Customize Your Domain Name
When choosing a website on which to build your portfolio, make sure to use a custom URL. That is, purchase a domain and make it your own. Make the URL something that has to do with you (usually your name or the name of your company, product, or desired position works best). Having a custom URL displays your professionalism, sets you apart from others, and makes it easy for prospective clients or employers to find you.
Tell Your Story
Now that you have your unique domain name set up, you’re ready to start building your site. Keep in mind: these days you don’t have to be a web designer or know how to code to create a show-stopping digital portfolio. Sites like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and others have templates available that you can customize with your info and you’re all set. If you don’t want to use a specific template, you can also choose a design theme or special palette to make your portfolio your own. No matter what you decide, the most important thing is to let your personality shine through.
Much more than a resume, your digital portfolio is an opportunity to share who you are and what you’re about. While a resume is normally just one page of text, your digital portfolio offers a chance to share your history, your passions, your goals, and why you want to pursue a career in the digital marketing industry. Your portfolio helps differentiate you from the rest of the crowd, showcase your professional successes, past work, and even share some personal details as well—including photos. Sharing a photo of yourself can help prospective employers and clients get a picture (literally!) of who they are going to be working with.
Create the Portfolio for Your Dream Job
When putting together your digital marketing portfolio, think about the job you want most and design it with that in mind. Being specific in your goals and the presentation of your portfolio will help you get the position you want. And that specificity will help eliminate jobs or employers that might not be a perfect fit. There’s no need to make your portfolio generic, or designed to cover any and every possible position in your industry—design it for the job you want!
Be sure to share your best work that is most relevant for the job you want. You don’t have to include everything you’ve ever worked on. And while it's important to include samples from projects you’ve led or ones that had optimum results, it’s also a place where you can share volunteer work you’re involved in and other parts of your life that you’re passionate about. Your portfolio is a chance to share so many more elements of yourself than a resume. Make the most of it!
Include a Video
Across social media platforms, video content leads to more engagement across the board. According to Wyzowl, 73% of consumers say they’d most like to learn about a product or service through video. Think of yourself as a brand ambassador for you—and use video on your portfolio to educate and inform your target audience about yourself. Video content on a digital portfolio similarly attracts people and is a great way for those visiting your portfolio site to get to know you, what you want to work on, and how you can help them reach their goals together. Sharing your results-driven professional experience is a way to amplify your public speaking, presentation, and overall digital marketing skills as well. Although creating a video is likely much more time-consuming than polishing your resume, the effort will likely be worth it in the long run.
Provide Relevant Education, Skills, & Experience
It goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: your online portfolio should provide relevant education, skills, and experience for the job you’re trying to get. While the provided samples of your work will give an idea of what you can do, it’s still important to include relevant education, skills, and other experiences. This can look like sharing your degrees, specific certifications if relevant, past employers, and any special skills that companies or clients would benefit from knowing about and might contribute to you snagging the job you want.
Offer a Downloadable Resume
It may seem old-fashioned, but providing a place where people can download a PDF of your resume is important. While it’s true that much of job searching and interviewing is done online, printed resumes are still often used during the interview process for taking notes and sharing at meetings. Having it available on your resume takes the guesswork out and makes it available for anyone looking. And since it’s on your digital portfolio, you have the opportunity to update it whenever necessary—ensuring no outdated resumes are floating around the internet.
Provide Social Proof
It’s a great idea to include testimonials in your digital marketing portfolio. By referencing past clients or former employers or colleagues who have worked with you or who have used or liked your products or services, you are providing social capital which increases your credibility. Providing this kind of social proof makes it easier for people to do business with you.
And more than just showing an image of your work, share case studies—that is, name the client, then provide an explanation of the challenge or problem they faced, the role you took, the work you did, and of course, share the outcome. Giving these kinds of results-driven examples gives future clients or employers step-by-step insight into your process, and shows how you can get the job done.
Optimize Your Portfolio Site
No matter what kinds of digital marketing services you’re offering, first of all, make sure the images on your site are high-quality, original images. A clean, high-resolution picture says a thousand words! Speaking of words, you can optimize your portfolio site with specific keywords to help your target employer or client find you.
Another way to optimize your portfolio is by making sure all the links are working and everything is moving at a steady clip. Site speed is critical when it comes to your portfolio. According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in page load times yields 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. While potential clients or employers are not customers, per se, you don’t want them frustrated with your site speed before they’ve even had the chance to review your work. Ensuring both your whole site and individual pages within are going as fast as possible will help your portfolio and enhance your chances of snagging the job you want. Try conducting speed tests to see how your portfolio stacks up and what you can do to improve rates.
Another important detail when it comes to optimizing your portfolio site is making sure it looks good on mobile. According to a 2020 Statista report, mobile devices generated about half of all website traffic globally. Since more people than ever are using their phones rather than desktop or laptop computers, it’s critical to design your portfolio to be as mobile-friendly as possible. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized portfolio, take action immediately to ensure it is navigable for mobile use. There are plenty of ways to test your portfolio’s mobile-friendliness. Do yourself a favor and take a look and make any changes necessary. These seemingly simple fixes can have a large impact on your future success.
Build Your Portfolio Through Digital Marketing Classes
Enrolling in a digital marketing program is a great way to learn more about the field, enhance current skills, and build your portfolio for future job searches. Digital marketing classes teach how to use the various platforms to your advantage. Depending on your location, you may be able to find digital marketing courses, bootcamps, and certificate programs in your area using Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me tool.
Those who prefer to learn digital marketing from home can attend Noble Desktop’s live online digital marketing courses, available from anywhere in the world. Virtual digital marketing bootcamps provide the same advantages as their in-person counterparts: they’re interactive, comprehensive training courses led by experienced digital marketers.
For a more comprehensive look at digital marketing strategies, take a look at Noble’s Digital Marketing Strategies bootcamp. The bootcamp is a 12-hour course that delves into the important role digital marketing strategy plays in a company’s overall success. The bootcamp is also offered as part of the 78-hour Digital Marketing Certificate, which delves deeper into each aspect of digital marketing including developing an end-to-end marketing strategy through hands-on classes where you work on your business or company as a project. Students even have the chance to retake the course for free for one year!
Other digital marketing resources offered by Noble Desktop that can be useful to freelancers include a digital marketing blog that has detailed articles on topics across the board.