How to create a portfolio [Part 1]

How to create a strong marketing portfolio (even if you have nothing to show)

Hello!

How are you doing?

This week we’re going to look at the big portfolio questions:

• Do you need a portfolio?
• What should you include?
• How do you structure them?
• Where do you even start?

In the following weeks, we’ll look at these in more detail. But for this post, we’ll scratch the surface of the big unknowns so you can get started.

So let’s get started with the big one.

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“Do I need a portfolio?”

The quick answer? Yes.

Now, it would be irresponsible of me to say this without the caveat that employers do not expect you to have a portfolio.

But the harsh reality is that the folks competing for the same job as you might have one, and therefore, you have to ask yourself if you’re doing yourself a disservice by not having one.

If you’re sitting here thinking “But really, does everyone have a portfolio?” As a hiring manager, I can say that not everyone has, but the ones who do show two things:

• Initiative
• Potential (we’ll get into this later on)

Portfolios ultimately serve as an opportunity to showcase yourself, your work, and your ideas to a potential employer, which, in this job market, can only be a good thing.

They’re especially useful when you’re a fresh, out-of-the-box marketer with no paid experience to show, as you can show off ideas instead.

“Okay, so what do I include?”

If you look for advice on portfolios online, you’ll get a mixture of responses - some only relevant to designers. You can understandably feel the pressure to include everything you’ve ever worked on or feel completely overwhelmed that you have nothing to share and feel defeated before even starting.

Whether you’ve got years of experience or you’re starting from nothing, here are the only two types of content you need to include in your portfolio: experience and potential.

“What do you mean by experience and potential?”

Experience and potential are (more or less) what they say on the tin.

Experience pieces in your portfolio are the things you’ve literally done or been paid to do. For example, the campaigns, social content, landing pages, and so on that you’ve created in paid roles or in freelance gigs.

Potential pieces are hypothetical ideas that you’ve brought to life. A hypothetical piece should:

• Start with a one or two-sentence idea pitch or problem statement like “What if Beauty Pie did a collab with Women’s Aid?” or “Waitrose wanted to break into the Gen Z market, specifically to sell their premium own brands.”
• From this, you can decide what you want to create - a hypothetical ads series, campaign, social series, etc.
• Showcase your talent in the areas you enjoy; whether it’s content or digital or a mixture of both, focus your idea or problem around the element (or elements) of the marketing mix that you want to work in, so this helps establish your skillset with hiring managers.

When Covid hit, I was made redundant and dived head-first into my portfolio. I, like many of you reading this, had some experience to show but it was a lot of the same stuff.

So big brands that didn’t really reflect what I love: purpose and impact (see: ‘How to find what you love’).

So I created two hypothetical potential pieces:

• “What if the social enterprise brand Hey Girls had a rebrand?”
• “What if Harry’s (the shaving brand) and CALM (the men’s mental health charity) collaborated to raise awareness for men’s mental health?”

The Hey Girls one allowed me to flex those branding muscles, whereas the Harry’s x CALM one allowed me to explore a brand activation (that came in the form of Harry’s taking over a barber shop for the day, inviting men to chat over a shave.)

Both showcased my potential in branding specifically (as that is what I wanted to get into at the time) but also helped me showcase what I could do if given the chance.

That’s why potential pieces are so valuable.

NB: Now, I’ll go into much deeper detail in a newsletter within this series, but hopefully this is enough to get you thinking!

“How do you structure your portfolio?”

There are three ways you can structure a portfolio:

• Skills-based - showing your breadth of skills and simply showcasing pieces that show your experience across the marketing mix
• Chronological - best for folks in early careers showcasing what you’ve done (starting with the most recent first)
• Impact-based - the stuff that did really, really well (and you have proof to back it up with)

Personally, I’m a big fan of the skills-based approach because that suits me and my experience as a generalist. But it’s also a great start if you don’t know where to start, as it allows you to show a lot of experience and potential without having to worry too much about stats if you’re just starting in marketing.

“Okay, but how much content do I need?”

I always advise my mentees that they should focus on quality over quantity and follow this rough rule:

• 1-2 hero pieces which would take up a couple of pages, i.e. a campaign, brand exercise, or landing page design. Something you can really break down and explain the theory or impact of.
• 2-4 highlight pieces which would be one-offs that either did really well (such as a viral social post) or smaller potential ideas (like a video series for your favourite brand) that allow you to highlight some of your work without bogging it down with too much detail.

“Where do I even start?!”

Ever heard the phrase “fail to plan, and you plan to fail?” In the context of portfolios, it’s less about planning to fail and more about planning to stress, worry, and feel overwhelmed if you don’t start with a plan.

Your plan should start with your ideas, not putting pen to paper. So here’s how you should get started:

1. Think about what you want to say about yourself:

Do you want to position yourself as an SEO expert? Maybe a generalist? Or even someone who just really, really wants to get into publishing despite having zero experience?

2. Plot your heroes and highlights:

So now you know what your portfolio should say, start with a blank document and start mapping out titles.

For example, if you wanted to work in the charity sector, your portfolio might look something like this:

Page 1: Hero - Beauty Pie x Women’s Aid CSR campaign (potential)

Page 2: Highlight - A hypothetical video series to encourage people to donate to Battersea Cats and Dogs Home (potential)

Page 3: Highlight - “What if Mind charity teamed up with Gymshark?” (potential)

Page 4: Hero - Social campaign from current role (experience)

Page 5: Highlight - Creating a landing page to promote the company’s CSR (experience)

3. Get to work

Now is the time to dive into those hypothetical pieces! Start fleshing out those ideas and creating some marketing collateral that brings your idea to life.

4. Plot your pieces

Now you know what you want to show in your portfolio, and your hypothetical pieces, you can start plotting these in your portfolio.

5. Talk through your thought process

Now you know what you’re going to be showing, you can start thinking about how you’ll talk about it.

Always take the problem, approach, results format. This lets hiring managers know that you understood the problem, came up with a creative approach to solving it, and delivered real (or hypothetical) impact as a result.

Top tip: Keep it concise! 3 short paragraphs max is ideal for a highlight piece, and for your hero pieces, walk your reader through the process of how it came to be. And of course, always add in data where possible!

A note on personal brand

Now, before you reel in horror thinking “Oh god - not that too!” Firstly, yes, we’ll get onto that personal brand in my next series.

But what I mean by personal brand in the context of your portfolio is making your portfolio feel like you.

I’m going to use my own portfolio as an example here - in my portfolio, the ‘red thread’ of personal branding is the literal branding I use throughout:

• Living Coral colour used throughout for links and text I want to highlight (taking full advantage of my name here)
• Using a complimentary but mature colour in the beige and Merriweather to communicate that I’m an older and more experienced Marketer
• Adding pops of illustrations (the hand and lines next to my name) to show I’m creative
• An opening comment that sets the tone throughout - brand and marketing generalist, loves working with small teams, creative, strategic

Throughout my portfolio, while I am talking about other brands and projects, these personal brand notes continue throughout. This is a great way to get you across when applying for roles - hiring managers don’t have a lot of time to sit down and review every job application in great detail, so it’s little tricks like this that help you stand out.

Part 2: How to communicate experience vs. potential in your portfolio

This week’s newsletter is very much a whistle-stop tour of portfolios. However, each segment deserves its own deep dive.

So next week, we’ll be diving into experience vs. potential pieces in your portfolio. I’ll talk you through how to make the most out of both types of pieces, how to come up with potential potential concepts, and how you create a narrative for your portfolio that ties them all together.

Have a great week, you’ve got this! Coral x

Things I am loving or have loved:

Reading: I saw Rory Sutherland giving a talk at a conference in Ibiza (yes, really) and he was as iconic as you would expect. I’ve started reading his book, Alchemy, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

Watching: 24 Hours in Police Custody, iykyk!

Eating: These biscuit things and now I fear my life (and waistline) will never be the same again.

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About the author of The Marketing Mentor

Hello! I am Coral, a Marketing Director who’s been in marketing for over 10 years, worked at 7 different companies, in 10 different roles, across 7 different industries.

After experiencing career-defining mentoring myself, I am trying to pay it forward as best I can, from 1-2-1s to this newsletter, and everything in between.

When I’m not in my professional headspace, I enjoy cooking and eating in equal measure, getting creative, being outside, and fussing over my incredibly spoilt dog, Bobbi.

Thanks for reading The Marketing Mentor! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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