Question

Topic: Career/Training

Critique My Marketing Portfolio,is Marketing 4 Me?

Posted by biggermiao on 2/12/2015 at 12:43 PM ET 250 Points
Hi Marketing Gurus,

I spent the last several months exploring if a career change to marketing is for me. It's a significant decision given the 5 year investment in my current field. One of the methods to test the waters was to get hands on experience by putting together a marketing portfolio.

Question: "I would be very grateful if some mentors could visit the link below and look through the materials in my portfolio, then glance through my resume (2nd half of this page) describing these tasks, and appraise whether I have any knack or affinity for the field, is my stuff any good, and ultimately whether or not I should go into marketing or refrain. We can assume that I really enjoyed and was excited about the stuff I did."

Thanks plenty! I know the advice up ahead will be really great!

Marketing Portfolio

https://www.wacom-portal.com/portfolioweb/Samples.html


Portfolio Items Description

Designed a creative advertising piece for Wacom and ran it on the Google Display Network on pages matching the behaviors of the researched segments, leading to 135 units sold for a total of $270,000 in just one day.

Augmented the same Wacom campaign with additional search advertising using segment focused copy and a keyword list generated from audience research to further increase sales conversions.

Developed a web portal with key word optimization, enhanced lay out, tracking code, various call to actions and promotional web copy to direct more visitors to the Wacom main site as well as monitor sales conversions for above campaign.

Researched the U.S. upper income cat owner segment's concerns and purchasing habits and designed an email blast for Purina Cat Food that delivered expert cat food advice for the purposes of relationship building newsletter sign ups and email directed product purchases.

Created a Social Media Channel for Plantronics Headsets and posted self created content and visuals aimed both at promoting the latest products and building brand engagement, awareness and thought leadership by delivering expert value based on online listening of the audience's interests that related to the brand.

Strengthened the value of the social media channel by creating and linking to a Plantronics blog and publishing lengthier content.

Wrote a mock search advertising campaign during the Digital Marketing Course for Delta Airlines and an accompanying landing page with enticing web copy and visuals.

Based on deep industry and customer research, wrote engaging copy, designed the layout, info-graphics and creative concepts for an IBM Big Data newsletter and product PDF for their Platform LSF offering
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by mgoodman on 2/12/2015 at 2:04 PM Accepted
    It's really difficult to evaluate/assess the portfolio unless we understand the problems the ads are supposed to solve and whether/how well the ads solved those problems. There is no particular style that is inherently better than other styles. It's all about how well the specific execution delivers against the stated objective.

    That said, the Wacom example certainly appears to have worked well ... as long as the CPC didn't exceed the variable profit.

    An observation: Graphic elements seem to dominate most of your work. Not much copy. Depending on the objective that could be good or bad.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 2/12/2015 at 3:10 PM Accepted
    The link isn't active for me so I can't judge.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 2/12/2015 at 8:03 PM Accepted
    If you're interested in marketing, then continue your exploration. Your 5-year investment in something else isn't being tossed. That knowledge and skills will likely be useful in marketing (maybe you'll find a way to explore the intersection of your previous life and marketing dreams). And perhaps you can begin to explore marketing by doing more side projects to build your network, learn more about different companies, and build your portfolio beyond mock pages and into real-world solutions (with measured effectiveness).
  • Posted by biggermiao on 2/12/2015 at 8:52 PM Author
    Thanks a lot for the advice!

    *note: The images on the link's landing page are just thumbnails, they don't show much on their own. Clicking on them leads to the actual content and copy.

    I agree that getting real results against an objective is truly key. So you've helped strengthen the decision to focus the next few months on trying either some semi-affiliate marketing or take a remote part time with an actual business to observe how good the KPIs are. So, I'm not going down just yet!

    @Jay, I think so too, as most of what I do now is customer oriented.

    @Mgoodman, Right, I should learn to balance. Though actually if you click on the thumbnails, it will take you to the actual content (the thumbnails just show the above the fold images, or covers, etc.) , a good portion of them actually have lengthy copy up to 8 pages, such as the Purina Cat Newsletter.

    Thanks Gary for attempting the link, it might have been the hosting service was down at that time, though I verified that it's up now. If you happen to have revert back here, I'm crossing my fingers it's be available for you :)
  • Posted by Shelley Ryan on 2/24/2015 at 11:04 AM Moderator
    Hi Everyone,

    I am closing this question since there hasn't been any activity in at least 10 days.

    Thanks for participating!

    Shelley
    MarketingProfs
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