Design is a powerful tool in your marketing toolkit, but if people don’t see your designs in the first place, you’re missing out on their full power. Here are some strategies you can use to help get your designs the spotlight they deserve by increasing your reach.
Be Strategic on Social Media
The online landscape has come a long way since MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger were the latest thing, and it’s more important than ever to make sure you aren’t just present on social media, but strategic. Here are some of the strategies you can use to increase the reach of your designs on social media platforms and connect with more colleagues and potential clients.
Prioritize User Engagement
Gone are the days of time-based social media algorithms. Instead, many social media platforms now prioritize content based on engagement. Likes, comments, and shares are the best way to get your content in front of as many people as possible, and the sooner your posts gain traction, the more likely they are to reach a large audience. Pay-to-play engagement strategies, like using bots, are ineffective and often violate a platform’s terms of service, so it’s best to focus on organic options.
When someone does comment on one of your posts, don’t let it sit—like and engage with that comment as much as you can. This increases the overall engagement of your post and helps that commenter feel like their thoughts are seen and valued in your online space. Engaging with your own content from other accounts can also give your content a boost. For example, if you post something on your business’s LinkedIn profile, it might make sense to comment on that post using your personal profile. This can help give your posts an initial bump in the algorithm.
Engaging with other people’s content is also an important part of expanding your reach. Don’t just leave a generic comment saying “love it,” because bots can do that. With each comment you add, try to share meaningful input and refer to specific things in the post that show you are a real person, responding to a real person. Another great way to engage with others is to share other designers’ work to your story, tag them, and add a note about what you like about that design or their work in general.
Optimize for Each Platform
It doesn’t take a social media strategist to see that what thrives on X won’t make it very far on Pinterest. It’s important to make sure that your posts are optimized for each platform, even if the designs you share are the same. Here are some examples of what works best on popular social media platforms for designers:
- Instagram: Carousel posts thrive on Instagram, so if you have a series of designs that fit together, this platform is their place to shine! Reels and stories are also a great opportunity to share the behind-the-scenes work you do on each design. Stories, in particular, are a great way to build more personal connections with your colleagues and clients, so don’t shy away from stickers like polls and question boxes.
- LinkedIn: Long captions are king on LinkedIn compared to other platforms, so brush off your essay skills and get writing! Stories of your design journey and lessons you’ve learned along the way can be a great way to add value and show potential clients how far you’ve come over the years.
- Pinterest: What started as a DIY-centered platform has since blossomed into a place to share art, ideas, and inspiration of all sorts. Vertical images do best on this platform, so you may need to adjust your images’ ratios to get the results you want. Pinterest also functions as a search engine, similarly to YouTube, so make sure you add plenty of relevant keywords to your caption.
- X: While character limits aren’t as tight as they used to be, keeping things short and sweet is still the name of the game on X. Snippets of design thoughts or a little bit of context shared with an image or motion graphic tend to do well, and retweeting old posts as throwbacks can help keep your content circulating.
Add Value in the Caption
Captions are an important part of the post and an opportunity to add value to your followers’ feeds. Take your captions beyond a quick note on who the design was for and share about your thought process, what alternatives you considered, and why you made the specific design choices you did.
It’s also a good idea to add hashtags and keywords to your post that people might be searching for. Different platforms have different search functions, but most platforms currently offer both hashtags and keyword search, so there’s no harm in optimizing for both.
Post Your Designs Consistently
No matter what platform you’re on, it’s important to stay consistent! Search engines prioritize fresh content, including both new posts and updates to old posts that make them more valuable or timely. On social media, posting consistently may be even more important, as it’s hard to break back into people’s feeds after not posting, and as a result, not getting any engagement, for an extended period of time. The right posting frequency varies depending on the platform, but most algorithms will respond well to a posting schedule somewhere between weekly and daily.
However, you don’t ever want to sacrifice quality on the altar of quantity. Your best work takes time, so if you don’t have new designs to post, there are other ways you can still engage! Sharing content that offers a sneak peek of what you’re currently doing is a great way to keep your posting frequency up without trying to rush the creative process.
Another great way to stay top-of-mind is re-sharing old designs of yours with new thoughts on them. You may be able to add new insights in the caption or with a text overlay in a carousel format, sharing what you learned in the process of creating that design and how you might modify it for today’s online landscape. There’s also no harm in an occasional Throwback Thursday post simply for the nostalgia of it; the people who have followed you from the beginning will appreciate seeing how far you’ve come!
Make Your Work Shareable
In person, you’ve likely seen the power of word-of-mouth marketing, so you can imagine how much more impactful it can be online! Making your work shareable is a great way to let your followers directly expand your reach by sharing your designs to their own stories or profiles and sending them directly to their connections. The nuts and bolts of making your work shareable is double-checking your privacy settings to make sure everything is public, but beyond that, you can encourage sharing by making your posts relatable or adding clear value that people will want their friends to see.
Collaborate with Others
As cliche as it may seem, collabs are a great way to expand your reach and the reach of anyone you’re collaborating with. Whether you’re a featured guest on a podcast or simply tagging a professional peer in your story, collaborations are a great opportunity to provide value to your audience by introducing them to a new resource and to reach a whole new audience yourself. When you collaborate with people in similar spaces to you, those impressions are especially valuable because they are already vetted: they follow someone who shares content that is relevant to what you do, which means they’re more likely to follow you and engage with your content as well.
Influencer and Celebrity Collaborations
If you design physical products, and especially in the fashion industry, it’s a great idea to initiate collaborations with influencers and celebrities when you can. For some lower-cost items, it may be worthwhile to start a PR list and send out products for them to try and share if they like. If your products are more expensive items, on the other hand, you’ll want to gear more toward offering to dress them for events or sponsoring posts of theirs featuring your designs. Either way, these collaborations are a great way to expand your reach dramatically for a relatively low upfront cost.
Community Hashtags and Design Challenges
Another great way to collaborate with others is to participate in community hashtags and design challenges. The same way that influencers and laypeople alike will use trending hashtags based on current events, designers can expand their reach by using relevant community hashtags like #dailyui and participating in design challenges like #36daysoftype. Not every hashtag will get your posts traction, but by engaging in niche topics and challenges that are relevant to the work you do, you can reach people who are already scrolling through similar posts.
On some social media sites, like Instagram, people can even follow hashtags directly. This means that top posts from that hashtag are mixed in with posts from other people they follow in their main feed. In this area, more niche hashtags are the name of the game, since which posts get featured seems to be mainly based on engagement.
Keep Your Website Optimized
Whether your designs are in a portfolio on your website or your design is your website itself, it’s important to keep things up-to-date so users and search engine crawlers can easily look around and find what they need. Here are some important aspects to consider next time you update your website.
Keep UX Top of Mind
Even the best designs won’t get much traction if they aren’t designed with the end user’s experience in mind. Whether you’re figuring out how you want text to show up on your website or evaluating the best sizes for images, it’s important to think about how people will see those images and if that experience will be smooth and convenient for them. The less friction, the better, so make sure your designs are built for the platform you’re sharing them on so the UX is as easy as possible!
Improve Your Website’s Technical SEO
Technical optimization is an important part of SEO and covers things like your website’s load speed and making sure your source code is clear and efficient. It also includes optimizing for mobile users, which used to be a bonus but in our modern landscape is an absolute necessity for any website. Making sure your website loads quickly and effectively on a variety of devices is a great way to help get your design in front of more searchers.
Make Your Portfolio Stand Out
Your portfolio is full of designs you’re proud of, but how you set up your portfolio is also a way to show off your design skills. Whether you’re using your own site, a specialized portfolio platform, or anything in between, here’s how to make sure your designs stand out from the rest.
On Your Own Website
Building a portfolio on your own custom website gives you nearly unlimited creative freedom, but it also means it is all on you to make sure your portfolio looks good, works well, and has the right UX so potential clients can see everything and enjoy their experience on your website. To make sure your website’s portfolio stands out, consider setting up a carousel or clickable cards so users can easily scroll through your designs and see the breadth of skills you have to offer. Don’t overcrowd your page—let your designs speak for themselves, and set it up so people can either click on the design or scroll down on each one to learn more about your process and the requirements of that design project.
On Behance
Behance is a popular creative networking site where people can review your portfolio and start conversations with you about upcoming projects. While many of the same best practices apply, one perk of Behance is that you can list what services you want to be hired for along with timeline options, pricing, and other relevant information. This encourages transparency with potential clients and helps to weed out anyone who may not have the budget for your skillset.
Behance strongly recommends laying out your design thought process to stand out from the rest. Don’t make people ask how you juggle diverging priorities for the same project or turn around great work on tight deadlines—show them how you did it and walk them through your process.
On Dribbble
This platform wants your visual work to do most of the talking for you. Their portfolio solutions include vibrant color schemes and illustrations that are meant to draw people into a curated experience of your work. Variety is the spice of life, but these portfolios stand out best when you’re able to walk potential clients through a series of design projects that have some sort of common thread. Throughout that experience, people should be able to see the designer behind the design, so have fun adding elements and sharing your real behind-the-scenes thoughts where it fits so they can get to know you as well as your work.
Incorporate Video Content
If you aren’t producing video content that features your designs yet, now is the time to start. In an online landscape that is increasingly saturated with more content fighting for users’ attention, audiovisual content is a great way to help your designs stand out. If motion graphics are already part of your design, all you have to do is start sharing them. If you make static designs, though, you can turn them into videos by assembling them in a slideshow and adding background music or a voiceover.
