Just the other day, I came across an artist’s reel that said, “I make art, not content.” While that stance might seem cool for some of us rebellious souls, approaching what you post on social media as content isn’t that bad of a thing.

For surface designers, content marketing isn’t just a buzzword — it is actually an important strategy to build brand awareness, attract clients, and showcase your portfolio, products, and services. In an industry where graphics are deemed a necessity, using effective content marketing to complement your art can work to your advantage.

What is Content Marketing?

Remember, without good content, there is no good marketing. Content marketing these days is an integral part of a wide range of marketing approaches. Want to run an ad campaign? You need to know the right words to say. Planning on publishing a YouTube video? You need to have a stellar script while ensuring you keep in mind SEO. Need to ace your SEO strategy? You need to have great content to impress the search engines.

For illustrators and surface pattern designers, content marketing can help bring your portfolio to life. Now you might wonder where content fits in when a design portfolio is visual in nature. Here’s one thing we often get wrong: content isn’t just text. Images, audio, and videos are also considered content.

According to a report by Demand Metric, 90% of marketers ensure they include content in their marketing strategy.

If you’re sending out newsletters to art directors, you need to know what to say in your emails, have a consistent schedule, and have it all planned out. If you’re planning to attract potential clients to your website, you need to support your images with content that is SEO-friendly and can organically drive traffic to your website.

An effective content marketing approach can also help you catch the attention of the audience you want to target.

Think of it this way: if you share Instagram posts where you’re offering a helpful design tip, you’ll be attracting fellow designers. If that’s your target audience, good job!

But if you want to attract art directors or art agents to your account, you need to throw in a good mix of content that showcases your designs and a peek into your ideation and design process.

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Related Article: 5 Marketing Tips for Surface Designers

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What Kind of Content Can You Create as a Surface Designer?

Here are some ways to incorporate content into your marketing strategy.

Blog Posts

If you have a blog, don’t just restrict it to being a place where you post a new collection or a collaboration and write a couple of lines about it. Think about how you can add value to a blog post.

You don’t necessarily have to write a detailed how-to-do-something post. Even behind-the-scenes stories or how you came up with inspiration for the collection can be interesting. These can educate your audience, showcase your expertise, and add a personal touch to your blog post.

Social Media Content

You don’t have to be a prolific writer to create content on Instagram or Pinterest. Just a little bit of text that draws your audience in, either in the captions or as overlays for your reels can be a good way to get started.

Videos

If you’re more comfortable with visual content, show off your content marketing skills in tutorials, timelapses of your design process, and studio tours that keep your audience engaged.

Newsletters

Regular updates with exclusive content for subscribers, including lead magnets, promotions, updates about your newest collections, and a closer look at your unique design process, can help build a loyal community. Choose a schedule that works for you and try out a routine that you can stick to in the long run.

Developing a Content Strategy

While creating a content strategy sounds daunting, it isn’t actually that overwhelming. Here are a few simple tips to help you get started with a strategy that works.

Set Goals

Ask yourself what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. This could include increasing followers on social media, increasing website traffic, getting more people to subscribe to your newsletter, or attracting new clients.

Identify Your Target Audience

Zero down on your ideal customer. Make sure you get as specific as you can with their demographics, interests, income, needs, and pain points. This will help you write content that appeals specifically to your target audience.

Content Calendar

I’ve burnt my fingers by posting content on the fly and that’s why I can confidently harp upon the importance of planning your content. Decide on what you want to write about, make videos on, or post images of, and then schedule your content in advance to maintain consistency. This helps you stay organized and ensures you always have a steady flow of content to share.

Creating Engaging and Relevant Content

The only effective content is the content people engage with. So, how do you create engaging content?

Tell a Story

An effective way to make the content you share relatable and interesting is by using storytelling techniques. Think about how you can share the story behind your inspirations or your creative journey.

Make It Visually Appealing

Plain text is boring when read on screen. Even if it is a blog post, pay attention to how you use white space (break down your paragraphs into short, readable chunks) and relevant images. If you’re planning content for social media, high quality images and videos are essential, especially if you’re a surface designer.

Be Yourself

Trying to keep up appearances can be exhausting. Be genuine and let your personality shine through in your content. Being authentic with what you say and how you say it, especially on social media, might not get you a whole lot of followers, but at least it will get you an audience that truly cares about what you share.

Promoting Your Content

You just wrote a blog post and now you’re waiting for people to land on your website and read it. There’s no way that’s going to happen. Unless you have a strategy in place to promote what you write, how on earth are people going to find your content?

Social Media

Whether it’s the blog post you just wrote or a new design you created, or a YouTube you just published, learn to share your content on various platforms.

Use hashtags on Instagram, respond to your audience, and use the features of each platform to your benefit to maximize reach. Not only is it a way to get more eyes on your portfolio, it is also a good practice to get over the feeling of “I am not good enough and my art isn’t good enough.”

SEO

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Learn just enough SEO to be able to use the right keywords across your social media platforms and your website, and you’re good to go! Speaking of websites, it’s a great idea to optimize your meta descriptions and titles as well to ensure you show up on search engines.

Email Marketing

Though I’m not very consistent, this has to be my favorite way to promote my content. Newsletters are a more personal approach to connecting with your audience.

These are people who gave away their email addresses to listen to you, and that’s a big thing. Use newsletters to keep your readers informed about what’s going on in your art business. Trust me, be it an art director or a fellow designer, they’re all ears.

Measuring Success

You can spend months on your social media captions, reels, newsletter content, and blog posts, but unless you’ve learnt the ways to understand which content your audience is engaging with, those efforts will go to waste.

The first few times you create content based on initial keyword research will be more of a trial and error. But once you get into the habit of creating and sharing content more regularly, use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and email marketing metrics to track the performance of your content.

Determine some key metrics you want to track. These key metrics should be relevant to your surface design goals. While likes and follower count are common metrics, if you want to get more people to view your portfolio on your website, then website traffic is what you should track.

If you’re selling your products through your newsletter, then sales conversions or click-through rates are metrics that you could use to understand which emails are getting more clicks and which content is performing better.

Once you have a clear picture of the kind of content your target audience likes, revisit your strategy and make tweaks accordingly. If you get a spike in website traffic every time you post a new process reel, then that’s what you should focus on creating more of.

Content Marketing Comes with Challenges…

But nothing a bit of smart planning can’t overcome. Here are the two most common challenges when it comes to creating content for your audience.

Consistency

This is a problem I always face. I make big plans about showing up more on social media, but I always end up falling short. But there’s a caveat to that. I have social anxiety and spending too much time on social media takes a toll on my mental health.

But for the stretch of time that I do post content, either on social media or over on my blog, I always start off with generating a list of ideas and creating a content calendar for myself. Once I’ve done that, I batch my content for a month or two so that I don’t have to worry about what I want to share for those two months. 

Creativity

Sometimes we just don’t know what to share. Maintain an inspiration library either on your phone or on an app like Pinterest that you can fall back on when you’re running low on ideas. I will often use ChatGPT to come up with initial content ideas and then do my own research and write content from scratch. A disclaimer here is to avoid using AI to write your content for you. That hampers your efforts to be authentic.

When all else fails, step away from what you’re doing, take a break, and come back to the idea generation phase later.

Content marketing is a powerful tool for surface designers, especially when it comes to building brand awareness, attracting potential collaborations and licensing opportunities, and showcasing your portfolio. All you need to get started is an understanding of different types of content, a simple but tested strategy, a content creation workflow, and a content promotion plan.

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