Portshowlio Social Media campaign
Advertising Campaign for Seattle Central Creative Academy
CHALLENGE:
Celebrating their hard work, Seattle Central Creative Academy hosts a virtual "Portshowlio." Graduating designers and visual media artists that have leaned into change and thrived in its ebb and flow, the theme of this year’s Portfolio Showcase is Metamorphosis. This website highlights a few pieces from each graduate's portfolio. The challenge for the marketing team is to get the word out to friends, family, and prospective employers. So how do we create compelling social media posts that make you stop doom-scrolling?
APPROACH:
Utilizing the Metamorphosis Brand Guidelines, we created a storied grid through a series of attention-grabbing posts on Instagram. The posts highlight each graduate with a fun fact about them and the work they are proud of.
TIMELINE: 10 Weeks
ROLES + SKILLS: Marketing, Social Media Post Creation, Scheduling, Print Advertising Delivery
TOOLS: Illustrator, Photoshop, Later, Miro
COLLABORATOR: Kristina Kenney, Cassie Clemente
research
The marketing team began by identifying that the primary audience would be prospective employers while the secondary audience would be friends, family, and former and future students of the Creative Academy.
Next, we brainstormed various marketing ideas taking into account reach, cost, and additional resources needed. At this stage, we narrowed the selection down based on budget and time: social media, posters, postcards, a VIP kit delivered to local creative agencies, and a mural.
The marketing team collaborated closely with the branding team to work with their guidelines and the illustration team for assistance with posters, postcards, and mural design, while marketing worked with coordinating with printers, local businesses, and downtown ambassadors for the mural.
With our marching orders, the marketing team was divided into teams where the social media team continued their research to determine which platforms would best reach the target audience.
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Instagram
Ages 13-44- former students, future students, prospective employers
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Facebook
older demographic- family, friends, former students
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LinkedIn
prospective employers, former students
FIRST, WE PLOT
We wanted our posts to include:
1. student features
2. teacher praises
3. weekly countdown reminders
4. elements of motion
5. A big finish; the Metamorphosis Tiger the illustration team created for posters and other marketing material.
Once these five key pieces were identified, we created a schedule and pattern. This allowed us to determine the best time to start posting to be able to finish the grid for the website launch.
NEXT WE IDEATE :
With three weeks of posting student highlights, we wanted to create a visual story that embodies metamorphosis using the branding guidelines. Each week the graphics of the grid would become less structured, ending in a big finish.
At this stage, we discovered a key ingredient to creating an ongoing story; a thread that connects all of the posts.
THEN WE REFINE
With a new critical unlocked, we implemented the thread and gave it the same rule: it would start structured and become more organic as the weeks progressed. We also applied that rule to the shapes holding the highlight image on every post's first page of the carousel.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
THE FINAL TOUCHES
As a team, we finalized the design of the grid, ensuring the shapes and thread would overlap with other posts, and created a cohesive slide deck for the post to give it a seamless look.
NOW MAKE IT PERSONAL
We collected students’ fun facts and at least three pieces of work they wanted to share and Teacher praises through Google forms.
To stay organized, we color-coded each post as we went along.
RED for posted and done, YELLOW for in queue, and GREEN for still need to collect content and finish.
From the reestablished schedule, one person on the social media team was in charge of posting that week, while another team member reviewed posts for quality control.
HICCUPS
On the first day of our posting schedule, we came to the sad realization that our grid was off! The continual thread going from post to post wasn’t aligning. We left too much of a gap between grid posts with the initial design. The fix was to recreate the grid in illustrator and tediously move all of the posts closer together. A big takeaway from this was to create a “ghost” account to practice posts before launching on the actual page.
Using Later to reschedule posting saved us time and gave us more flexibility within our own busy schedules. However, our subscription only allowed for a certain amount of posts per month. Since we had more posts than our subscription allowed, the social media team had to adapt and quickly make a game plan. The fix was to schedule all (9 AM, NOON, and 5 PM) posts up to the final week. For the last week, we only used the Later tool to schedule the 9 AM posts and manually posted the midday and afternoon ones with another team member overseeing for quality control.
The results.
The Big Finale was posted on our last day of school, leading viewers to our Portshowlio site, which launched the very same day! We were pleased to see ample engagement with the posting content, proving the theory that Instagram was the platform that garnered the most attention.
LIKES
48
Average per post
MOTION VIEWS
178
Average per post
COMMENTS
4
Average per post
To see more of the marketing team’s awesome work in other areas besides social media, please reach out!