Can your brand be the rally point for your customers? InVision has become the rally point for designers around the world. They have created a platform for designers around the world giving them a voice and a stage to share their thoughts with the community. Before we deep dive into InVision’s Content Marketing Strategy here is how the company started.
Clark Valdberg was running Epicenter Consulting a small design agency in 2011. When he realized that the requirement gathering process for design needed a complete overhaul. Often while dealing with different clients the project manager would pass a single document to different teams to gather feedback on a prototype.
As most projects are timebound, this would leave little time for people to share their feedback. Clark believed that the feedback process should be asynchronous. So he and his team created the prototype for InVision, which allowed other people to chime in on a wireframe design so that they could gather needs and feedback over time. Today, Invision has a valuation of over a billion dollars, with 5 million designers using the product every day.
A Look Inside InVision’s Content Strategy
In 2016 Invision did something to build community and give product designers a seat at the table. They created a documentary about the product design profession titled Design Disruptors. The film listed some of the best design thinkers and leaders on the planet.
The film was screened at 100+ cities and generated over 1,00,000 leads for the brand. It took the team 18 months to film, edit, strategize and execute an outreach campaign for the film. The film helped InVision to rally an entire industry around their brand.
What makes InVision’s Content Strategy transformative in the careers of millions of designers around the world is how the company teaches design. They talk very little about themselves. Rather than just providing tools for design they want people to understand the craft. So in addition to the above film, the company publishes blog posts, a recurring newsletter, podcasts to something called the Design Genome Project. The design genome project gathers insights from the world’s leading companies on how they are approaching design to gain a competitive advantage in the market. InVision also publishes its study on Design Maturity covering 2,200 companies across 24 industries spread over 77 countries.
The brand also launched its six-part web series on Mastering Design at Scale in 2018. The web series features industry experts Brad Frost, Dan Mall and Josh Clark. The series covers how an organization can create, maintain, and evolve a single source of design truth that unites and scales with the entire organization. The brand also publishes a weekly podcast on design. Hosted by Aarron Walter, VP, Design Education and Eli Woolery, Director, Design Education, the podcast has completed two seasons and features some of the leading design experts.
Helpful content feels like table stakes today, and a small percentage of brands do it really well. So what makes InVision’s Content Strategy different from other brands? In addition to publishing content that designers love, InVision rallies them together to battle the stuff they hate. Designers hate it when others trivialise their expertise. This comes across clearly in massive projects like Design Disruptors but it also the implicit message underscoring every little thing they do.
