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How to Write a Director of Marketing Resume (with sample)

 

Looking for something other than a director of marketing resume? Check these out:

  1. Marketing Executive Resume 
  2. Masters of Business Administration (MBA) Resume

You can also use my two-page, salary-doubling resume cheat sheet as inspiration for creating the ultimate, optimized resume. It breaks down exactly how a marketing manager was able to get their dream job AND double the initial offer they received. You can get your own copy by submitting your information right here:

Writing a marketing director resume is tough. The most challenging part is to balance the managerial and executive discussions.

Condensing all that into a couple of pages is difficult. It is even difficult to decide what to add and what to leave out, and how to present yourself in the best possible light for a marketing director or higher roles. 

This is made even more difficult by the conflicting information readily available online. What should you add to your marketing director resume? And how should you best present it?

I will answer all that and more in this article. I’ll also share a sample that you can copy from.

Marketing Director Resume Sample

My client, “Mike,” was having a hard time getting any responses to the jobs he was applying for. I’m going to use “Mike” as an example of how you can also use resume writing best practices to get more interviews. Although he had relevant experience at several big-name companies, he wasn’t getting interviews. 

I identified the following reasons behind this:

  • His marketing director resume was not optimized for applicant tracking systems (ATS). 
  • His resume lacked focus. As you can see from his previous resume, which starts on the third page here, he was coming across as a mix of a project, product, finance, and marketing manager. 
  • His resume didn’t make the best first impression.

 

Here’s how I fixed it for him:

  • First, I redid his resume to focus it on just marketing at the director level. 
  • I ensured that his most relevant achievements were front and center of the resume to catch recruiter’s attention within seconds.
  • And lastly, I maintained ATS-compatibility by using a clean and simple format.

Here’s how you can also create an ATS-optimized Director of Marketing resume:

Step 1: How to beat applicant tracking systems by extracting keywords from marketing director job listings

A resume is only going to get you an interview if it’s read.

This is why you should optimize your director of marketing resume to get through applicant-tracking systems (ATS), which are used by companies to help them shortlist applicants.

You have to do two things to make your marketing director resume ATS-compliant:

1. Keep the resume format simple

If your resume is too graphic-heavy, it might not be legible to ATS.

Mike’s resume had some issues with ATS-compatibility.

If you click here, I share Mike’s previous resume. He placed important information in a header. Some ATS cannot access information in a header or a footer. Therefore, if a recruiter used the location “California” for their search criteria, Mike’s resume wouldn’t be selected, even though that is where he is based.

2. Use keywords

Mike’s resume was missing critical keywords. Without keywords, your resume simply will not get picked up.

Keywords are nouns or noun phrases that ATS algorithms “catch.”

Hard keywords are those that can be quantified or that someone can take a test for, for example, the names of marketing analytics programs. They are most important with respect to ranking in ATS.

Soft keywords, on the other hand, are skills you can’t really test for, like “Unifying Marketing Collateral.” 

 

Common keywords include:

  • Job titles
  • Marketing terms
  • Tools
  • Technologies
  • Degrees
  • Licenses
  • Certifications
  • Training
  • Patents
  • Publications
  • Zip codes.

Carefully go over the marketing director job listing you are interested in for keywords. Which ones are you familiar with? Weave these keywords into your resume.

Here are some important keywords for marketing directors. Feel free to copy and paste these to your  director of marketing resume if they match your skill set:

Marketing Team Leadership

  • Marketing Department Leadership
  • Team Capacity Development
  • Marketing Team Capacity Building
  • Budget Management
  • Scaling Business Rapidly

Marketing Strategy

  • Go-to-Market Strategy
  • Product Strategy, Pricing, and Roadmap
  • Brand Strategy
  • Social Media Strategy
  • PR/Influencer Strategy Execution
  • Email Marketing Campaign Strategy

Marketing Insight Generation

  • Market Assessment
  • Campaign Forecasting and Evaluation
  • Qualitative and Quantitative Market Analysis
  • KPI Development
  • Centralizing Marketing Data
  • Consumer Sentiment Analysis
  • Market Segmentation

Marketing Product/Process Development & Improvement

  • Driving Marketing Innovation
  • Marketing Program Development
  • Product Development
  • Establish Product Release Plans
  • Marketing Automation
  • Brand Website Redesign
  • Marketing & Advertising Technology (MAdTech)

Marketing Areas of Expertise

  • Digital Marketing
  • Product Marketing
  • B2B and B2C Marketing
  • Lifecycle Marketing
  • e-Commerce
  • Omni-Channel Marketing
  • Direct-To-Consumer Marketing
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Upstream Marketing
  • Downstream Marketing

Day-to-Day Marketing Roles

  • Lead Generation
  • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) Generation
  • Brand Proof Point Development
  • Marketing Collateral Development
  • Sales Collaboration
  • Collaborate with the Product Management Team

Here is a quick tip to find the right keywords if you are looking for a marketing executive position:

Marketing Keywords 2022

Here are some marketing keywords that will be “hot” in 2022:

  • Re-Commerce
  • Content Selling
  • Hyper-Targeted Advertising
  • Just-In-Time Marketing
  • Voice Search
  • Peer-To-Peer Marketplace
  • AI Assistance

Which of these keywords are you familiar with?

Have you deployed any of these marketing strategies or generated buy-in for them?

How have you used technology to enhance marketing efforts?

Think about these questions and add relevant keywords and details to your resume.

Aside from these keywords, keep the products, services, and customers mentioned in a job listing in mind too. When applying for a job, carefully comb the job listing to identify the kind of products or services that need to be marketed. 

Did you promote a similar product or service? Were you marketing to a similar customer? Did you lead B2B or B2C campaigns, and is that experience mentioned in the job listing as a requirement?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, weave that information in the resume. Don’t assume that a recruiter will know what you worked on simply by glancing at the employer’s name. Providing the correct context is important, and a recruiter will prefer a candidate with the specific, niche experience that their job listing requires.

If, however, you do not possess marketing experience for similar products or services, keep the resume generic instead.

Here is how Mike’s summary looked like in the before version:

 

Highlighted below are some of the keywords that we added to Mike’s summary:

The placement of these keywords helped not only ATS find Mike, but also engaged recruiters. Within the first few lines, they could see that these keywords aligned with their business needs. As a result, Mike got more interviews.

Step 2: How to entice recruiters by creating marketing accomplishments

Once your resume has made it through ATS, it still has to impress a human reader. According to a study conducted by The Ladders, recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on a resume.

You have to do two things to make your resume recruiter-friendly.

1. Only talk about an experience that is relevant to the hiring manager

Everything else should be summarized or left out.

Unfortunately, a lot of candidates make the mistake of thinking that their broad experience is attractive to hiring managers. For example, look at Mike’s “before” resume.

Although it shows his vast exposure to marketing strategies and solutions in multiple industries, a recruiter who is just glancing through will get distracted by the names of the industries they aren’t hiring for.

Think about it this way. If you were the CEO of Victoria’s Secret, would you rather hire…

  • a Marketing Director who says they specialize in fashion and apparel
  • a Marketing Director who has experience with consumer-packaged goods, manufacturing, sports, fashion, food, grocery, construction, and financial services?

2. Use accomplishments

Especially in the KPI-driven marketing world, your resume has to show quantified proof that you’re worth an interview.

Mike’s second page has a lot of strong accomplishments related to being a very good marketing director. But, because the first page doesn’t have any relevant accomplishments, it is unlikely that someone will make it to the second page of his resume.

The key characteristic of an accomplishment is that it showcases change, i.e. This was terrible before. I made it not terrible.

The most obvious examples of change are quantitative improvements like a bump in sales, a boost in customer satisfaction scores, and increased web traffic.

We can apply this concept qualitatively, too. Perhaps before, a long and tedious market analysis process was causing a lot of headaches. You can’t measure a headache but saying that you simplified a tedious process provides the necessary context.

The following questions will help you identify your marketing accomplishments:

Overcoming Marketing Challenges

  • What company-wide marketing challenges did you face when you first started? How many of those issues have you addressed and resolved?
  • What customer needs and challenges did you identify and address to develop go-to-market plans?

Developing & Improving Marketing Strategies

  • Did you identify and develop innovative and trendsetting marketing strategies for new products?
  • What future market trends did you identify and how did you evolve your strategy?
  • How did you decide between a sales-intensive and a marketing-intensive strategy?
  • Did you accommodate regional nuances while bringing visibility to global brand strategy?
  • How did you balance between consumer demand and competitive pricing when devising a pricing strategy?
  • Did you improve promotions and product overviews?

Lead Generation Methods

  • How did you customize marketing content to target different audiences?
  • What value propositions did you offer to beat competition?
  • Do you useInstagram and other social media trends to maximize marketing impact?
  • How did you make use of paid ads, events, search engine marketing, and PR to amplify launch?

Actionable Insight Generation

  • Did you collect and analyze sales trends, category shifts, COG changes, market intelligence, and competition?
  • How do you track and measure the effectiveness and impact of all marketing activities?
  • Did you analyze in-market performance data to identify areas of opportunity to increase adoption of your products?
  • What trends did you identify at the point of sale?

Marketing Team Management

  • How many teams did you lead? What was the team size?
  • What steps do you take to create cohesive working relationships and collaborations with other teams?
  • How did you improve optimization of project materials, costs, and schedules?
  • What common gaps did you identify in areas of product and marketing knowledge?
  • How did you maintain awareness of current trends in visual arts and merchandising?
  • In what ways did you aid team members’ professional development?

After answering these questions, you can “mold” your answer to fit one of these two frameworks to create bullets for your resume:

  • Achieved RESULT by addressing CHALLENGE and taking ACTIONS.
  • Resolved CHALLENGE and achieved RESULT by taking ACTIONS.

I asked Mike some of the above questions and dug deeper into his history with follow up questions. As a result, we were able to come up with great accomplishments for his most recent role. Some of which are given below:

Double-check your bullets against the keywords from Step 1. Remember, we want your resume to be hyper-focused on marketing at the director level.

Step 3: How to make a strong first impression

Our surveys indicate that recruiters pay the most attention to resumes towards the top. If the first few lines grab their attention, they’ll read the resume more slowly and with more care.

Are the first few lines of your director of marketing resume attention-grabbing? After reading them, do you feel like you want to continue reading?

Mike utilized the top portion of his old resume to write various generic statements:

  • managed projects in a multitude of varying departments
  • skilled professional with extensive experience in product management, marketing, and strategic planning
  • successful manager with extensive supervisory experience.

These sentences probably apply to anyone applying for a marketing director position and do not differentiate Mike from other applicants.

Furthermore, these statements sound more managerial than directorial. Don’t you feel a decent marketing manager can also do all of the above?

To capture and maintain the reader’s attention, we need to make the point hard and fast.

Here’s what we did for Mike:

This is the top half of his resume, which immediately uses his multimillion-dollar wins to grab a recruiter’s attention. We showed they were achieved again and again at different companies to prove that Mike can replicate this success in varying conditions. Moreover, we also elaborated on how he achieved these accomplishments while keeping the language high-level and crisp. Doing so allowed us to drop in some critical keywords here, too.

What story do you want your resume’s first impression to convey?

Ideally, list your career’s biggest marketing wins here. How much did you increase your market share? How effectively did your marketing strategies boost sales, and what was the impact on the bottom line? Were you awarded for marketing or advertising excellence?

The visual center isn’t all about your career highlights though. A critical component of the resume is your contact information. Without this, you could have the best resume in the world and remain unable to be contacted. ATS systems also typically weed out resumes based on location. Therefore, it’s important to have your phone number, your email address, and your city, state, and zip code listed on the resume.

 

Step 4: How to use your volunteer experience and projects to enhance your marketing director resume

Although employment gaps might stand out as red flags, honesty and integrity are more critical.

Instead of altering dates on your resume, use your volunteer experience and projects during your employment gap to add more value to your marketing director resume. This will help you show that you kept your skill set up to date and are an active member of your industry.

Here are some examples of how a director-level marketing candidate can fill in employment gaps:

  • Attained Master in Business Administration with a 4.0 GPA from University of California, Los Angeles.
  • Used maternity leave to brush up on Digital Marketing skills by taking several courses and achieving the following certifications:
  1. Google AdWords Certification, 2015
  2. Google Analytics Certification, 2015
  3. HubSpot Content Marketing Certification, 2015

Step 5: How to make a Director of Marketing LinkedIn profile

Once you have completed your resume, it’s time to upgrade your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn is a powerful job board, a place to build your personal brand, a tool to rank your name on Google, an invaluable networking resource, a platform to research companies, and a hub of industry news.

Most importantly, LinkedIn is used as a sourcing tool by more than 94% of recruiters.

A LinkedIn profile is different from your resume in that its algorithms and fields are different from what you’d get with a resume.

Plus, with a resume, you are restricted to two pages. With LinkedIn, each experience, project, and the about section can run up to 2000 characters. There’s a lot more room to play with.

I have created a free LinkedIn cheat sheet which you can use to highlight your achievements and expertise.

Step 6: How to take your director of marketing resume from good to great

 Here are three basic checklists:

Best practices

  • It’s important to ensure you’ve used correct grammar throughout the resume.
  • While writing your resume, use precise and appropriate vocabulary to capture the attention of a distracted, tired recruiter who is swimming in resumes peppered with self-descriptors like “self-starter” and “dynamic.”
  • Eliminate unnecessary articles and adjectives for punchier writing.
  • Use acronyms and abbreviations consistently.
  • Use active voice instead of passive voice. This is because active voice has a more concise and direct style than passive voice.

Compare the following:

  1. $4M in revenue was secured through this revamped email marketing strategy.
  2. Secured $4M by revamping email marketing strategy.

Doesn’t the second active sentence sound much better?

Proofreading

  • Use an online tool, like Grammarly, to check for obvious errors you may have missed.
  • Read your resume “backwards.” Read the last line first, then go backwards until you get to the top. This will help you catch more mistakes.
  • Read the resume out loud. This will also help you catch more mistakes.
  • Get a friend to proofread it.

Formatting

  • A director of marketing with 10 to 15 years of experience should ideally have a 2-page resume.
  • Use either Calibri or Arial in size 10 or larger for your resume font.
  • Use a single-row table to showcase skills. Multi-row tables are hard for ATS to read.
  • Minimize the use of color and graphics. Remember, a graphics-heavy resume may be illegible to ATS.

Looking for more? Check out these links: 

Writing is not everyone’s forte, but it is definitely mine. This is the reason my marketing resume writing best practices have been approved by dozens of recruiters in the marketing space. 

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If you prefer to have us create your resume, all you have to do is speak to us about your experience. We’ll do all the research and writing and then continue following up with you until you have an offer that interests you.