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You know how to reach the right customer at the right time with your messaging. You can create Facebook ad campaigns to sell water to a fish. You can build an organic traffic engine that grows exponentially over time.
You’re a great marketing manager. You shouldn’t also have to be great at building a resume or writing a cover letter for a job. We’ve poured through thousands of marketing manager resumes learning what works and what doesn’t, to help you get an interview.
We’ve distilled our findings into professional resume templates and an extensive resume guide that has helped marketing managers get interviews at companies like Stripe and Facebook in 2024.
The goal with your marketing manager cover letter and resume is to get an interview. From there, your resume is not nearly as important.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to best structure your resume to get that initial interview. Marketing managers have a wide range of skills so it can be really tough to figure out what to include and what to leave out.
You’ll need to make sure your resume is formatted properly, you have all the sections a hiring manager is looking for, and most importantly you’ll have to be sure to talk about your skills and work experience in the right way to get an interview.
What’s in this guide (the sections are ordered by how important they are):
Formatting your marketing manager resume is relatively straightforward. In short, here is what you should strive for:
Let’s dive right into the most important part of your resume: your work experience. You’ll see in the example resumes I provided that this part takes up most of the space.
There’s a good reason for that. Hiring managers largely make their decision about whether or not you get an interview based on your past experience.
The best way to talk about your experience is to focus on tangible outcomes. Hiring managers want to know you’ll have a big impact on their business through your marketing ability.
What’s the best way to make that case? By showing you’ve had a similarly large impact in your past marketing manager roles.
Think about it. Would you keep running a paid ad if you had no insight into whether it was working or not? Or course not!
To illustrate this point consider these two work experiences. They are describing the same person in the same job but one utilizes numbers to describe their impact and the other doesn’t.
Which do you think is more convincing?
Financial Services Company
August 2016 – May 2018, New York NY
Marketing Manager
Financial Services Company
August 2016 – May 2018, New York NY
Marketing Manager
The reality of applying to marketing manager roles is that you’ll likely be competing with 50+ other applicants. This means the hiring manager will quickly review your resume and determine whether or not you’ll get an interview.
You can quantify your marketing impact in a wide range of ways. Here are some examples for inspiration:
Quantifying your impact draws the hiring manager’s attention and quickly makes the case that you’ll have a huge impact on their business.
Before your resume is ever reviewed by a hiring manager, companies utilize an Applicants Tracking System (ATS) to automatically filter out resumes based on whether they contain certain keywords.
How can you be sure that your marketing manager resume will get past this filter? By including the relevant skills on your resume that are mentioned in the job description.
In your skills section, only include hard technical skills that you have. ATS filters are not screening for soft skills. Including soft skills also won’t help you impress the hiring manager.
When you’re reviewing the resume of a marketing associate is your decision impacted by whether they include a word like “communication” in their skills section? Soft skills listed without context don’t really convey meaningful information about your qualifications.
So what skills should you include? Here are common skills to include in your marketing manager resume.
You don’t (and shouldn’t) list all of these skills. Only include the ones you’d be comfortable being interviewed on.
Skills to include in your marketing manager resume:
The skills you’ll include on your resume should vary based on the kind of job you’re applying to. If you’re applying for a digital marketing manager role then you should focus less on events and more on paid ads.
If you’re applying for a marketing director role that focuses primarily on SEO then you’ll expand on that as an area of focus in your “skills” section at the expense of, say, your social media skill set.
You don’t want your skills to be a laundry list. Only include skills you’re very comfortable with. For marketing managers, it’s better to be a master of a few skills than a jack of all trades.
A hiring manager would be skeptical of a digital marketing manager who claims to be an expert in paid ads, social media, SEO, and email marketing. Rather, it’s better to position yourself as an expert in one or two of those specialties on your resume.
Because “marketing” is such a broad, all-encompassing term you’re much more likely to get an interview if you tailor your resume for each job you apply to.
Only 5% of applicants customize their resumes for each application. By taking the time to do so, you’ll really help yourself stand out.
How do you actually go about customizing your resume for a specific marketing manager role? It’s easier than you think.
That’s it, not so bad, right? For example, if for a given marketing manager role they want someone with extensive experience in paid ads then that should be the primary focus of your work experience.
Let’s walk through a concrete example.
At the time of this writing, the company Qapital is hiring a senior performance marketing manager. Here are the job responsibilities.
About the Role – Qapital Performance Marketing Manager
As a Senior Manager, Performance Marketing at Qapital, you will help to ensure that our investments in marketing pay off in the form of user and revenue growth. Reporting directly to the Chief Marketing Officer, you will:
I’ve highlighted in yellow the keywords and concepts you might be able to incorporate into your resume. In summary, they’re looking for someone to take ownership of overpaid media and all responsibilities that come with that task from budgeting to measuring performance.
I’ve taken the resume example at the top of this page and changed the work experience to mirror what they’re looking for.
Financial Services Company
August 2016 – May 2018, New York NY
Marketing Manager
You can see how I adjusted the description of my work experience to closely match what Qapital is looking for in this hire. This will ensure you get past the automated ATS filters and will really help you stand out to the hiring manager.
A resume objective expresses your specific interest in the marketing manager role you’re applying to. In short, you most likely shouldn’t include a resume objective.
Why? Remember that you’re trying to keep your resume to one page. You should be super selective about what makes the final cut on your resume.
99% of the time, resume objectives are generic and do nothing to convince the hiring manager you deserve an interview. Unless you’re customizing your resume objective for the specific role you’re applying to, you shouldn’t waste the space on your resume to include it.
You tell me, would this resume objective increase the chance of you giving an interview to the applicant?
“Looking to leverage my experience with paid acquisition and SEO to help grow a customer-centric technology product”
I fell asleep while reading that. It’s clear as day this marketing manager didn’t bother to customize the resume objective for the specific role. Compare that to this resume objective.
“Looking to leverage my experience with paid customer acquisition in new markets to further Stripe’s mission of making payments accessible to businesses of all sizes as they expand into Africa.”
This applicant took the time to understand the role they’re applying for, understand the company mission, and succinctly demonstrate their unique qualifications to succeed in this role. This is the kind of resume objective worth including.
All marketing managers should include their education on their resumes. At a minimum, this section should include the school you went to and the degree you obtained.
Since you’re applying for a marketing manager role you likely have a few years of work experience. This means you don’t have to include your GPA or relevant classes you took in school. Use that space to tsealk more about your work experiences.
You should also be sure to include any relevant marketing certifications you’ve obtained. You can include these in your education section.
Here are some common certifications for marketing managers:
Common certifications for marketing managers
Frankly, certifications don’t hold much weight for marketing managers. It’s much better to demonstrate your ability through your work experience and outcomes.
For newer marketing professionals, however, certifications can signal to employers you can learn on your own.
When writing your resume always keep in mind your goal: to get that initial interview. All of the tips we’ve given in this guide are in service of that mission.
Applying to new marketing jobs can be soul-draining. It can seem like you’re applying into a void. Try to keep your head up! Give yourself a high-five for completing one of the most annoying parts of the application process, your resume.
Before you know it you’ll have more interviews than you can manage. You got this!