How to Tailor Your Resume for Digital Marketing Roles
By Marta Gongos Resumes in digital marketing showcase your skills and experience, and show employers why you’re the right fit for the job. After reading your resume, the hiring manager should better understand who you are and what you can bring to the team.
Hiring managers often sift through hundreds of resumes daily, so it’s important to craft your resume for marketing jobs in a unique, easy-to-read way. In this post, we’ll dive into some tips and strategies on how you can tailor your resume and get hired for your next digital marketing role.
What Hiring Managers Look for in a Digital Marketing Resume
Before we get into how to structure and tailor your digital marketing resume, let’s understand what hiring managers usually look for when reviewing a resume for marketing. Here are some key points to think about:
Easy-to-Read Design
Since hiring managers go through hundreds of resumes daily, you want yours to stand out. Make it easy to scan, and ensure you include all the important information, like relevant digital marketing skills, education, and experience.
Use a legible font, like Open Sans, Arial, or Georgia. Break up your resume into sections with headings and subheadings, and add space between them to give it a cleaner look. Add a link to your LinkedIn profile and/or online portfolio to demonstrate examples of your work.
A Custom Resume for Each Role
You don’t have to completely rewrite your resume for every new job application, but we recommend starting with a template and customizing your relevant marketing skills for each role. Look at keywords from the job description and tailor your resume to fit the job description.
Cover Letter
Did you know applicants with tailored cover letters get 50% more interviews than those without? Including a customized cover letter along with your digital marketing resume will make you stand out. Take the extra 10 minutes to write about why you’re the perfect fit for the digital marketing job. Make it personal, including the company and the hiring manager’s name.
Relevant Experience with Performance-Driven Results
For digital marketing roles, employers look for candidates with expertise in email marketing, PPC, search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, social media management, and related areas. Make sure you include relevant experience and digital marketing skills. It’s a good idea to highlight some numbers, as well. For example, you could say you “generated $50k revenue through online marketing campaigns” on your resume for marketing.
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Tailor Your Resume for Applicant Tracking Systems
Most companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to scan resumes and pull out certain keywords before they reach a hiring manager. To get through the ATS and optimize your digital marketer resume for the highest chances of scoring an interview, you should:
- Include relevant keywords from the job description, like “SEO strategy,” “email marketing,” or “digital marketing strategies”
- Include the job title and use clear section titles, like “Skills” and “Work Experience.”
- Avoid complex graphics, colours, designs, or fonts that may disrupt the ATS readability.
By optimizing your digital marketing resume for applicant tracking systems, you’ll have a good chance of your resume landing in the manager’s hands.
Structuring Your Digital Marketing Resume for Maximum Impact
Structuring your digital marketing resume correctly makes it easy for hiring managers to find key information. Here’s a format you can follow:
- Contact Information, LinkedIn Profile, & Portfolio: Update your LinkedIn profile and ensure it aligns with your resume. Include your portfolio to showcase some successful marketing campaigns you’ve worked on.
- Professional Summary: Include a 2-3 sentence introduction summarizing your achievements and experience. Highlight anything that will make you stand out, such as your ability to conduct SEO competitor research and create content calendars.
- Key Skills: Include digital marketing-related skills in bullet points, which can include SEO, social media strategy, data analytics, content marketing, copywriting, and other relevant skills.
- Work Experience: List a few of your most relevant roles, with the most recent listed first. Include the company, job title, dates, and location. Use bullet points to briefly describe your achievements, focusing on results. List relevant digital marketing tools you can use.
- Education: List your university or college degree(s) along with any relevant certifications. E.g., HubSpot’s SEO Certification course.
Showcase Your Digital Marketing Skills & Achievements
The digital marketing world is quite large and encompasses many different roles. When you tailor your resume for marketing roles, the skills you include should be highly relevant, customized to the role, and chosen to show your marketing expertise. Here are some of the most important digital marketing skills you can include:
- SEO and SEM
- Content marketing
- Copywriting
- Email marketing
- Data analysis
- Research
- Design
- Social media advertising
- UX design
- Project management
Along with simply listing these skills, you should highlight quantifiable results. Some examples:
- Managed a $15k monthly ad budget managing social media accounts as a social media manager, achieving a 5x ROI
- Implemented technical SEO improvements that led to a 77% increase in organic website traffic over 6 months
Image Source: Pexels
Add a Creative Touch to Stand Out
There’s a fine line between the right amount of creativity on your resume and too much. Your digital marketing resume should include subtle design elements, like clean fonts and slight colour accents, but don’t go too overboard. You don’t want the applicant tracking system to reject your resume automatically.
You can stand out by adding a link to your portfolio and including relevant digital marketing-related certifications, such as Google or SEMrush. This is especially helpful if you don’t meet all the criteria for the job.
Tailor Your Resume for Different Marketing Roles
As each digital marketing role differs, you’ll need to adjust your resume accordingly. Here are a few examples of what to focus on:
- Social Media Manager: Focus on content strategy, engagement, and audience growth
- SEO Specialist: Highlight SEO tools (like Google Analytics), keyword research, and search ranking improvements
- Content Marketer: Showcase blogging, writing, and email marketing experience.
Land Your Next Marketing Role with the Perfect Resume
A resume for digital marketing roles should highlight your expertise, achievements, and creativity while being optimized for ATS so it can land in the hiring manager’s hands. If you tailor your resume by implementing these strategies, you’ll get interviews and stand out in a competitive job market.
At Ad Culture, we’re here to help you stand out. We’ll connect you to skilled marketing professionals and employers so you can land your next digital marketing position. Take the next step in your career by contacting us today.
