If you’re considering applying to a director of marketing position, you’re going to need a resume that shows hiring managers you have the right mix of technical knowledge and relevant soft skills.
To position your resume for a marketing director role, it’s important to first understand what the role involves and how that translates into what hiring managers are looking for. Typically, a director of marketing is in charge of overseeing the operations of the entire marketing department. This includes managing junior employees, collaborating with cross-departmental senior leaders, and deploying marketing strategies.
Hiring managers will first look to make sure you have technical marketing skills such as copywriting, digital marketing knowledge, budget management knowledge, and more. In addition, hiring managers will be looking to see that you have the necessary skills to be an effective leader. The marketing director is responsible for creating a vision and translating that vision into an easy-to-follow plan for employees. Junior marketers will look to you for guidance and advice, so hiring managers will want you to demonstrate that you are not only knowledgeable but can translate your knowledge effectively to employees.
The best marketers are creative-minded, tenacious, and able to work well with others to bring a vision to life. To become a marketing director, it’s important that you possess both the technical and soft skills that will make you a strong marketing leader.
In this guide, we’ll provide you with the insider scoop on how to position your resume for a director of marketing role and helpful tips and tricks to make your director of marketing resume stand out.
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The director of marketing leads a team in strategizing, planning and implementing effective marketing plans for the company. The director of marketing closely studies the company’s business goals, and builds a unique marketing plan to ensure the business reaches them. The marketing director is responsible for analyzing the company’s current and previous customer data, reviewing past advertising results, and setting the budgets for new campaigns. Then, the marketing director must delegate the tasks among the department to execute the plan.
When looking for a director of marketing, hiring managers will typically be looking for someone with several years of experience in marketing. They should have a Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, or another related field. A master’s degree is not necessary, but it can help a candidate stand out for a senior role such as this. Most importantly, hiring managers will be looking for a candidate with a stellar track record of implementing effective marketing strategy, and leading others in working toward a singular goal.
One of the core responsibilities of a director of marketing is to be able to effectively lead others in executing projects. The ideal candidate for this role will demonstrate experience with leadership and project management. Therefore, you should be sure to include any past experience leading others, spearheading a project, or managing projects with several people involved.
Today, digital marketing knowledge is increasingly important for a director of marketing to have. Hiring managers will want to see a candidate who is well versed in utilizing digital marketing tools, such as GoogleAds and Linkedin Ads. Google offers several training courses on digital marketing that will give you a new credential to show off on your resume.
A marketing director is someone who is responsible for overseeing the creation, implementation, and monitoring of all marketing campaigns in a company. As such, they are experienced marketing professionals who have knowledge of digital marketing, advertising, and event marketing. The marketing director must analyze data to create marketing plans based on a company’s current performance and desired goals. They also must lead a team of midlevel marketers in executing the campaign successfully.
When recruiting for this role, hiring managers will be looking for someone with proven marketing and leadership experience, as well as relevant technical skills. Most candidates for the role have a bachelor's degree in marketing or communications. A master’s degree can help make your resume more competitive. To land this role, candidates usually need at least three years of previous marketing experience, and technical skills in branding, advertising, and digital marketing.
There are many techniques marketers can deploy depending on a company’s needs. Since the marketing director is responsible for inventing all campaigns, hiring managers will want someone with expansive knowledge. On your resume, try not to focus on a singular marketing concept. For example, if you're currently in digital marketing, you’ll want to highlight experiences you’ve had with different campaigns like direct mail. It’ll show hiring managers you're well-versed in a variety of tactics.
The marketing director typically oversees a department of entry-level and mid-level marketers. Since the marketing director is responsible for managing employees to ensure campaigns are executed correctly, hiring managers will be looking for a candidate with stellar leadership skills. If you’ve been able to effectively lead a team, you should highlight your success. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to lead a team, try to highlight experiences where you lead a project or trained new hires.
Besides digital marketing directors, there are also traditional marketing directors who dabble both in the online space and in-person. This may include coordinating marketing campaigns for product launches, events to promote the product or service, and overseeing relationships with the public and marketing vendors. They lead their team and successfully complete projects within the set deadline and budget, while conducting market research.
Executing marketing campaigns requires project management experience; both in starting the project and successfully finishing it with results. Make sure to talk about any relevant marketing projects with what scale they were, the budget, the results, and within what timeframe. The details help the recruiter to create a complete picture of what you did and what you can do.
If you’re an outstanding leader with years of marketing and management experience, you may have your sights set on becoming a marketing director. Most professionals spend 5-10 years in various marketing jobs before advancing to a director position. When you’re applying for this job, your resume should show that you’ve excelled in past marketing roles and that you’ve been successful as a manager.
If you’ve advanced to more senior positions at previous companies, make sure to point out those promotions on your resume. Showing how you stepped up to greater levels of responsibility and seniority in past jobs speaks to your leadership abilities.
For a senior leadership role, your resume needs to show that you are an excellent manager and leader of people. Choose strong action verbs such as “improved”, “negotiated”, and “managed” to highlight your initiative and ability to make sound decisions for the benefit of your past companies.
Digital marketing is a fast growing field that focuses on utilizing web-based tools and software to enhance lead generation, audience targeting, brand awareness and more. A digital marketing director is responsible for assessing a company’s goals and building a digital marketing plan for them. The digital marketing director will create the marketing plan, as well as oversee its implementation, and monitor data to ensure it’s producing the anticipated results. A digital marketing director typically oversees a team of junior digital marketers, who they are responsible for managing and delegating tasks to.
For this role, hiring managers will be looking for someone with a degree in marketing, communications, or another related field. A master’s is not required, however, a master’s in marketing can help you land a senior role in digital marketing. More importantly, hiring managers will want someone with foundational experience in digital marketing. An ideal candidate typically has at least 2 years of digital marketing experience and specific technical skills such as being certified in GoogleAds, experience leveraging search engine optimization, and more.
Google is a robust tool for digital marketers who use it effectively. Hiring managers want a candidate with experience effectively utilizing Google’s advertising platform. If you don’t have much experience with implementing Google AdWords, you can take the certification course. Upon completion you’ll have a new credential on your resume that will catch the eye of hiring managers.
If you have assisted with or individually implemented digital marketing strategies in previous roles, it’s important to highlight this. There are a variety of experiences you should note, including any experience managing or creating social media content, analyzing social media data, utilizing email marketing campaign tools, and more. This will show hiring managers you understand how to implement these digital tools.
Digital marketing directors are not just specialists, but also leaders of the marketing department. You’ll be responsible for directing the vision of the company’s marketing campaign, developing new strategies to increase engagement and generating traffic for the company’s website. The ability to analyze performance of previous marketing campaigns is a must and this role often requires 5+ years of leadership experience.
As a director, you should have professional experience with effectively leading and managing teams. The question that recruiters want to know is: how were you effective? You’ll want to combine action verbs and numbers here to stand out. A great example this resume uses is “recruited, hired, and trained 25+ marketing and sales specialists, improving overall sales by 20%.”
As a digital marketing director, your ultimate goal is to generate as much revenue as possible and surpass sales goals by persuading more people to buy your company’s product or service with your marketing expertise. If you have a track record of achieving or overachieving previous sales, you’ll want to mention it with an estimated figure or percentage.
As a hiring manager who has recruited marketing leaders at companies like Amazon, Google, and Unilever, I know what it takes to create a Director of Marketing resume that stands out. The following tips will help you showcase your skills, experience, and achievements in a way that grabs the attention of top employers.
Employers want to see that you have a proven track record of developing and executing successful marketing strategies. Use specific examples to demonstrate your ability to:
For example:
Developed and executed a multi-channel marketing strategy that increased brand awareness by 30% and generated $2M in new revenue within 6 months.
When applying for a Director of Marketing position, your resume summary is an opportunity to make a strong first impression and highlight your most relevant qualifications. While a summary is optional, it can be particularly useful if you have extensive experience or are making a career change. Keep in mind that your resume itself is already a summary of your skills and experience, so avoid simply repeating information that can be found elsewhere. Instead, focus on providing context and showcasing your unique value proposition.
When crafting your summary, be objective and use metrics to back up your claims. Mentioning your target job title and incorporating relevant keywords can also help your resume perform better with applicant tracking systems (ATS). However, be mindful not to overdo it with buzzwords or soft skills. Your summary should be concise, typically no more than one paragraph in length.
Your work experience section is the heart of your resume as a Director of Marketing. It's where you show hiring managers how you've made an impact in your previous roles and why you're the best candidate for the job.
In this section, we'll break down the key steps to writing a strong work experience section that will help you stand out from other applicants and land your next Director of Marketing role.
When writing a resume, you want to use action verbs to describe previous experiences, achievements, and skills. The action verb should come first, followed by the achievement you are trying to highlight. Directors of marketing need strong leadership skills, and therefore should highlight previous leadership experience by using a leadership-related action verb, such as “spearheaded” or “directed”.
Below, you’ll find several examples of action verbs that relate to the core functions of the director of marketing role. You should always use these verbs at the beginning of a bullet point and avoid overusing them too many times.
For a full list of effective resume action verbs, visit Resume Action Verbs.
When applying for a director of marketing role, you’ll need to make sure your resume is optimized. To get past applicant tracking software, highlight relevant skills to the role of the director of marketing on your resume. To effectively do this, you can add a skills section to your resume where you detail each skill in a list form. Or, you can work these skills into your previous job descriptions and how you utilized them. If you’re stuck on what skills to include, you can browse director of marketing job descriptions to see what skills they are looking for. You can also review the list of hard skills often sought after for director of marketing roles below.
You can include the above skills in a dedicated Skills section on your resume, or weave them in your experience. Here's how you might create your dedicated skills section:
This word cloud highlights the important keywords that appear on Director of Marketing job descriptions and resumes. The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears on job postings, and the more 'important' it is.
Thank you for the checklist! I realized I was making so many mistakes on my resume that I've now fixed. I'm much more confident in my resume now.
