A Comprehensive Guide to a Job-Winning Chief Marketing Officer Resume (Examples Included)
How to Write the Best Chief Marketing Officer Resume
Chief marketing officers are engineers specializing in human needs.
You’re a business maestro.
You coordinate between customer expectations and the possibility of further development of products.
Your sharp analytical thinking helps you create the right products for the right consumers.
But unfortunately, not every hiring manager can see what you’re responsible for.
So when writing your chief marketing officer resume, you have to remind them of two things:
- How vital you were to your former employers (to highlight your experience).
- What hiring you would mean to the business (How will you help it grow?).
The secret to creating a stellar chief marketing officer resume is to:
- Think of yourself as the product, your resume as the marketing channel, and the hiring manager as your target audience.
- Find your unique value proposition as a CMO. Then promote it throughout different sections in your resume.
- Not sell yourself as a generalist. Instead, combine what you want to achieve with what the job requires to find a unique voice to communicate in.
This Chief Marketing Officer Resume Will Teach You:
- 7 chief marketing officer resume examples
- How to tailor your chief marketing officer resume to the position you’re applying to
- How to talk about your value while showing how you can help the recruiter’s company
- Ways to describe your duties as a chief marketing officer
- 20 Important skills that hiring managers look for when choosing the right candidate
Chief Marketing Officer Resume Examples
Check out our full guide on how to review your resume for additional tips.
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How to Write a Chief Marketing Officer Resume
When marketing is at its best, it brings the whole organization together.
Recruiters understand that very well. And they’re looking for the best chief marketing officer to help them achieve it.
Each section you write in your resume has to support the claim that you are a professional marketer.
Show how things changed for your former employers after they hired you. And also, dive into more details about how you helped identify a target audience and communicate with it.
The best chief marketing officers today are result-oriented. They continuously test out new marketing ideas and promotional activities.
They develop new strategies to meet end-users where they are and serve them top-notch customer experience.
Chief marketing officers lead marketing teams. And they guide them to test and improve strategies intended to increase revenue.
Here’s what a recruiter will look for in your resume:
- Do you have a bachelor’s degree in related fields such as marketing and business?
- Are you the creative type to lead new business development initiatives?
- Do you have experience leading teams into translating strategy into solid tactics?
- Can you handle brand voice and communication to deliver a brand-consistent message?
The most important sections of a chief marketing officer resume:
- Resume header
- Resume summary to briefly showcase your worth in the marketing field
- Resume experience to feature your business marketing expertise
- BI education and marketing-related certifications
- Key chief marketing officer skills to reinforce your your resume
How to Write a Chief Marketing Officer Resume Header
Does the header section in your CMO resume look like this?
It’s an okay version, but it only containts general information.
It lacks specificity to the job you’re applying to, and it doesn’t give the recruiter a chance to know more about you.
Instead, let’s try this:
In addition to all the necessary information, this header has a link to your LinkedIn profile.
That allows the hiring manager to know more about you in a very short time.
Also, it includes a brief reference to your qualifications in the field. And that hints that you are a qualified candidate for the job.
Here’s the information you should include in your chief marketing officer header:
- Name
- Job Title
- Email Address
- Location
- Phone Number
- (Professional/Personal) Website or LinkedIn profile
How to Write a Chief Marketing Officer Resume Objective or Summary
In a few sentences, you can leave an outstanding first impression on your recruiter.
You’ll encourage them to read further while paying close attention to everything you say in the rest of your resume.
Make sure to avoid writing fluff or relying on filler words to make your point.
All that shows that you’re a qualified copywriter who can lead marketing teams to craft persuasive web copy, white papers, product descriptions, and blog posts.
You also have to rely on your previous winning campaigns and products to make your point.
Then you can back that up with concrete numbers such as ROI, sales revenue, website conversions rates, etc.
3 Chief Marketing Officer Resume Samples - Summary
Because there are a million things you can say in the summary, let’s begin first with what not to say in your resume summary.
Starting your summary with an “I” gives an early negative impression. It makes it seem like the whole paragraph is going to be about you and what you want.
That’s not something your recruiter is going to be pleased with.
They want you to tell them why they should care:
- How have you helped your former employer?
- What change will you bring after you’re hired in the new company?
Most CMOs are more than willing to go the extra mile and work for long hours if that helps the company for thrive.
Therefore, hard-working they’ll expect from you.
On top of that, this summary lacks proof of your eight years of experience as a CMO.
- What business and marketing aspects were you in charge of during that time?
- Did you have any successful marketing campaigns?
- Were you responsible for any successful products?
- Did you receive any positive feedback from your customers?
Show some precise numbers and concrete results.
And while at it, briefly tell them how you did it.
Let’s try this again.
This is a bit better, but it’s still ineffective.
Due to two reasons reasons:
- It’s vague, generalized, and provides very little context.
- It doesn’t reflect your years of marketing expertise.
We can do better:
This summary has everything an amazing summary needs because it:
- States some of your most important past accomplishments.
- Features your long years of experience working as a chief marketing officer.
- Provides concrete results with precise numbers.
- Shows that you’re not mass sending your resume by mentioning the name of the organization you’re applying to.
How Should You Frame Your Chief Marketing Officer Resume Experience?
Marketing is a creative field. It requires tons of different skills working together to produce the desired results.
This is often where chief marketing officers get lost when creating their resumes.
Sure!
You may have launched dozens of successful campaigns. Or sold millions worth of online products in your career.
But not every task you accomplished is relevant to a chief marketing officer’s role.
Your experience section needs to be tailored specifically to show that you can:
- Handle high-level metrics such as branding and lead generation
- Work with individuals from different departments with different positions in the company
- Lead teams of different sizes and efficiently delegate responsibility for execution
- Conduct in-depth analysis and measure ROI and marketing spending.
2 Chief Marketing Officer Resume Experience Samples
The vagueness in this example makes you feel like the applicant doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
It gives the impression that you’ve copy-pasted those responsibilities from the web.
Let’s tweak it a little bit by adding specific details on your past roles and accomplishments.
This is detailed enough to make the hiring manager trust you more and have a positive feeling about hiring you.
How to Describe the Duties of a chief marketing officer on a Resume
- Set new branding and marketing strategies that increased brand awareness and lead generation.
- Participated in research to come up with new product ideas and growth strategies.
- Managed and supervised the in-house marketing team on several projects.
- Controlled the marketing budget and conducted sales forecasts.
- Planned and implemented new marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
Does your chief marketing officer resume need an education section?
Let's be honest.
You're applying for executive level positions, that enable you to sit alongside the C-Suite".
You've already proven to be an excellent marketer capable of driving and saving millions of dollars.
So, whether you want to Havard or Cambridge doesn't really matter - but it does present an interesting talking point.
Here’s some information you can include on your most recent degree:
- University/College name
- Location
- Study years or year of graduation
- Degree type
20 Skills to showcase in your chief marketing officer resume
A lot of what you do as a chief marketing officer is data, strategy and people-oriented.
Your role requires you to work with lots of different teams within the company. Therefore, you have to be both a leader and a team player at the same time.
And your recruiter knows that.
Let’s face it.
Even if you could list hundreds of skills in your resume, unless they're carefully picked, you’d still not be chosen for the job.
Only include major skills that gain you a competitive advantage against other candidates.
For example, every CMO applying to this job knows how to use Microsoft Office. So, it would be counterintuitive to include that in your resume.
Instead, focus on these skills:
9 soft skills to include on a chief marketing officer Resume
- Communication
- Leadership
- Creativity
- Teamwork
- Flexibility
- Work Ethic
- Problem Solving
- Assertiveness
11 Technical skills to include in a chief marketing officer resume
- Data analysis
- Sales funnel management
- Keyword research tools (e.g. Keyword Planner, KWFinder)
- A/B testing
- Email marketing tools (e.g. MailChimp, ConvertKit)
- Graphic Design (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator)
- Project Management
- Social media management
- SEO
- Coding languages (e.g. HTML, CSS, JS)
- Marketing automation tools (e.g. Hubspot, Marketo)
How to include certifications in your chief marketing officer resume?
Struggling to highlight certain aspects of your experience throughout your resume?
This section is your savior.
Most job applications state clearly what the job requires you to do.
Getting a certification is a genuine way to show your interest in the job and draw attention to your high ambitions for the position.
Top 11 Chief Marketing Officer certifications to include in your resume
- AMA Professional Certified Marketer
- AMA® Certificate in Analytical Skills
- Adobe Certified Expert (ACE)
- Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification
- Hootsuite Social Media Certification
- The Digital Marketing Institute Certified Digital Marketing Professional
- Google’s Digital Garage: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Certification
- Online Marketing Certified Professional (OMCP)
- Cornell University Digital Marketing Certificate Program
- American Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Certification
- Certified ScrumMaster®
What are the tricks for the best chief marketing officer resume?
- Create a resume specifically tailored to the chief marketing officer role
- Use your summary as a brief introduction to showcase your sales and marketing skills
- Highlight your successful campaigns and brilliant marketing ideas throughout your resume
- Use precise numbers to prove your competence in understanding customers and creating winning products
- Use certifications to authentically turn your career shortcomings into strong selling points
* Data reflects analysis made on over 1M resume profiles and examples over the last 2 years from Enhancv.com. Use this Chief Marketing Officer resume sample as a base to create a unique resume for yourself.
