You’ve got years of experience and want to become a digital marketing director. The increased salary looks nice and you’ll have more flexibility to try new things.

But you’re not getting called in for interviews.

There’s a few things which could be going wrong:

• Your resume is written for the wrong kind of company/audience
• You’re framing your experience around responsibilities
• You’re throwing around jargon instead of clearly explaining your value

One digital marketing consultant explains a classic mistake like this:

Now that’s not always going to be the case. Generally if you’re applying at a digital marketing agency, they’re going to know their stuff inside and out. But if you’re applying at a company which doesn’t do digital marketing well, this is critical advice.

If you’re applying somewhere without a lot of knowledge about digital marketing, don’t overawe them and throw industry jargon in their face. Clearly explain your value and how you’ll make things easy for them.

The larger point is that your resume needs to be perfect, perfectly tailored for its audience. This guide shows you how to do that.

This digital marketing director resume guide will teach you:

 ✔ How to put yourself in the shoes of the people hiring you to be a more effective applicant.

 ✔ What subtle resume header additions can make your resume far more effective.

 ✔ How to write a professional summary that explains why they should hire you.

 ✔ What makes digital marketing work experience stand out to recruiters.

 ✔ How to leverage skills and certifications to make yourself a stronger applicant.

Digital marketing director resume sample

Read our comprehensive guide on how long a resume should be.

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The best digital marketing director resumes should...

Your resume needs to focus on your work experience. If you don’t have enough to fill an experience section, you’re probably not ready for a director position.

That said, a reverse-chronological resume layout is ideal for digital marketing directors. This puts your experience front and center.

On top of that, sections about side projects, skills, and certifications can help bolster that core work experience as well as show passion and personality.

You’re underestimating the importance of your resume header

Name, location, email, title, what could go wrong?

Honestly, it’s not about what’s wrong, it’s about missed opportunities.

Sure, a straightforward resume header with the basics isn’t going to torpedo your chances of getting hired, but it’s not going to help them either.

Look at these two examples to see what we mean:

Adding certifications and sites shows you’re competent, proud, and involved. Ideally, they can click on those links and see you involved in communities and groups about digital marketing.

Optimizing your resume header with certifications is a fantastic way to stand above the crowd for whom marketing is “just a day job.”

Plus, you can accomplish all of this before the hiring manager even gets past your resume header!

Show you can write and tell your story in your professional summary

When you’re applying for a leadership position, and that too marketing - you need to be highly presentable.

Every line, every bullet and every thing on your resume’s real estate should scream that you’re flawless.

The first thing where a hiring manager would make the first-real-impression is your resume summary.

Simon Lewis puts it this way:

Also, when you write your summary, try to put yourself in the shoes of the person deciding to hire you.

How can you make their job easy? How can you give them a reason to hire you?

Here’s a resume summary that we commonly see across digital marketing director resumes.

It doesn’t add any useful information so it essentially wastes the hiring manager’s time.

The second example is focused on quickly explaining the type of experience you have and what value you intent to provide to the company looking to hire you.

It shows that you’ve researched their marketing challenges and already have an idea of what they need to achieve.

In other words, the first example answers the question “why should we hire you?”

How should you frame your digital marketing experience?

Your experience will now expand on top of your resume summary and what you possibly add within your resume header.

If you said that you are Google Ads certified, now would be a good time to display what you did in Google Ads with results you achieved.

Similarly, you can explain on your broad marketing experience and team management skills to display the scale and impact you made as well.

A resume experience is just like a really small KPI report that gives a glanceable view of your performance, innovation and success factors.

Let’s quickly go over two resume experience samples to see the difference.

2 Director of digital marketing resume examples

The value this person provides and their skillsets are both crystal clear here. Now let’s look at the same work experience but written with the focus on responsibilities and not measurable outcomes:

Just reframing your experience and including success metrics makes a massive difference in how hiring managers view your work experience.

Does your digital marketing director resume need an education section?

Yes and no.

Nobody is hiring a digital marketing director because they finished a degree in marketing 10 years ago. Still, if you have a relevant degree you should include it (especially if it was from a well-known school), just leave off details like your GPA.

How should you decide which skills to include and emphasize?

The question here is, what kind of marketing team are you going to be expected to lead?

What size (the larger the team, the more management you’ll be expected to do)?

What are its goals, what channels does it excel at and which does it need to work on?

Your skills should be framed around the answers to these questions.

Resist the urge to say you’re an expert in everything.

That will strain believability and make you sound like too much of a generalist. A digital marketing director is expected to be T shaped just like any marketer.

How to include your certifications on your resume

You may be thinking “I’m experienced enough in digital marketing, what do I need certifications for?”That’s fair, your resume should rely largely on your digital marketing experience, but don’t discount the power of certifications even for more senior roles. Shaun Thomas described why digital marketing managers need to constantly update their skills and knowledge, and we believe the same applies equally to digital marketing directors:

Now if you have extensive experience in Google ads (and it’s clear in your work experience), a certification isn’t going to help you. But think of certifications as a way to bolster your credentials in new areas or types of marketing you have less experience in.

In other words, they can help form the top of your T shaped skill set.

We used big data to get you critical insights

One of the core skills of a digital marketing director is data analysis. Fortunately, we’re as passionate about that as you are. That’s why we designed an algorithm to analyze thousands of digital marketing director resumes and job offers to learn which skills were the most in demand and which showed up the most in resumes.

How to create the best digital marketing director resume

• Always look at your resume from the hiring manager’s perspective, learn what they want from an applicant and make yourself an easy choice.
• Include certifications and personal profiles or websites in your resume header.
• Use a professional summary to add context and explain why they should hire you.
• Frame your work experience around concrete metrics.
• Choose a few skill areas to emphasize and back them up with metrics and examples.
• Use certifications to boost your strength in areas outside of your core expertise.