Marketing Manager Resume Samples and Guide

As a marketing manager, you’ve built a career on understanding your audience and selling a product.

But how does that translate to putting your resume in front of recruiters?

A job-winning marketing manager resume has to accomplish a few things.

Your marketing manager resume needs to pass ATS scanners, get statistically more traction with recruiters, and convince C-suite managers that you can do amazing things for their business.

All that via a single piece of paper. How?

Below is our complete guide that will walk you through it.

How to write the best marketing manager resume

• Tailor your resume to match your target job.

This is a piece of advice you will see repeatedly throughout this guide. Every section of your resume from your header to certifications must be tailored to your target job.

Creating a targeted resume is crucial to getting the job you want. Writing a generic resume to be mass sent to job applications won’t stand out in the sea of qualified candidates.

Study the company and job description for the role you’re applying for. Find where your accomplishments and the company’s needs overlap. Use the same keywords and phrases that appear in their job description.

Be sure to incorporate these keywords into your resume naturally. Recruiters will be able to spot “copy-and-paste” resumes right away.

Apply this practice to every section as you write your marketing manager resume. You have limited space to work with, so make it count!

• Numbers are cool, but some numbers will get you the job.

All marketers will use quantifiable results in their resumes. That's common HR advice — you won’t get a job without producing measurable results.

But hear us out: some numbers will have a much stronger impact than others. Their impact depends on your niche and your company preference. Study the company’s social media and blogs — what numbers do they put forward? Traffic, conversions, budgets?

For example, in content marketing, traffic growth % beats the number of posts that you published. In advertising — the ROI of your campaign and budgets, not the number of ad campaigns launched.

Bad example: Launched 10 marketing campaigns over 3 months

Good example: Increased ROI of all advertising campaigns by 260% after conducting a series of user behavior studies in collaboration with the data science department

Find more examples in the experience and summary sections of this guide.

• Put your skills in a real-world context.
  

Anyone can learn Google Ads and put it on their resume. Worse yet, anyone can open Google Ads, then claim they know Google Ads and put it on their resume.

The sad reality is that both resumes will look exactly the same to a hiring manager.

By putting your skills in a real-world context you achieve two things: beat imposters and make yourself memorable. People love stories, and hiring managers are, after all, people.

Bad example: Used Google Ads to launch advertising campaigns in Google

Good example: Designed a custom Google Ads campaign that attracted 200 organic links within 6 months, increasing blog traffic by 130%

We’ll share resume examples in the experience and skill sections of this guide.

• Use resume format to guide the recruiter’s attention where you want it to be.

If you don’t have decades of experience to justify two pages of a resume, then go for a one-page resume as your default.

Avoid death by bullets. Don’t use more than three bullet points in a row when describing your experience.

Emphasize results with bold text and use headers to make your marketing manager resume easier to scan.

Feel free to play around with this template in our resume builder.

Before reading a word, the hiring manager will notice your resume format. Because you’re expected to be an experienced marketer, a reverse chronological format that emphasizes your past work experience is perfect.

Your marketing manager resume will feature the following sections.

Marketing manager resume header: forming good first impressions

Think about how little time you’ve spent on your resume headers. Name, email, title, done, right?

Now imagine if you spent little time on the header of a Google or Facebook ad?

You wouldn’t dream of it.

If it seems a bit crazy to take that much time to write ad copy and neglect the header of the resume that could get you your next marketing manager position, that’s because it is.

The right header speaks volumes, projects confidence, and makes a strong first impression.

2 marketing manager resume samples - header

What doesn’t work here:

• Generic job title
• No link to online portfolio or LinkedIn profile
• No email or phone number to conduct a follow up

This is a big improvement.

Certifications and relevant links show someone who lives and breathe marketing as opposed to someone just doing the bare minimum.

Marketing manager resume summary: an elevator pitch, perfected

A great marketing manager should ideally be a great writer as well. Most of the time you’ll be responsible for managing some type of copy, so it makes sense to show off your writing skills in a great resume summary

Think of this as your 30-second elevator pitch, a quick summary that’s going to grab the recruiter’s attention by telling a compelling story backed up by metrics.

Let’s see a good example and a less than a good example.

Marketing manager resume summary examples

This summary fits a lot into a small space. Let’s break down all the messages it sends:

• It explains that this marketing manager has largely worked in content marketing. This is important because a marketing manager can specialize in any number of areas. Emphasize your experience in the area the job offer is looking for.
• It presents strong and specific success metrics. This makes it clear that this candidate gets things done. It’s also specific about the type of company this worked for.
• It then shows that this candidate cares about process as well as strategy, fixing what was clearly a broken team dynamic and CMS. This portion highlights the people management element of being a marketing manager.

Now let’s compare that to another version of a marketing manager resume summary written for the same candidate.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s look at all the things that went wrong here:

• They referred to themselves as “I”, generally you want to avoid this in resume summaries.
• It’s vague to the point of being meaningless. What do they mean “a variety of marketing areas” or “diversity of experience”? The hiring manager reading your resume doesn’t have time to investigate what you’re trying to say, so just say it.
• It’s not targeted. The second sentence makes it clear that this is a generic resume summary written to apply to every single marketing manager job offer. This tells the hiring manager that this applicant didn’t care enough to personalize it.

Now that you’ve got a top-notch marketing manager resume summary written, let’s get to the most important part of your resume: the work experience.

Marketing manager experience section: the most crucial bits

You can have an absolutely perfect resume header, summary, skills section etc. but if your marketing manager experience section isn’t excellent, don’t expect a callback.

You’re not the kind of person to slack off here, so let’s dive into what you need to craft the perfect experience section.

2 marketing manager resume samples - experience

In three bullets, it’s clear that this person has had great success in both managing a happy marketing team and getting fantastic results with it. Both core elements of being a marketing manager are addressed: team leadership and raw results.

Now let’s see another version of that same experience section:

Notice the difference?

Take away all of the specifics and focus on results and that impressive experience turns into what can only be described as mediocre.

For more examples on crafting a job-winning experience section, check out our in-depth guide on How to Cover Work Experience On Your Resume

Marketing manager resume education: do you need it?

Yes, but don’t focus too much on it. Surely having a relevant bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree is a plus, but by the time you’re experienced enough for a marketing manager position, you should be way past graduation.

Your work experience should do the talking, so include what your degree was, the institution, and your graduation year, but that’s about it.

Marketing manager resume skills: which ones land interviews?

Let’s say you’ve just finished a stellar marketing manager resume. You spent days polishing it. You send it to a top choice and… crickets.

Turns out your top choice clearly stated that you need technical SEO skills. You’ve got some experience there but it was only alluded to in a single bullet point.

The point is, you need to be targeted and strategic about your skills.

As a marketing manager, you're going to need to show you have at least some basic skill level in 8 major categories:

1. Analytics
2. Advertising
3. Design
4. PR
5. Social media
6. SEO (technical, on-page, off-page, organic)
7. Content (newsletters, lead generation, marketing production)
8. Product launches

However, do not pretend you’re an expert in all 8. This just tells the director of marketing that you’re full of it.

You can go for the classic T-Shaped Marketer framework, showing deep knowledge in one area and some knowledge in the other 7.

In general, just be sure you’re showing what the hiring manager and director of marketing want to see. Below, we’ve broken down the soft and hard skills you should focus on:

Marketing manager certifications: do you need them?

In general, your experience should do the talking. However, let’s say the marketing manager position you’re applying for wants more email marketing experience than you have?

What are you supposed to do?

Your best bet is to try getting a certification. It’s the best way to quickly boost your skillset in a specific area without the need to spend months or years working on it in a job.

Key takeaways for writing the best marketing manager resume

In summary, our best advice boils down to this:

1. Tailor your resume to the exact job you’re applying for.

2. Quantify your marketing achievements as much as possible.

3. Use a reverse chronological resume layout.

4. Include certifications and links in your resume header.

5. Write a professional summary focused on showing you have the right experience and skills for the position.

6. Focus on the skills mentioned in the job description and back them up with examples.

7. Use certifications to boost your experience.