1. Resume Examples
  2. Marketing Manager
Written by Susan ShorSusan Shor

Marketing Manager Resume Example & Writing Guide

As a marketing manager, you're a whiz at SEO, creative campaigns, social media ads and all the forms of engaging your target audience. With those abilities, and the marketing manager resume examples and tips below, you’ll be on your way to your next great job before you know it!
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Marketing Manager Resume Example & Writing Guide
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As a marketing manager, you know how to leverage social media and search engines to put your products and services in the public’s eye. Now, you are the new product you’re going to sell to hiring managers. That’s a little different, but you can approach it in almost the same way. As a job seeker, you need to define your target market and present your work experience in a way that speaks to the recruiters who are gatekeepers to your next opportunity. 

This marketing manager resume example is filled with dozens of adaptable samples to help you:

  • Wow right out of the gate with a clean, professional layout
  • Display your sense of style in your creative profile
  • Show the progression of your career in your employment history
  • Focus on your most desirable skills.

How to write a marketing manager resume

Learning how to write a marketing manager resume is all about knowing what your target audience wants – only this time, you're selling your experience to a hiring manager. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marketing manager jobs are projected to increase by a whopping 10 percent by 2031 – above average for most professions. That means you have plenty of opportunities to grow your career. 

As companies try to stay on top of their game during uneven economic times, they need to stand out from the crowd. It’s your job to help them do that by using your knowledge of business development and marketing techniques to get customers talking about you. But first, you have to get recruiters talking about you.

Marketing managers bring in a median salary in the six-digits and with the boom in online commerce, your digital skills are at a premium. Your resume is the perfect tool to promote yourself in a booming industry.

Make sure you follow this format and include the following sections in your marketing manager resume:

  • The resume header
  • The resume summary (aka profile or personal statement)
  • The employment history section
  • The resume skills section
  • The education section

Choosing the best resume format for a marketing manager

Typically, we recommend reverse chronological order as the best resume format for two reasons:

  1. Recruiters are used to this format and can easily find the information they seek on a first scan: your most recent position and your skills
  2. It helps when you input your resume into an Applicant Tracking System online, since these applications are typically set up to look for the standard chronological order format.

What does a marketing manager do?

Marketers are crafters of image. As a marketing manager, you may still be developing content marketing campaigns, or you may be supervising and mentoring a team that does the ground work for you. Either way, your skills are in demand across almost all industry verticals. That means opportunity abounds. The median pay for a marketing manager is $135,030, and workers in New York and California earn the highest salaries, according to U.S. labor statistics.

The highest paying industries for marketing managers are oil and gas extraction, pipeline transportation, cable and other subscription programming, and scientific research and development services.

Statistical insight

Marketing managers may work under a variety of titles, so when you’re setting up searches on job boards, make sure you hit all the keywords. (We’re pretty sure you know this since you are an SEO expert.)

Marketing managers may work under a variety of titles, so when you’re setting up searches on job boards, make sure you hit all the keywords. (We’re pretty sure you know this since you are an SEO expert!)

You may already specialize in one of these areas, or you may be more of a generalist. Either way, you will be focusing each section for your dream jobs, so you will have some tailoring to do with each application.

As a marketing manager, you also have a variety of career paths that stem from your current work, so consider carefully what you may want your next steps to be as you form your job-hunting strategy. Do you want to slide into public relations or does your job already overlap into that arena? Do you have your eyes on the title marketing director? Or maybe something more specific like marketing and business development director? Maybe you are heading for the top and like the sound of VP of marketing and communications. Choose jobs that provide you opportunities to learn and grow into those roles. Make sure your resume tells the story of your growth and ambition.

Resume summary example: sell your potential

The summary of your marketing manager resume is the one area of this document that gives you the chance to unleash your creativity as you show off your talents and what you will bring to prospective employers. The summary is no place to be shy about your greatness.

Most summary examples of marketing managers will include their most impressive achievements, best qualities and specific strengths, described with powerful, evocative language.

This section is sometimes called a profile, and feel free to label it as such, however you should think of it as much more than that. You are not detailing every move in your career; you’re showing off the best of it.

You excel at knowing your audience and understanding how you should deliver your message. Use those abilities here. Think of your profile as your direct mail to hiring managers. You need to wow them with your stellar marketing skill by crafting a campaign for yourself. You’re in luck because you’re used to saying a lot with few words, but maybe you’re not used to patting yourself on the back. This is the place to do it (without exaggerating, of course).

Here are some sample questions to help you craft a marketing manager summary in four lines:

  • What am I most proud of in my career?
    • What metrics do I have to back up my success?
  • What is my marketing philosophy?
  • What are my top two attributes?
  • What makes me a great candidate?

You don’t have to include all of that, but thinking through those questions should help you write the best profile section possible. Focus your paragraph by imagining your dream job, and including the attributes and achievements that you need to get there.

Expert tip

You can quickly catch a hiring manager's attention by including a valuable skill in your summary. According to Shopify, some of the hottest marketing trends of this decade include:

  • Shortened videos
  • Tapping into micro-influencers
  • Mobile optimization
  • Direct messaging

Use your SEO knowledge to beat the ATS

Applicant Tracking Systems are programs built into almost all of the most commonly used online application portals. The ATS scans resumes for keywords and ranks candidates against each other. Only the top resumes get passed on to the hiring manager's desk. This is one of the biggest obstacles for many candidates, but your knowledge of SEO can give you an advantage. Here's our recommendations for beating the ATS:

  1. Understand the hiring practices of the marketing industry, its trends and its demands
  2. Tailor your resume with the right keywords from the job description
  3. Create an organized resume format that can be easily scanned by the ATS software

Analyze the job for which you are applying and compare the skills listed to those on your resume. Do you have a skill your prospective employer listed but didn’t include it? Consider swapping it for a different one. Use the exact phrasing when possible.

Do

Try to use the keywords and phrases that appear in the job listing.

Don't

Force those words or use underlying white text. Recruiters are savvy to those tricks.

Your resume should relay the message that you want the specific job, not just any marketing manager’s job. This is target marketing at its most granular. Imagine it as an email marketing campaign for one every time you apply for a different position.

Adaptable summary example

Experienced and energetic marketing manager with over seven years of experience effectively managing marketing projects from conception to completion. Adept in using digital marketing platforms to increase sales and overall company productivity. Experienced in preparing and overseeing online and print marketing campaigns, resulting in an increase in partner relations for the company. Adept in monitoring and reporting marketing objectives, to maintain necessary internal communications within the company. Pragmatic and result oriented, I am determined to build market presence in the next company I join.

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Employment history example: experience counts

Your employment history section is the best place in your marketing manager resume to explain how you develop, implement, and execute marketing strategies to retain current customers and attract new ones. Stick to the script: organize it in reverse chronological order and use bullet items.

This is the spot to detail times when you increased public awareness of the company and its mission, and deployed marketing campaigns to drive their efforts. 

Expert tip

Consider using the CAR method to drive your points home. Tell of a Challenge you faced, the Action you took to resolve it, and the Results of your action. Be sure to use data and details wherever possible.

But how do you keep this highly formatted section from sounding stale?

First, make sure all your bullet points contain active verbs and descriptors. That’s the easy part. You know how to use a thesaurus.

The real challenge is to create a story out of your work experience. You started at point A, perhaps as a marketing intern or assistant. As you progressed, you took on bigger challenges, successfully solved problems, and created campaigns that brought your company higher market share.

Employers want to know that you can expand your knowledge of marketing strategies as you work, so show them within your work experience section that you already do that. Even better, think about the responsibilities you will have when you get your next marketing manager’s job. Then, use your job descriptions to show that you are already performing many of those tasks well.

You can adapt this basic employment history example to the bullet point achievements of your own past jobs:

Adaptable employment history example
  • Put forth carefully planned strategies to optimize market share by focusing on KPIs.
  • Conducted market research on the motivations of users and consumers to better understand company goals.
  • Leveraged metrics in Google analytics and presented findings to marketing and sales directors.
  • Fostering relationships to maintain existing clients, while developing new relationships to attract potential clients.
  • Assessed the strategies of competitors, while avidly working to increase our own productivity.
  • Planned, executed, and led online and social media marketing tactics, resulting in wide range company advancements.
  • Developed and maintained internal and external relationships with sales teams, which were crucial to company enhancement and success.
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Skills example section: highlight your strengths

The skills section of a marketing manager resume is the place to highlight unique qualifications. It’s not that easy to take all your attributes, accomplishments and marketing savvy and turn it into a bulleted list of 5-10 items, but that is what you have to do here.

We suggest doing a brain dump of every skill you have. This is your “Master List.” Then, you can categorize your skills in any way that makes the most sense to you. You should keep this list and add to it as your career grows so you don’t have to repeat this step at every career juncture. 

Think through all the abilities you need to oversee all marketing efforts and activities within a company, including responsibility for the marketing budget and campaigns based on company goals. You must be a strategic thinker to create long-term marketing plans and be able to analyze data and present findings to upper management. In addition, you need detailed knowledge of the industry in which you work so you can develop excellent marketing strategies.

Expert tip

While hard skills are important, don't overlook the importance of soft ones, including strategic planning. According to Acadium, marketers must be ready to reestablish their marketing strategies to account for digital lifestyles and shorten the customer journey.

Skills can be broken into two broad categories: hard skills, or the knowledge you learned in school and on the job, and soft skills, or the interpersonal and organizational abilities that make you a good employee.

We’ve already mentioned many of the hard skills you need, but you know to be a good leader you have to be a great listener and communicator. You need to inspire your team to unleash their creativity without fear of judgment. 

So how do you choose which skills to list? Pick the ones you feel give the best picture of who you are as a marketing manager. Make sure you include those that your prospective employer ranked high in their job description, a move that will also help you beat the ATS. Finally, if you are struggling to keep the list short, drop lower-level skills. For example, employers will assume you understand ecommerce if you have been promoted in your current ecommerce job.

Adaptable skills example section
  • Project Management
  • Marketing Strategies
  • Leadership Skills
  • Internal and External Communications
  • Google Analytics
  • Customer relationship management (CRM) systems expertise
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Education example: a strong base 

The education section of your resume is the easiest to compile: All you need to do is list your degrees, the schools from which you graduated, and the years you attended each school.

Marketing managers need at least a bachelor’s degree. Many hold degrees in business, marketing, advertising, or communications, although those specialties are not a requirement. Some employers may prefer that you have an MBA. If you do have a master’s degree, there is no need for you to include your high school diploma. We also recommend leaving out your GPA, even if you are really proud of it. Your work successes speak for you at this point in your career.

If you have earned professional accolades, you may also list those here.

Adaptable education example
  • 2000-2004 Westbury (NY) High School
  • 2004-2008 NYU, Bachelor in Business Marketing NY, NY
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Resume layout and design

Marketers know that visuals are important, and this applies to the layout of your marketing manager resume just as much as it does to your ad campaigns. You may have an eye for design and enjoy the visually creative aspects of your job. 

You can show a bit more style in your resume than, say, an accountant could. In fact, you should check out Resume.io’s creative category of resume templates.

That said, you still have to color in the lines. Resumes should be designed to make it as easy as possible for recruiters to find your relevant information. Just as you want the message in your marketing materials to stand out, here you should be leading the eye toward key bits of data:

  • Your contact information (including a LinkedIn profile if you have an up-to-date one)
  • Your current job and title
  • Your previous job and title.

Hiring managers are looking for those items first. If they can’t find them within a couple of seconds, you may end up in the “no” pile.

Do
  • Avoid large blocks of type
  • Choose a resume template that meshes with your prospective employer
  • Use standard section titles to help a HR manager find important info
Don't
  • Go overboard with too many eccentric colors
  • Use more than two different fonts on your resume
  • Create a resume longer than one page

Key takeaways

  • Use your analytical skills to help you beat the ATS
  • Answer the question, Why should I hire you? in your profile
  • Create a ladder of success in your employment history section
  • Keep your design clean and professional, with a little flair.
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