Writing a resume isn’t as simple as ‘Job Title’, ‘Employment Date’, and ‘What Did You Do’, it is also extremely important to tailor your resume for every position you apply for as well as the type of job you are looking for. Writing a resume for a marketing position requires a lot of skill that is beyond a simple resume because essentially you are marketing yourself for the marketing role. You are your own brand. This is the first impression the hiring manager will take note of when looking for the right candidate. Here are a few tips on how to write the perfect marketing resume that managers will notice.
1) Know Your Target
Just like knowing your target market audience, know who will be reading your resume and why. Research the company and its values to emphasize them on your resume. Highlight your skills that obtain to the position you are applying for and link them to how that effected the company.
2) Define Your Value
It is important to highlight any achievements that you have personally completed, especially if it helped the company grow. In order to make your resume stand out to the manager, it helps to define that value you add by acknowledging it throughout your resume. If you are excellent at SEO and how to determine its analytics, then mention every company you did this for and how it was used to improve their market reach.
3) Determine Your Messaging Strategy
What are you trying to tell the manager? How do you want to be perceived? Just like in a campaign, you want to define your message and highlight it for the manager to see clearly what it is. This is almost like a story for the manager but in clear and concise bullet points. The first couple of bullet points are the most crucial as they may be the only ones the manager looks at, so take the time to change your first two points to be the ones you want them to see. After that, take them on a journey through your career and show them why this journey has made you the perfect candidate for the position.
4) The Length is Important
You may have an impressive list of accomplishments throughout your career but realistically no one else cares as much as you do. If your resume becomes a short novel no one is going to take the time to read it. So how do you create a working balance of defining your values, telling a story and keeping length to a minimum? Try to tailor your skills to ones that only pertain to the job description and keep it short and to the point. Managers spend six seconds on a resume before they decide to read or move on, so keywords are crucial on the first page. Two pages are acceptable, but beyond that you need to cut back or eliminate older jobs.
5) Formatting and Writing
Marketing is all about getting your audience to enjoy what they see and buy it, which is why your resume needs to make the manager enjoy what they see and hire you. Your resume is an advertisement of you so when you format it be creative but not over the top. If it’s too out-of-the-box it will be difficult to read. Clear structure with a story is what they are looking for. Your writing is also important because this is your skill set. Keywords and grammar are just a few things they will notice. Any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are likely to get your resume to the back of the line. It is also important to keep in the same tense throughout the resume and include well written sentence structures that are easy to read and interesting to follow.
