If you want to write the ultimate marketing resume then you need to think about which skills you employ during work and showcase benefits over features. You know how to do marketing; it’s what you’re best at after all. You shouldn’t find it too difficult to market yourself after you get past the initial hurdles.
1. You Are the Product
The first step to creating the ultimate marketing resume is accepting that you are a product and you need to sell yourself. It might sound a crass given that you aren’t really a product, but you can use marketing approaches and techniques to conduct a successful job search.
You’re a marketer so you must have developed some marketing plans in your time. You’ve also positioned products and put together brand messages, come up with tag lines, and undertaken market research. You can use these techniques to effectively market yourself. That’s why the first step to success is to accept that you’re the product that needs to be sold.
2. Understand the Audience
You wouldn’t advocate putting a product on the market before getting an understanding of who the target audience is. Take this approach and apply it to a resume. Understand the people reading the resume and tailor it to them and their concerns.
If you’re looking for work with a smaller company then you should showcase your ability to market effectively on a smaller budget and handle responsibilities. If you have experience as an executive then you need to show you’re willing to get dirty and do work as well as directing things from up on high.
The complete opposite of this applies to larger companies. You need to show how you can handle large budgets and campaigns, manage large teams, and even showcase any international marketing you’ve been a part of.
If the company you’re applying for belongs to a particular industry then you need to show that you have experience with that industry, or that you have transferrable skills that can apply to that industry. Before you begin writing your marketing resume you should write notes about the companies you’re looking at and what these companies are looking for. If you aren’t sure then read through their job postings to get some ideas.
3. Understand your Value Proposition
Which traits would you say makes you unique and valuable to the companies you’re looking at? Everyone has their own special and unique skillset, characteristics, and personal experiences that go together to set them apart from everyone else looking at the job. Putting together a really effective resume means understanding your own unique blend. We call this the value proposition.
From this you can understand why you need to understand the target audience. You could have a completely different value proposition for different companies.
4. Create a Messaging Strategy
As a marketer you would consider it a sin to put together a website or advertisement without putting together a focused strategy. This is also true of your resume.
After you understand your target audience, understood what they need and your unique value proposition, there are some decisions to be made:
- How can you structure the resume to best communicate the value you bring?
- Do you need to insert keywords?
- What real-world examples can you provide to showcase your value proposition?
- How should you lay out and design your resume to better support your message?
You need to make all of these decisions before writing your resume.
5. Showcase Benefits Rather than Features
As a marketer you know to focus on the benefits of the product or service rather than features. When writing your marketing resume you should as well focus on benefits over features and in the resume world that translates to focus on writing about the value you added to your tasks rather than listing your responsibilities.
Before a company can hire you, they have to believe you’re able to benefit their business through increasing sales. That means you need to show them you’ve been successful before and can do it again. Instead of telling the company how you put together an integrated campaign or a website, you should tell the company how these things benefited your employers.
6. Proper Design
The design of your resume really does matter. It needs to be laid out effectively to showcase your strategy and message. If you feel your value proposition is how you can always make small budgets work, then you should put together your resume in a way that really showcases this.
7. Your Resume is Your Brochure and Not a Catalog
When writing a resume it’s important to not overdo it. It’s impossible to use one document to tell your whole career story so don’t even try. Instead stay focused and concise. Understand your audience, what they are looking for, and what you can offer them. Write just enough to convey this and nothing more.
Conclusion
As a marketer you’ve got an advantage over other people who write resumes. You already know what it takes to get people to take action. Now you need to apply that knowledge and use it to sell yourself. To make your resume stand out in the creative world of marketing, consider using resume templates.
