5 Tips for a killer Digital Marketing Resume

Digital Marketing is a trending profession. Professionals with creativity and a business-oriented mind are dominating this industry.The job prospects have increased over the years and so has the competition to grab those jobs.

A digital marketing resume is a robust tool that can help you beat the competition smooth and easy, all you need to do is implement some tricks. You need it to convince the recruiters that you are better than the thousands of applicants rivaling for the same job.

According to Ladders, you have 6 seconds to make your resume count. So here are 5 tips to help you make a killer digital marketing resume:

1) Make a Master Resume

A resume should ideally be only one or two pages long, but that does not mean you have to draft the finished product in one-go. A great resume is one that is thoughtfully put together to bring out the best highlights of your career.

This can be achieved when you follow the right approach.

Making a master resume is a great place to start. It is the first step to resume writing and it also happens to be the most important step. Here’s why.

The first stage is important because it helps you preserve important pieces of information that you can strategically use in your resume.  All you have to do is compile information in one place irrespective of its current importance.

Doing this is important for Digital Marketers because of many reasons.

For example, Digital Marketing is a vast spectrum containing different segments such as pay per click, search engine optimization, social media marketing, digital public relations, analytics, mobile marketing, and so on. No digital marketing professional does all this in one go. You begin with one domain and gradually progress to picking up more roles & responsibilities.

Drafting a master resume proves to be extremely helpful in this context as it helps you retain information. Having compiled all your data in one place, you can easily cherry pick the information that you should use in your resume without leaving anything important out.

Thus, making a master resume helps you make an information-rich and job-relevant resume for the Digital Marketing job you are targeting.

This brings us to the next point.

2) Customize your resume

If you have been sending the same resume while applying for different positions in different organizations, you’ve been approaching job hunting the wrong way this whole time.

To stand the best chance at getting hired for a digital marketing role, you need to tailor your digital marketing resume to  each of your target jobs.

Doing so increases the chances of being shortlisted for an interview because you are able to address the specific needs of that specific job without sounding too generic.

To customize your resume, go through the job description and match your resume to the specific needs of that job description. For instance, if you are applying for a job that specifically asks you to do web analytics, you can omit the points related to email marketing or social media marketing and focus more on your web analytics skills.

After that, filter out the important keywords from a job description and incorporate these keywords evenly across the entire resume. You can include these keywords in the technical and non-technical skill sections and across the work experience sections as long as you can effectively prove your expertise in these keywords to a recruiter.

Having important keywords listed in the resume also makes it ATS compliant which increases your shortlist chances.

Long story short, tailor your resume and use relevant keywords. Doing this will increase the likelihood of you bagging your dream job.

3) Follow basic rules to resume-writing

There is a professional way of writing a resume that generally goes unnoticed.

There are guidelines that you should adhere to if you are aiming to work as a Digital Marketer in a decent company.

Here’s a brief list of resume rules that you should follow:

• Based on the longevity of your work experience, your resume should either be one page or two pages long. If you have over 3 years of relevant work experience, you can write a two-page resume. If you don’t, stick to a one-page resume.

• Use one liner points to compose the details of your work experience. In case you exceed the one-line limit, make sub-points for the same.

• Follow the proper chronology of resume sections and include all the sections. The correct chronology is: begin with a Header, Personal Information, Profile Title, Summary, Key & Technical Skills, Professional Experience, Internship Experience, Education, Certifications, and Additional Information.

4) Quantify your achievements

Quantifying your achievements in your resume means adding numbers and figures to showcase the depth of your professional contribution.

A resume is achievement-based and not roles & responsibilities based.

Writing generic statements does not demonstrate the extent of your achievements. Being skilled in digital marketing does not prove that you’re a prolific Digital Marketer. What showcases your skills and expertise in digital marketing is the visible extent of your contributions. Therefore, it is necessary to quantify your achievements to convince the recruiters that you are an achiever.

Here are examples of quantified and non-quantified bullet points. Decide first-hand which ones are more likely to attract a recruiter:

• Example 1: Brainstormed with the marketing manager to implement PPC

• Example 2: Orchestrated 3 PPC campaigns to facilitate a traffic boost of 1000%

While the first example blandly illustrated the roles & responsibilities of a digital marketer, the second example shows how the digital marketer used his skills to get results. In this case, the digital marketer strategized a PPC campaign that led to a tremendous growth in traffic.

To make your work experience more impactful bold the important figures and numbers. It makes your resume more readable. A recruiter within a first-look can decide whether he is interested in reading the entire profile or not.

Once you are done making a final draft incorporating all the above-given expert-tips, proofread your resume to ensure that it is grammatically correct and you have not missed out anything important.

Downloading a template and copying & pasting points do not cut it anymore. To make an impressive digital marketing resume, you need to put in time and effort.

5) Choose the right format

Before you get on with the task of making a stellar digital marketing resume, choose a resume format suitable for your experience.

There are 3 types of resume formats namely: Reverse Chronological, Functional, and the Combination resume.

Reverse chronological is one of the most popular resume formats. In this format, you begin with your current or latest work experience then move towards recent experiences.

This is the most preferred format and recruiters are more used to scanning a resume in this format.

The functional format focuses on highlighting skills and abilities rather than the chronology of the work experiences. This is a better-suited format for you if you have career gaps.

The third format is called a combination resume format. ; iIt highlights both the skills and abilities along with the reverse chronology of your work experiences.

To make an impactful digital marketing resume, it is necessary to choose the right format.

Conclusion

To make the most of your digital marketing resume, you should:

• Make a master resume i.e. compile all your information in one place.

• Customize your resume according to each job you are targeting i.e. your resume should be tweaked according to the needs of each job. They should all be uniquely tailored.

• Follow resume writing rules.

• Quantify your achievements to show the extent of your digital marketing skills.

• Choose the right format according to the career stage you are in.