If you’re looking to land a top digital marketing job, then you need a strong CV.
Whether you are an all-round digital marketer or a specialist within a particular area, such as SEO, PPC or social media; your digital marketing CV needs to communicate your value to employers quickly, and show recruiters that you are perfect for their job.
This detailed guide includes 5 digital marketing CV examples and a range of professional CV templates – to guide you towards creating your own winning CV.
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Digital marketing CV example
Digital marketing executive CV example
Digital marketing intern CV example
Content marketing manager CV example
SEO executive CV example
The digital marketing CV example above shows how the structure and format work in practice.
Your own CV will of course be unique, but this should give you a good base to work from, and an idea of what elements you should be highlighting.
Pick a focus for your digital marketing CV
Before you write a single word of your CV, you must decide on its purpose.
As a marketer; if you were planning a SEO campaign or building a landing page, you would firstly need to determine who you are looking to target, and what goals you are trying to achieve.
Without knowing these 2 factors, your marketing efforts will probably fail.
Your CV is your marketing material for your job search, so it’s important that you know it’s audience and purpose before you start writing it.
You need to ask yourself:
What types of roles will you be applying for?
Digital marketing covers a broad spectrum of activities, so you need to be clear about exactly which roles you are applying for, before you start crafting your CV.
For example you may be applying to…
- SEO specialist roles where the job is solely focused on organic traffic generation
- Email marketing roles where you will be tasked with increasing sales via email campaigns
- Digital Marketing Manager roles where you are responsible for the full digital marketing spectrum of a company or area within a company.
Who will you be sending your CV to?
Once you have determined the types of roles you will be applying for, you can also choose what type of employers you will be targeting.
This could be one or more of a broad range of organisations such as:
- Digital agencies who work with multiple clients
- Online retailers
- A specific type of online retailer: such as clothing, homeware etc.
- Insurance companies
Once you know the roles and companies that you are targeting, you have a clear focus for your CV.
This part of the of the process is similar to creating a buyer persona in marketing terms.
As a marketer, you probably know that if you try to attract everyone in a campaign with too broad targeting, you will probably end up attracting nobody.
The same is true of your CV.
If you make it too broad, you won’t impress many recruiters or employers because you will not appear as an expert in any particular area.
The more narrowly you target your CV, the more attractive it will be to those who you are trying to reach.
Here are some examples of good CV focuses:
- SEO Manager for Online Retailers
- User Experience (UX) Designer for Digital Agencies
- Social Media Manager for Large Corporates
- Digital Marketing Manager for Cross-industry Small Businesses
Note: It’s OK to focus your CV solely on your skills and apply cross-industry, if you don’t have an industry specialism or preference.
Also, if you are looking to apply in 2 or more very different areas, it’s best to have multiple CVs that are each strongly targeted towards each specific area.
To help you pick a focus for your digital marketing CV, we have created this handy infographic which shows 63 valuable digital marketing skills you could potentially add to your CV.
Research employer needs
Once you’ve decided on a focus for your CV, you need to determine what qualities your target employers are looking for in a candidate.
Failing to do this will mean that you are simply using guesswork to generate the contents of your CV.
After some thorough research, you will know exactly what to put in your CV to impress recruiters, and therefore writing it will become much easier.
So how do you research employer needs?
i) Hit the job boards
One of the easiest ways to research employer needs is by visiting a relevant job website and scanning through plenty of digital marketing jobs that you would apply for.
Make a list of the candidate requirements that frequently appear, to gather the most important attributes for employers.
Focus on hard factual skills like the ones in the above infographic.
Don’t worry too much about soft skills like, “motivation”, “team work” etc. as these types of qualities are generic and needed in any job – recruiters will not be actively searching for them.
ii) Scan LinkedIn
A global search for “digital marketing” on LinkedIn, returns over 6 million profiles, so you should be able to find some strong profile examples in your niche.
If you’re already on LinkedIn, you will probably have a decent network of peers to scan through. If not, then sign up and start connecting with colleagues and friends.
Search for professionals who are working in similar roles to the ones you are applying for, and take some inspiration from the skills and tools they are including in their profiles.
Once you’ve decided a focus for your CV and researched the needs of your target employers, you will be in a much stronger position to start writing your CV.
Most candidates write their CV without any research, based on what they think is important and usually end up with a CV that only impresses themselves.
If you want to impress employers, you need to find out what will impress them first.
Formatting and structuring your digital marketing CV
Now that you understand the message you are trying to convey with your CV, you need to create an effective structure and format.
When formatting your CV, you must bear the 2 following points in mind.
1) Easy reading
Recruiters and hiring managers sometimes see hundreds of CVs in a week, so make it easy for them to navigate your CV and find the information that they want.
2) Professionalism
Your CV is often the very first impression that a recruiter will have of you, so it should look immaculate and not give them any reason to doubt you.
Quick tip: If you worry that your spelling and grammar might not be correct, try using our quick-and-easy CV Builder to eliminate the risk of making mistakes.
The diagram below shows a very high level overview of how you should structure your digital marketing CV.
I would advise writing your CV in Microsoft Word, as it has all the features you will need for writing your CV and is generally considered to be the standard format amongst recruiters and employers.
Don’t be tempted to go wild on design by adding logos and multiple colours – it can cause distraction and confuse CV scanning software. Keep it simple and focus on the written content.
Create an eye catching profile
Your profile is a short introductory paragraph which sits at the top of your CV. It summarises you at a very high level and tells readers the benefits of hiring you.
As your profile will be the first visible point of your CV once it is opened, it needs to make a big impact.
If your profile doesn’t contain the important requirements for your target roles, some recruiters may close it down without reading any further – which is bad news for your applications.
Think of your profile as a quick sales pitch to get your foot in the door.
As a digital marketer, your profile should include:
- Type and size of companies/clients you have worked for
- Specialisms with digital marketing (SEO, email marketing, PPC etc.)
- Type of projects you have worked on and their size and impact
- Tools and technologies you are familiar with
- Relevant qualifications
- What problems do you solve for your employers? (increase engagement, boost revenue, increase conversion rates?)
You should avoid using too many cliche terms such as;
- Hard working
- Team player
- Self-motivated
- Positive attitude
These phrases are too generic and don’t tell readers anything factual about you. Recruiters will be searching for hard factual experience, skills and knowledge – not cliche phrases.
Here is an example of a digital marketing CV profile.
Try to keep yours to around the same length whilst maintaining a punchy and professional writing style.
See more CV profile examples here.
Add a core skills section
By adding a bullet pointed core skills section just underneath your profile, you can ensure that essential points instantly jump out at readers to give them a very quick snapshot of your skill set.
These points should include skills, tools, qualifications and anything else that ties in directly to your target employers’ requirements.
Bear in mind that it’s best for your current or most recent role to be visible when the CV is opened, so keep your profile and core skills short enough to allow this.
It’s similar to keeping important elements above the fold on a web page, to ensure they are seen without making the user scroll down.
Write your CV role descriptions
Your role descriptions give you a great opportunity to describe how you contribute to your employers’ success. They must be organised and structured correctly in order to communicate your message effectively.
Firstly, your roles should be listed in reverse chronological order, with plenty of detail in recent roles, and less detail in older roles. This is because recruiters will be most interested in your recent work to gain an understanding of your current capabilities. They won’t be so interested in the work you did years ago, but it should still be included (in less detail) to show your career path.
Structuring your roles
To ensure that your roles are easy to read, navigate and understand, a logical structure is crucial.
Head the role up with an introductory paragraph that summarises:
- What your employer does
- What your area/team do (if working for a large firm)
- Where you sit within the hierarchy
- What the overall goal of your role is
- How your work contributes the goals of your employer
Once you’ve set the scene with an informative intro; list your responsibilities in a series of bullet points to demonstrate your daily/weekly/monthly activities.
Keep the bullet points to one line in length to allow easy scanning, and where possible, try to show how your actions benefit your employer.
Responsibilities will differ from job to job but some important things to include are:
- People you interact with: clients, colleagues, vendors, contractors, regulators etc.
- Tools and languages used: HMTL, WordPress, Mailchimp, Facebook, Hootsuite etc.
- Work produced: Web pages, articles, email campaigns, reports etc.
- Projects you contribute to: website builds, marketing campaigns etc.
- Environments worked in: busy agency, secure government building etc.
Show your impact
If you really want to prove your value as an employee, include some impressive achievements that have impacted the business greatly.
In digital marketing, achievements could include:
- Increasing traffic to a website or page
- Building a huge social media following
- Generating a large number of leads for a service or product
- Increasing revenue for an employer
- Gaining an industry recognised award
These types of achievements show employers the benefits they can expect to see, if they bring you on board.
Add numbers
Ideally you should quantify your value by adding tangible facts and figures to back these achievements up.
For example:
- Built a 10k Facebook following and 20k Twitter following from scratch
- Generated a 300% uplift in organic traffic to website in 6 months
- Generated 5,000 leads and converted 30% into high value sales
- Delivered PPC campaign with a £20k return on investment
By including numbers in your achievements, you make them instantly recognisable to readers and allow them to bench mark you against other candidates.
Education, qualifications and technical skills
Your education, qualifications and any relevant technical skills should be listed in detail at the bottom, as in the example below.
Important aspects from this section should be repeated in your profile to ensure they are noticed by recruiters.
For experienced candidates, your profile will be focused around your work experience, but for junior candidates (such as school leaver and graduates) your profile will be more focused on your education and qualifications.
Interests
Interests and hobbies are an optional section. I would only recommend adding your interests if they are relevant to your target roles or digital marketing in general – or if they are particularly impressive.
For example:
Work/digital marketing related interests
- Creating your own websites
- Writing articles or blogs
- Selling products on eBay
Impressive interests
- Running marathons
- Volunteering
- Organising events
Final checks
Your CV is a professional marketing document for your services, so it needs to be immaculate. It only takes one mistake to make a recruiter doubt your credibility.
Before you take your CV out on the job market, proof read it thoroughly to make sure that there are no spelling mistakes, grammar errors or typos.
Don’t rely on spellcheck to do all the work for you.
Conclusion – your digital marketing CV
If you want to create a CV that will secure interviews in the digital marketing space, follow the steps above to pick your niche, create a professional structure, and fill the CV with appealing content.
If your CV can quickly communicate your skills and the benefits of hiring you, you will definitely capture the attention of recruiters and employers.
More regions: Digital marketing specialist resume (Australia)