Creating a VP of digital marketing resume presents some unique challenges that you should be familiar with before submitting your resume for a new VP position.
Many digital marketers fail to properly detail the vast experience and skills that make them exceptional leaders who inspire teams to create customer-centric marketing strategies that speak to the audience.
In this guide for creating an attention-grabbing VP of digital marketing resume, we’ll discuss the common issues that many digital marketers face when updating their resumes. These include:
- Demonstrating proficiencies in digital marketing tools, interpersonal skills, and business skills in a way that highlights your versatility, creativity, and leadership abilities.
- Quantifying past work experience that focuses on key digital marketing metrics, like increases in unique web traffic visits, customer conversion rates, and ROIs.
- Highlighting team management experience where you led a cross-functional team and the achievements of that team.
- Documenting technical certifications and continuing education courses that reflect your commitment to staying current with new digital marketing technologies and trends.
To do this, we use real-world VP of digital marketing resume examples to show you how to format each section to meet industry standards, pass applicant tracking systems, and target those skills listed in the job description. The end result will be a targeted resume that makes a big impression on recruiters and hiring managers.
Before we begin, if this resume guide does not fit your career path, we have similar guides that can help:
- Digital Marketing Executive Resume
- Digital Marketing Account Manager Resume
- VP of Business Development Resume
- VP of Marketing Resume
- Digital Marketing Analyst Resume
Before adding all of your relevant details, we’ll go over the proper format of your resume and which sections you must include.
How to format a VP of digital marketing resume
Creating an attention-getting VP of digital marketing resume starts with using the correct format. This includes the proper page settings and the five required resume sections with additional resume sections available to round out your experience and skills.
The standard resume format settings include:
- One-inch margins on all sides
- Single line spacing
- A selection of Serif or sans serif font
- A plain white background
The font you choose can give your resume a certain look or feel. Fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier are acceptable fonts that can give your resume a more classical feel. Modern fonts like Exo 2, Lato, Montserrat, Railway, Rubix, and Volkhov are best if you want your resume to have a more modern and clean look.
The font you choose is up to you, just avoid any decorative or script font as they are harder to read and may pass applicant tracking systems.
Enhancv’s resume templates come with a wide range of fonts that you can use, along with different resume styles and layouts to choose from. So, which resume template is best for a VP of digital marketer? Each template comes with its unique advantages and features:
- Modern: This template takes advantage of modern resume features, like graphics and icons, and different background colors to help you stand out. It uses a two-column format, which allows you to put more data on a single page.
- Traditional: This is the most popular resume format today, and recruiters like it because of its classic single-column layout. It features all of the standard resume sections while leaving enough room to include additional resume sections to round out your skills.
- Simple: This format creates a clean and simple resume that presents your experience, education, and skills in a straightforward, organized layout. It is best for digital marketers who want to present a minimalistic yet professional resume.
- Creative: The creative resume format is similar to the modern format but allows for a more freeform approach. It includes modern features, like embedded videos and QR codes, and incorporates creative backgrounds and graphics.
A modern, two-column resume format is best for experienced VPs with more than 5-10 years of experience. You can add more details about your skills and experience and take advantage of the additional resume sections without going over the two-page limit.
A quick word about applicant tracking systems (ATS) and resume formats. Despite what you may have heard, this software can easily read all formats, including two-column formats. Recruiters enter specific keywords and skills into the system to search for resumes with those skills. So, the only thing you need to worry about is making sure your skills match the ones they are looking for.
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Your resume is divided into separate sections so you can organize your information in an easy-to-read format. It allows recruiters to quickly find the information they need to determine your qualifications and make an informed decision.
The top sections on a VP of digital marketing resume:
- Summary section: The resume summary/objective allows recruiters to get a general impression of your skills and experience in a brief 3-5 sentence statement.
- Core competencies section: A comprehensive list of your technical skills, business acumen, and interpersonal skills are necessary to demonstrate a wide range of skills that combine to make an effective leader.
- Professional experience section: This is where you will detail your past work experience as a VP of digital marketing, including details of the work you did and the effect it had on the company’s site performance and market reach.
- Education and certification section: Digital marketers need to highlight their post-secondary education, technical certifications, and any continuing education to show they’re up-to-date with the latest digital marketing tools and trends.
- Awards and achievement section: This section allows you to showcase any local or national awards or achievements in digital marketing.
A VP of digital marketing is a highly skilled position that requires expertise in many different areas, from creative design to data analysis. When you start adding your skills and experience, you must do so in a way that demonstrates all of the necessary skills of a digital marketer leader.
To do this, be sure to include the following types of experience and abilities:
What recruiters want to see on your resume:
- Proven leadership experience: Digital marketers need to demonstrate proven leadership abilities so that recruiters can see they can lead diverse teams to achieve their goals.
- Digital marketing competence: Recruiters prioritize resumes that detail experience in digital marketing and like to see evidence of their data analysis skills, conversion rate increases, content creation, and managing marketing budgets.
- Strategic thinking: You can make a big impression by highlighting those times when you used your critical thinking skills to design, drive, and manage digital marketing strategies.
- Mastery of digital tools and platforms: This is a highly technical position, and recruiters want to see experience in SEO best practices and content development, as well as experience with Salesforce, Google Analytics, and other digital marketing software.
- Business acumen: In addition to technical and personal skills, digital marketers need to showcase their business skills, such as experience with project management, Microsoft Office, negotiations, and having a customer-centric mindset.
When you have finished tailoring your resume to the job post and want to submit it, save it as a PDF document type (.pdf). This format is accepted on all operating systems and devices and will maintain the look and feel of your resume, no matter the screen size.
Now, it’s time to dive into each section and start adding your relevant experience and skills, starting with your past work experience. If you are looking for your first VP of digital marketing position, we will go over what kind of work experience you can list a little later on.
How to write your VP of digital marketing resume experience
The resume experience section is where you’ll document your past work as a VP of digital marketing and include your relevant experience and accomplishments in improving marketing strategies and increasing profits.
This section is where many VPs of digital marketing miss the mark on making an impression. They forget to highlight any achievements they made at the company and normally just list their job duties.
Keep in mind that recruiters already know what the job duties of a VP of digital marketer are. They want to see actionable results that clearly state what you did and the results of that work.
The resume experience section will take up the bulk of your resume. You can list up to three jobs, with each job entry listing the following:
- Job title
- Company name and location
- Industry type
- Dates of employment
- 3-5 detailed bullet points describing your duties and the outcome of that work.
You can list your past work experience in two ways: chronological and reverse-chronological.
A chronological order focuses more on relevant experience than a timeline. You start with the job that has the type of experience that closely matches the job you are applying to. This is the preferred format for more experienced VPs of digital marketing with over 10-15+ years of experience and multiple jobs.
A reverse chronological order is more time-centric and starts with your most recent work experience and works backward from there. This format is best for those with only a few years of relatable experience or still looking for their first VP role.
To give you an idea of how to format this section, let’s look at a real-world VP of digital marketing resume experience example for tips on making each job entry sing your accomplishments.
- •Led SEO efforts and conversion funnels to generate unique monthly site visitors and increases in monthly revenue.
- •Designed, implemented, and optimized retargeting ads for social media sites
- •Designed and launched affiliate marketing programs.
- •Planned and performed keyword research and outlined blog posts designed for SEO.
- •Implemented an A/B testing framework for SEO purposes for all content.
This first example demonstrates this person’s experience but fails to leave an impression and leaves more questions than answers, which is not what you want. This section should clearly state your accomplishments in implementing AB/frameworks, optimizing retargeting ads, and increasing revenues.
Let’s add some key details to see if we can get the answers we need so that recruiters can make an informed decision on this person’s abilities.
- •Led SEO efforts and conversion funnels to generate 170,000 unique monthly site visitors and $1.8M in monthly revenue.
- •Designed, implemented, and optimized retargeting ads using Facebook and Adwords to improve the visitor-to-paid conversation rate by 335%.
- •Designed and launched affiliate marketing programs that grew to 130 partners and $220,000 in incremental monthly revenue.
- •Planned and performed keyword research and outlined 275 blog posts designed for SEO, and managed a team of 3 content writers to complete that content.
- •Implemented an A/B testing framework for SEO purposes for all content, which incrementally improved the rank for targeted keywords by 29%.
- •Recognized for exceeding marketing campaign goals by a 20% average.
You can see how adding a little bit of detail can go a long way to impress hiring teams and managers. This example does an excellent job of:
- Using numbers and percentages to quantify key metrics without sounding too technical.
- Detailing leadership experience in implementing ad design changes and leading cross-functional teams.
- Demonstrating industry-specific technical experience and how that work impacted website rankings.
- Showcasing the implementation of affiliate marketing programs and the increase in revenue from those programs.
- Highlighting company recognition for their achievements.
Notice how this example includes a short company description. This little bit of extra information can go a long way in helping recruiters determine if you are the best fit for their company.
Let’s take a look at some other digital marketing metrics that you can quantify in this section and others.
How to quantify impact on your resume
When you list your past work experience, it’s not enough just to say you did something. You need to show the results of that action.
Quantifying the impact of a VP of digital marketing work experience is one area that recruiters wish more job candidates would start doing. As you can see from our previous examples, you can make a big impression by quantifying key metrics.
If you are not sure which metrics you can quantify, take a look at these real-world resume examples for ideas on how you can improve the resume experience section:
- Performance metrics for digital campaigns: “Spearheaded the launch of a new marketing campaign that generated a 20% increase in revenue.”
- Sizes of budgets managed: “Managed a $1,000,000 marketing budget and produced quarterly reports on ROI, lead generation, and cost reductions.”
- Changes in web traffic: “Increased website satisfaction scores over the last two years by four percentage points while significantly increasing site traffic by over 40% through usability improvements and new online tools.”
- Before and after conversion rates: “Applied conversion rate optimization methods to attain a 23% growth in website conversion rates and online revenue, which led to 23,000 more customers YoY.”
- Increases in social media followers/engagement: “Launched SEO campaign for high volume and long-tail keywords that generated 11,000 unique visitors and 160 new customers monthly.”
- Revenue growth: “Created top-of-funnel marketing assets like infographics and white papers that generated 32,000 unique visitors, resulting in $1.2M in incremental revenue.”
- Improvements in customer retention rates: “Boosted customer retention by 25% and customer lifetime value by 20% by implementing a CRM strategy that included integration, behavior tracking, and targeting campaigns.”
- Reduction in customer acquisition costs: “Analyzed marketing campaign performance, achieving a 15% increase in campaign effectiveness and a $7,300+ decline in customer acquisition costs.”
In the next section, we’ll focus on how to format your resume experience if you are applying for your first VP of digital marketing position.
How do I write a VP of digital marketing resume with no experience
If you are going after your first VP of digital marketing position, you’ll need to tailor your resume experience in a specific way. Avoid listing any jobs that do not include the skills of a digital marketer. Instead, focus on those jobs where you:
- Have hands-on experience with SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and content marketing.
- Supervised or led cross-functional teams to develop marketing strategies.
- Managed a budget and worked on reducing production costs.
- Gained experience with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or other marketing tools.
- Learned about new digital marketing technologies, like AI and machine learning applications.
A VP role is a highly experienced position that requires 10 - 15 years of experience just to qualify for an entry-level position. List your relevant work experience in chronological order, starting with the job that highlights those skills that are most relevant to the position.
How many jobs should you include? You only need to include 3 relevant jobs with 3-5 detailed bullet points. Any more than that, and you risk going over that two-page limit.
How to list your hard skills and soft skills on your resume
Now that you’ve added your relevant work experience, it’s time to focus on your technical, business, and personal skills to make you an effective leader. First, let’s go over the definition of what hard and soft skills are.
Hard skills are those skills that you pick up in school and through internships and on-the-job training. They include essential training in CMS and CRMS, managing budgets, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and other necessary skills for digital marketing. They allow you to analyze market trends and customer reports so that you can develop marketing campaigns that speak more toward what your customers want.
Soft skills include those personal skills that make you an effective communicator and better listener. They include beneficial skills, like being an inspirational leader, creative thinking, and being adaptable to any type of marketing situation. You learn these skills through everyday experiences with your family, friends, peers, and mentors.
Enhancv’s customizable resume sections allow you to list your essential skills in a way that is easy to read and can include modern features like graphics and icons to help you stand out.
So, which skills should you include? Study the job post for clues as to what skills they are looking for and include those first in the technical skills, resume summary, work experience, or other resume sections.
Best hard skills for your VP of digital marketing resume
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
- Email marketing
- Content management systems (CMS)
- Customer relationship management software (CRMS)
- Google Analytics
- Social media marketing
- Marketing automation software
- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- Graphic Design
- Web development
- Data analysis
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Machine learning (ML)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Video production and editing
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Salesforce
- Adobe creative suites
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
You can include your interpersonal and decision-making skills in multiple soft skills resume sections, like our strengths and passion sections, that you can customize to fit your needs.
Best soft skills for your VP of digital marketing resume
- Leadership
- Strategic thinking
- Creativity
- Analytical thinking
- Decision making
- Attention to detail
- Time management
- Project management
- Communication skills
- Teamwork
- Adaptability
- Problem-solving
- Multitasking
- Negotiations
- Persuasion
- Results-oriented
- Empathy
- Innovation
- Integrity
- Persistence
If you are using a modern, two-column resume layout, your skills sections will fit nicely in the side column so that they are displayed right next to your resume summary, work experience, and education.
How to list your certifications and education on your resume
The education section of your resume is another required section where you will list any post-secondary education. Even if you graduated 15-20 years ago, recruiters expect to see a bachelor’s degree from an accredited university.
List all education in reverse chronological order so that your most recent education is listed first. For each entry, you will include:
- Degree type and field of study
- School name and location
- Enrollment/graduation date
You do not need to include any bullet points detailing your education as long as you have 5+ years of experience in marketing or a related field.
In addition to general education, VPs of digital marketing need advanced training that directly relate to digital marketing. Use the certification section to list any technical certifications in analytics, marketing tools, and other vital technologies.
If you are interested in improving your skills and earning potential, consider applying for these top certifications.
Best certifications for your VP of digital marketing resume
Many companies today require their new employees to stay current with new marketing trends and technologies. You can show recruiters your passion for learning by listing any workshops, seminars, and training conferences you’ve attended.
You can also demonstrate your commitment to staying current by listing any memberships in national groups, like the Digital Marketing Association, American Marketing Association, or a local networking group.
We have one more required resume section we need to discuss. This next section is your first chance to make a real impression on recruiting teams.
How to write your VP of digital marketing resume summary or objective
This section is where you will write a brief, 3-5 sentence professional career statement. It goes at the top of your resume underneath the header, and the way you write it depends on where you are in your career.
A resume summary is for more experienced marketers with 5+ years of experience. It is a career summarization that includes any career highlights while quantifying one or two key metrics. A resume objective is for less experienced digital marketers with only a few years of experience under their belt.
Because a VP of digital marketing is a role that requires several years of experience, we’ll focus on demonstrating how to write a resume summary.
Let’s take a look at this real-world VP of digital marketing resume summary to see the effectiveness of this section.
This first example represents what most recruiters see. A lackluster resume summary that include relevant keywords, but fails to show any impressionable statistics. This section should never leave more questions than answers about your abilities.
Like with our earlier examples, you can make a big impression by quantifying some key metrics, like so.
Now, we have an effective resume summary that demonstrates how this person used their skills and experience to create positive results. This example does a good job of:
- Indicating the number of years of experience.
- Highlighting their success in increasing web traffic and conversion rates.
- Demonstrates leadership abilities and effectiveness in leading cross-functional teams.
- Showcasing their ability to read data and implement changes based on those findings.
The resume summary gives you another chance to create a more targeted resume that speaks to the skills and experience the company is looking for.
Additional sections for a VP of digital marketing resume
Now that we’ve discussed the main sections of your resume, it’s time to look at how you can expand on your experience and abilities.
Consider adding one or more of these additional resume sections to highlight more of your skills:
- Foreign language: This section is only necessary if the job requires written and verbal knowledge of one or more foreign languages.
- Publications: Writing blogs and books about digital marketing tools and techniques is an excellent way to highlight your skills in the field.
- Speaking engagements: Leaders and teachers of digital marketing can make a big impression by listing any seminars or workshops they led or taught at.
- Technical skills: Digital marketing is a highly technical job that involves a wide range of software and tools. Enhancv allows you to customize your technical skills section to match the different skills you want to promote.
Another resume section you should consider adding that many digital marketers don’t think about is Enhancv’s awards and recognition section. You can demonstrate your award-winning digital marketing skills by listing any local or national recognitions and awards.
Including a project portfolio link on your resume
An experienced VP of digital marketing will have a long career in developing profitable marketing strategies, SEO-driven content, and technical implementations that led to significant improvements.
You can use your design and coding skills to create a project portfolio that can include:
- Successful marketing strategies
- High-engagement content creation
- Case studies
- Team successes
- Testimonials and endorsements
At the top of your resume is the header section, which is the best place you can add a link to your portfolio. You can also include any certification titles or relevant keywords, like SEO Specialist or Creative Solutions Expert, to grab the recruiter’s attention.
Key takeaways
Congratulations on creating a professionally formatted, attention-grabbing resume that will increase your chances of getting an interview. If you’ve followed the advice in this guide, your VP of digital marketing resume will do several things:
- Showcases a wide range of technical, business, and personal skills that paint a clear picture of a well-rounded leader.
- Quantifies key metrics that demonstrate your abilities to increase market expansion, improve marketing strategies, and create content that speaks to a particular audience.
- Points to your passion for learning through continuing education courses, seminars, workshops, and professional affiliations that offer training and mentoring.
- Highlights any national or local awards or recognitions to point toward personal achievements in digital marketing.