5 Marketing Skills for Your Resume
Marketing is an essential component of business growth and stability. It’s also a concept that is much more complex than getting the word out about a company. The act of properly promoting a company, brand, product, or service hinges on the ability to build strategies that target the right consumer at the right time. This involves understanding the various components that can allow a business to best reach its target audience—such as what medium to use and what marketing campaign will work best.
Because of this, a marketing professional must be able to demonstrate a specific skill set for creating marketing strategies that effectively and consistently reach the right people. These marketing skills, when developed at a high level, can potentially be the difference between a campaign that succeeds and one that stagnates.
What Are Marketing Skills?
Marketing skills are attributes that allow professionals to succeed in marketing roles within businesses. This could lead to several key outcomes. First, it could enable companies to build and execute marketing strategies at a high level. It could also position an individual in a mid-level marketing role to advance to a higher level marketing role.
The skills associated with marketing fall into two categories: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills relate to the creative and data-driven aspects of the job; they make it possible to design the media elements of a marketing campaign and also get these elements in front of the right people. Soft skills, on the other hand, allow professionals to handle the peripheral elements of marketing in a way that can help promote efficiency within a campaign.
Marketing is a field ripe with opportunity. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes a 10 percent job growth for marketing managers and a 19 percent job growth for market research analysts between 2021 and 2031. The projected growth for these roles is much more than the 5 percent rate the BLS reports for the average profession.
To take full advantage of this dynamic job market, it is important for you to furnish a resume that highlights the marketing skills that will catch the attention of a potential employer.
Why Marketing Skills Matter
A strong, properly utilized set of marketing skills are the backbone of any successful marketing campaign. Skills translate to strategies that understand the current state of consumer demographics and know how to reach the right demographic at the ideal time.
An individual must hone their skills to a level effective enough to meet the typical demands of their role. For example, someone with insufficient analytical skills may not be able to effectively determine the best target audience for their product or service. They may build a campaign that connects with some people in their desired audience, which could lead to mild success. But an optimally targeted campaign can bring in a substantially higher audience.
Additionally, an individual with inadequate soft skills—such as organization or time management—may have difficulty guiding a campaign through the various steps it typically goes through from idea to implementation. This could cause delays in strategic development, and it may also lead to the end result being less impactful once it gets rolled out, even if it reaches the desired target audience.
Essential Marketing Skills for Resumes
While effective marketing professionals will have a dynamic and well-developed set of skills, some marketing skills on a resume stand out more than others because they are highly valued. If you are in the job market for a new marketing role, the following competencies are particularly important to highlight.
1. Creative Skills
Successful marketing campaigns don’t merely convey product or service information. They do so in a memorable way that keeps the product or service at the top of the consumer’s mind. Promoting creativity on a resume can demonstrate an ability to think outside the box and deliver results that stand out.
While this skill can be associated with other competencies like writing or video production, it’s important to note that it also applies to building strategies that align with a specific medium—such as a social media or a web-based campaign. It can also pertain to other important marketing elements, such as branding.
2. Analytical Skills
A sleek, clever marketing campaign only matters if it gets in front of the right people. On a resume, it’s important to list relevant achievements and campaigns that generated actionable results. Doing so can prove to a potential employer that you can conduct research and develop campaigns that reflect this ability.
Demonstrating analytical skills in marketing can be listing out accomplishments, such as the creation of analytics reports or website optimization that extended page views. Other examples can be listing proficiency in essential analytics tools that can help someone gather, view, and interpret key audience data.
3. Communication Skills
Marketing professionals must have the skills needed to convey marketing ideas and strategies to others. This can involve people outside of the marketing department, such as executives that have the ultimate say in the direction a company goes. It can also involve people in the marketing department an individual may be in charge of overseeing.
Individuals can convey strong communication skills on a resume by demonstrating how they have connected with those outside of the marketing department and displaying teamwork and leadership skills. Common examples of these skills involve discussing pitch presentations, team management, and responsibility delegation.
4. Content Management Systems Skills
A company’s online presence plays an increasingly important role in its marketing strategy because it can provide a glimpse into what the company is beyond its products and services. Because of this, maintaining a solid web presence is a vital part of a cohesive marketing strategy. A key component of this is the content management system, which allows marketing professionals to manage and update a company’s site with greater efficiency.
Showing strong content management skills on a resume can signal to a prospective employer the ability to jump right in and handle their content management needs with very little extra training and onboarding. This can be achieved by discussing proficiency in specific content management systems platforms or discussing duties related to a company’s website maintenance.
5. Social Media Skills
The rise of social media platforms in recent years makes them an integral part of a company’s marketing strategy. To have this skill stand out on a resume, it’s essential to reference examples of actionable social media usage within the context of a marketing strategy.
These examples can involve highlighting the usage of social media to actively engage with consumers, giving a more personable feeling to the account. It’s also important to highlight any interactive social media campaigns created through social media, such as events or contests.
Pursue Your Future with Fearlessness
The methods used to market products and services may change due to technological innovation and customer preferences. A proper skill set can allow you to consistently meet the challenges that may come with these changes and build marketing strategies that work. While being able to convey these skills on a resume are important, developing these marketing skills to a high level is even more crucial, as they allow you to achieve the goals and complete the projects that ultimately turn into the resume examples that could impress your next potential employer.
The Marketing Strategy Certificate offered by Suffolk University’s Center for Continuing & Professional Education can help you cultivate the skills you need to fortify these eye-catching campaigns. Our online program is designed to prepare you to apply the core components of marketing strategies toward highly-targeted campaigns that engage the right customers and get excellent results.
Learn how we can get you ready for the next phase of your career.
Sources:
Indeed, “Key Marketing Skills to List on a Resume (With Examples)”
Investopedia, “Marketing in Business: Strategies and Types Explained”
MasterClass, “Marketing Skills: 10 Hard and Soft Marketing Skills”
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Advertising, Promotions, and Marketing Managers
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Market Research Analysts