How To Market Yourself for the Marketing Role You Want

It’s been a rough few months for marketers.

For all the announcements on LinkedIn celebrating the landing of a new job, I see as many (or more) marketers increasingly asking for help landing a new job.

Applying for marketing roles today feels like an open-world video game called Tears of the Resume. You collect skills, grind through endless side quests (application forms), and battle increasingly powerful bosses (interview panels).

But just when you think you’ve unlocked the final dungeon, the employer vanishes into the mist — leaving behind a cryptic, automated rejection email.

Yeah, it’s not easy.

But I have an idea that might help. If you’re considering a job move or are already trying to make one, consider both how you’re developing your career and marketing yourself as a candidate. Watch the video above or read in more detail below.

The paradox of modern marketing roles

In a paradoxical twist, the demands of modern marketing have become more specialized and expansive.

Marketing professionals are expected to have deep expertise in a niche area while maintaining a broad skill set across multiple disciplines. Employers want you to be a specialist, generalist, strategist, operator, data analyst, and, ideally, a mind reader.

Employers won’t settle for unicorns. They want multiclass unicorn-wizard-hacker-marketers.

I see many marketers on the job hunt falling into a trap. If the best way to describe this new unicorn is perhaps a T-shaped skill set (what recruiters and HR professionals call someone with deep expertise in one area — the vertical bar of the T — and broad knowledge across other disciplines — the horizontal bar), I still see many young and veteran marketers promoting themselves in these ways:

• I-shaped marketers (too specialized, no breadth). These marketers know one thing very well (maybe they’re a killer copywriter) but lack broader positioning in strategy, analytics, or other disciplines.
• Em dash-shaped marketers (know a bit about everything). I see this a lot with experienced marketers. They’ve done many things throughout their career (social media, content, branding, product, and even sales) but with no depth in any area.
• Star-shaped marketers. These marketers try to position themselves as specialists in everything. Social media? Fifteen years. SEO? Knew Google before it was Google. Brand? I’m a storyteller. Video editing? Better than Scorsese.

Pressure comes from both above and below.

From below, more candidates than ever compete with the same single skill set attributes, making differentiation difficult.

From above, job descriptions now demand a mix of connected skills. Employers aren’t just looking for someone with multiple skills — they want someone who understands how those skills integrate into the business.

Unfortunately, AI adds an extra layer of complexity. Every day, new startups promise to rid companies of those pesky human marketing employees, trading them for AI agents that don’t ask for vacations, take sick days, or want to work from home.

Fearful marketers hear the bumper sticker advice that “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will” and rush out to try to become “good at AI” without knowing what “good at AI” means.

It’s all very frustrating and concerning.

Marketing yourself as the marketer you want to be

I wish I could offer “10 easy steps” or “10X your job opportunities” advice, but I can’t. Anyone who says they have the answer to what will happen with AI and automation and how it will affect the art and science of marketing is fooling themselves (or trying to fool you).

I often receive messages and emails from colleagues asking if they should start a freelance (or fractional) practice or how they might present themselves for employment at a new organization.

The advice I’ve been giving for the last 20 years hasn’t changed: Market where you’re going, not where you are.

Here’s what I mean. When marketing yourself — whether as a freelance consultant, fractional marketer, or employee — always position yourself where you want to be rather than where you are.

I’ll use myself as an example. When I started as a freelancer, I took any gig I could get (from SEO to writing email copy to website design). After all, I needed to make rent.

But if you read my content or looked at my website two decades ago, you wouldn’t have seen any of that. You would have seen “content marketing strategist.” I marketed myself as what I wanted to be in the future.

Eventually, with great difficulty, I convinced a company to hire me to fix its content governance, technology, and content marketing approach. That led to another project and another.

But here’s the critical point: I didn’t fake it till I made it. I studied, read, talked to, and learned from professionals in the field. I invested the time and energy it took to recognize what a “good” content strategist looks like.

Developing yourself is the product development side of deciding how to market yourself as a marketer. But how do you position yourself to beat competitors for the same gig?

A classic lesson on selling content and marketing services

For a marketing agency workshop about 10 years ago, I developed a version of the famous smiling curve for creative agencies.

The smiling curve is a way to illustrate how value is distributed across different stages of making and selling a product.

It shows that the highest value comes from the beginning and end of the process — design, research, and branding (before production) and marketing, sales, and customer experience (after production).

The middle stage (production) tends to add less value to the product because the process can be duplicated or outsourced easily, making it a commodity. On a graph, innovation gets the high value on the left side. The line then dips down at the middle stage (production) and rises again on the right as the value increases (marketing, sales, and customer experience).

The image below shows how I plotted agency services across a similar curve. The x-axis represents the continuum from one-off projects to long-term processes. The y-axis shows the span from low-value investments (near the intersection with the x-axis) to high-value investments.

Strategy and planning show up as high-value one-off projects on the top left end of the curve. Optimization and measurement appear at the top of the right end as high-value, long-term processes. Content creation as a service ended up at the bottom of the curve because it’s so easily replaceable.

My point to agency leaders was this: If clients hire you at the top of the smile, you’ll find it relatively easy to expand down the curve into other services. But if they hire you for bottom-of-the-smiling-curve services, you’ll find it almost impossible to climb up.

How agencies positioned themselves to win the initial engagement defined their potential for becoming a strategic partner.

I advised agency leaders to force clients who hired them for content creation to go through some kind of strategy or optimization engagement (even if they couldn’t charge for it). That would ensure the client viewed the agency as a strategic partner, not a replaceable service provider.

The smile curve for marketing yourself as a marketer

Today, it’s not enough to be T-, em dash-, or even star-shaped. Your differentiated value isn’t in having a mix of skills — it’s in how you connect them.

The question isn’t whether to position yourself as a specialist or a generalist; it’s how to position yourself as a fully integrated solution in which skills like copywriting, data, measurement, and storytelling are more than the sum of their parts.

Instead of listing skills as a menu of disconnected abilities, present a unified, strategic perspective that demonstrates how these skills work together to drive impact.

The real unicorns don’t just have multiple skills; they market themselves in ways that demonstrate how those skills combine into a bigger, smarter, and more effective approach.

With this in mind, I’ve adapted the smile curve for marketers who want to market themselves.

The image below balances a portfolio of skill attributes across the art (perspective) and science (performance) of marketing on the x-axis from lower to higher value (represented on the y-axis).

The top left end of the curve shows high-value perspective activities, with marketing leadership at the top, and brand strategy, creative direction, thought leadership and storytelling, governance and marketing ops, and campaign management on the descending slope.

High-value performance activities make up the right side of the curve, with measurement and data strategy at the top, and technology integration, performance marketing, A/B testing, personalization, and targeting inching down the slope.

At the center (bottom) of the curve are lower-value focus activities, including copywriting, editing, content and creative production, translation and localization, media buying, and SEO.

I hope you’ll use this smile curve graph to help you reposition or differentiate yourself based on where you’re going rather than where you are.

For example, if you’re a copywriter and want to present yourself as a creative strategist, start crafting your content, resume, portfolio, social posts, etc., to connect concepts such as campaign management, thought leadership, and creative direction.

Or, if you’d rather lean into the performance side, highlight SEO, personalization, and performance marketing concepts.

I want to make this clear: This framework doesn’t imply that being a writer or content production professional is somehow less than being a creative director or a performance marketing manager.

The chart merely reflects the current perception of replaceability and differentiation.

In other words, it’s just as important for a creative director to weave together campaign management, governance, and marketing ops skills as it is the other way around. 

The smile chart will also help you map your learning and career development. In other words, it’s not just about changing your marketing — it’s about developing your skills.

Preparation and positioning are everything

As I said, it’s a rough time in marketing. There’s no guarantee that business leaders won’t make shortsighted decisions and prioritize AI as a replacement for humans. And there’s no telling which marketing activities AI and automation may replace.

Look at this framework as a way to prepare. If you’re hired for a single-skill position at the bottom of the smile, you’ll find it challenging to move up.

But if you can position yourself as an integrated solution — stitching together value up and down the curve — your perceived value moves higher while your replaceability goes lower.

Marketing yourself isn’t about listing skills on a menu. It’s about presenting a cohesive story of how your integrated skills connect to create a positive impact.

So, as you reposition yourself, don’t just update your resume — update the way you think about your value. Market where you’re going, not just where you are.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute