What is the best advice on writing an effective resume for senior level marketing job if I haven't achieved much in my career?

What have you done lately, what are you doing now and what can you do for me tomorrow those are questions on the mind of a hiring manager in many of today's organizations. As a senior marketing professional your strategy should include a robust social media presence that shows you understand and get what is needed today, which is more important then what you did 5 years ago. If you examine your work over the past few years there will be achievements you can present in your resume. If you re-designed a marketing strategy that is an achievement. If you developed a new process for cost effective promotions that is an achievement. If you cannot show that the company achieved greater success, while important, you need to show what you have been doing that is relevant to succeeding on the next job. You can also gain achievement points by applying your skills elsewhere. Join your local chamber of commerce as a committee or board member and use your skills in that capacity. Consider if your view of your lack of achievement is as real as you think or far more a result of your own impression. Most employers like hiring for a track record of success and sometimes you have to create and define your own successes to make it work. Your decision to continue your training is very important. Now you have to find ways to share your up-to-date knowledge with people. Engaging in relevant social media and in-person events and displaying your knowledge to the right people at the right time can lay the groundwork for networking, which can often supplant your resume as a job search tool. Fine confidence in your own achievement and market those in tangible ways with a focus to what you can do and you might just get the bite you were looking for.

I couldn't help but smile when I saw this question. You're asking how to land a marketing role that you appear unqualified for on paper. Am I the only one seeing the obvious? Through marketing - the art of making things look better than they are. If you wanted to sell them a product, what would you do? 1. Research the customer and understand their needs, preferences and expectations. 2. Develop nice packaging for your product, communicate it's value to them with the right wording and by highlighting the features that would appeal to them most. 3. Close the sale. Well buddy, you're the product. The job description is your customer research. Go to your resume and make it communicate the things they want to hear. Go back to your stories and find the examples that show why you would be a good fit for this role. Make the sale.

It is a truism that when you are looking for a job, the hiring managers are not sure about what you can do - they only know what you have done. There's some logic to this - you would not want an unqualified person be your surgeon or your chef or a car mechanic and you look for the person's past experience to build an extrapolation and then use this future projection to decide between "continue" or "reject" options. So, the burden is on the candidate to paint a picture and set up a trajectory that promises to deliver. here are my suggestions for you based on your details; 1. Find a timeslot when you will be undisturbed and then look at all your correspondence - your status reports, your performance reviews, your tough decisions that you escalated to your manager. Now make a detailed list of all your accomplishments;.., include your notes (if you still have them)  from the interview session which landed you the current job a few years ago and also the letter that indicates that you were promoted. If you don't have the documents, write down what you remember being told. 2. Go to a bookstore or a library and browse through books about resume's for various levels. See the tone that needs to be communicated at senior levels along with a solid track record of accomplishments. Consider how your list of accomplishments (that you just made) can get adapted to address this need. 3. Hiring managers are not going to interview hoping that you might have the core skills that would allow you to scale up. And there are many reasons why people accept lower level positions initially - lower stress level at a particular time in your life or there was a recession and you took what was available. Most employers understand this. (As an aside, I have held exec positions before and wanted to get a firsthand exposure to a particular function and hence took a step-down position. While it was financially painful for a while, the inside scoop that I have now been able to understand gives me a powerful advantage.)  4. Find and hire a skilled resume' writer who can help you with the wordsmith role. It appears that English may not be your native tongue and/or the stress/anxiety is making your written communication a bit hard for others. You need not pay thousands of dollars for resume' creation (yes, there are resume' writers who will happily take upwards of $5K from you). Besides communicating your strengths and accomplishments, your resume'  and cover letter should also filter out perceptions of negativity against your current manager (or the owner of the firm). For example, you blame the owner for not investing more in marketing and such info can be conveyed with a slightly different touch/verbiage so that it does not taint you as a complainer or as a "sour grapes" person. Good luck,

First and foremost you need to manage your own expectations.  Typically senior-level roles in any industry require that you've accomplished a fair amount in your career, hence...senior.  If you feel that you're qualified for a role like that, I'm sure you can look back at your career and identify those accomplishments that would highlight your value to someone looking to fill that kind of role.