“We need someone to sort out the marketing.” 
 It sounds simple enough.

The business is growing. Marketing is becoming more complicated. Sales wants more leads. There are several agencies doing vaguely related things. And somebody has finally admitted that the CRM isn’t going to manage itself.

So, you need a marketing person. But do you need a Marketing Manager or a Marketing Director?

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at why these aren’t simply two versions of the same job with different salaries, and why hiring the wrong level of experience for the problem you’re trying to solve can be an expensive mistake.

A Marketing Manager will typically take a strategy and turn it into coordinated activity: campaigns, content, events, agencies, digital marketing, budgets and reporting.

A Marketing Director should be working at a different level, connecting marketing with the commercial ambitions of the business and making decisions about markets, customers, positioning, investment, growth and the marketing capability the company needs next.

Put simply:

If you know where you’re going but need someone to organise the journey, you probably need management. 


If you’re not entirely sure where you’re going, you may need leadership. 


We also tackle the increasingly common job description that expects one person to develop the global marketing strategy, generate leads, run exhibitions, manage the CRM, write content, create graphics, produce video, support Sales, manage the website and preferably know a bit of HTML.

That isn’t really a Marketing Manager.

That’s an entire marketing department with one email address.

And what if you genuinely need senior marketing leadership but don’t need or can’t justify, a full-time Marketing Director?

Fractional leadership can provide the strategic direction, commercial thinking and senior experience the business needs, while a Marketing Manager, Executive, internal team or external specialists handle the day-to-day execution.

For some growing businesses, the right answer may be both capabilities:

The Marketing Director asks, “What should we be doing and why?”

The Marketing Manager asks, “How are we going to make it happen?”

So before writing the job description, forget the title for a moment and ask a much more useful question: 
“What problem are we actually hiring this person to solve?”

Answer that properly, and the job title becomes considerably easier.

Marketing, Properly! – practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want better decisions, clearer strategy and marketing that actually supports where the business is going. 


Produced in Scotland.