Marketing Director
Career information and advice on being a Marketing Director

As a Marketing Director you would be the most senior member of the marketing department and have a more strategic role to play when it comes to the marketing of the products or services of your organisation.  This includes the assessment of the market place and determining its needs so you can develop a strategy to satisfy those needs profitably.

You would also play a leadership role within your organisation and would be required to determine requirements in terms of marketing expenditure or demonstrate effectiveness of your initiatives. This will involve consultation with the Managing Director or Board Members as well as other senior department heads..

Your Functions May include

Your role as a Marketing Director would require you to develop and implement a Marketing and Sales Strategy.  This would need to satisfy the objectives of your organisation, which could be articulated in a number of ways, for example:

• Achieve a given sales target
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase consumer engagement
• Reduce customer churn
• Grow market share

On a day-to-day basis you would be required to manage the marketing department’s output. This includes:

• Market intelligence - The collation of information on industry trends, customer insights, demographic profiling and so on. You would then be required to interpret this information to guide your marketing strategies.
• Marketing communications – The creation of TV ads, press ads, marketing literature, direct mail and so on. You would make sure that every communication adheres to your brand guidelines and is delivered on budget.
• Reporting – The collation of relevant reports such as market share, sales performance, return on investment, budgeting forecasts and so on. You will take these reports and present them to key stakeholders.

Some organisations will require you to be responsible for the entire product portfolio throughout their respective lifecycles. You would be required to develop well thought-out strategies to maintain profitability for each product until they are ultimately delisted. This would also include identifying gaps in the market place for new products and managing their development through to a successful launch campaign.

As Marketing Director you would be called upon to compile a comprehensive budget indicating the financial requirements of relevant divisions or product lines. This would be done in accordance with an organisation’s budgeting guidelines and would be submitted for approval.  Throughout the financial year it will be your function to monitor the expenditure against the budget by each division/ product line and ensure that spending occurs within the budgetary restrictions.  You will do this by receiving the monthly expenditure statements from Finance and analyse to enable reporting.  It may also be necessary to re-write the budget should your organisation require you to make savings. 

You would be called upon to be your company’s ultimate brand champion. In conjunction with your brand team you would develop your brand guidelines to ensure consistency in all your marketing communications. You and your team will monitor consumer perception of your brand and make the necessary enhancements to your product, communications or service levels to ensure visibility, likeability and loyalty.