Marketing manager duties and responsibilities: the full list, by company size

A marketing manager owns the demand the business needs and the plan that produces it. The duties fall into eight groups: setting the plan against a revenue or enquiry target, owning the budget and the spend decisions, running the channels (site, search, paid, email, social, events), owning the brand and the message so every asset says the same thing, commissioning and approving content, managing the team and the outside agencies and freelancers, measuring and reporting results to the leadership, and working with sales so leads are followed up and the feedback comes back. Everything else in a job advert is a variation of one of those eight.

This page covers the duties, the weekly rhythm, the numbers a marketing manager is normally judged on, and how the job differs between a small company and a large one. For hiring, the duty table below works directly as the body of a job description.

The eight duty groups, in detail

A marketing manager sits between strategy and delivery. Above the role, leadership sets a commercial target. Below it, specialists and agencies make things. The manager converts one into the other and is accountable for the gap.

Duty group	What it looks like in practice	What gets reported
Plan and strategy	Annual and quarterly plan, audience and segment definitions, positioning, campaign calendar, launch plans	Plan against target, what was committed and what shipped
Budget	Allocating spend across channels, approving invoices, forecasting, deciding what to stop	Spend against budget, cost per lead, cost per acquisition
Channels	Website, SEO, paid search and social, email, organic social, PR, events, print, partnerships	Traffic, enquiries, pipeline and revenue by channel
Brand and message	Positioning, tone of voice, visual guidelines, approvals, consistency across every touchpoint	Brand search volume, share of voice, awareness tracking where it is run
Content	Briefing writers and designers, editorial calendar, sign off, repurposing, keeping old assets current	Output shipped, content performance, assets sales actually use
People and suppliers	Hiring, objectives, one to ones, agency briefs and reviews, freelancer management	Team delivery, agency value against fee
Measurement	Analytics and tag setup, attribution choices, dashboards, monthly and quarterly reporting	The monthly pack, and the decisions it drove
Sales alignment	Lead definitions and handover, follow up standards, win and loss feedback, sales collateral	Lead to opportunity rate, lead quality, revenue influenced

A normal week

The duty list tells you the scope. The week tells you the job.

• Monday: numbers from last week, pipeline check with sales, priorities for the week set with the team.
• Through the week: briefing and reviewing work in progress, approvals, campaign build and launch, supplier calls, fixing whatever broke.
• Midweek: one block of protected time for the thing that is not urgent: the plan, the positioning, the analysis nobody asked for.
• Friday: spend check, next week's calendar confirmed, anything that slipped reassigned.
• Monthly: the report, the budget reforecast, the retrospective on what worked.
• Quarterly: the plan for the next quarter, agency reviews, a decision on one channel to grow and one to drop.

The numbers a marketing manager is judged on

Most arguments about the role come from a mismatch here. Agree the measures in writing before the first quarter starts.

• Volume: qualified enquiries, demo requests, trials, bookings, footfall.
• Efficiency: cost per qualified lead, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend.
• Quality: the rate at which leads become opportunities, and opportunities become customers.
• Pipeline and revenue: value created, value closed, and the share marketing sourced.
• Brand: branded search volume, direct traffic, mentions, repeat purchase rate.
• Delivery: what was promised in the plan, and what actually shipped on time.

Pick one headline number and three supporting ones. A scorecard with fifteen metrics hides performance rather than showing it.

How the job changes with company size

	Under 25 staff	25 to 250 staff	Large company
Main work	Doing the work personally	Managing two to six specialists and agencies	Owning one channel, region or product line in depth
Budget control	Small, and every pound is visible	Real budget, real trade offs	Large but governed by process
Hardest part	Choosing what not to do	Hiring and holding standards	Getting decisions through other teams
Title you often see	Marketing manager, head of marketing	Marketing manager reporting to a head or director	Brand manager, performance manager, product marketing manager

In a small company the title means generalist and the real skill is prioritisation. In a large one it means owner of a defined area and the real skill is influence. Read any advert with that in mind: the duty list is similar, the day is not.

Skills and tools that the duties require

• Commercial reading: comfort with a margin, a payback period and a budget line.
• Writing: briefs, positioning, and the ability to edit somebody else's copy without rewriting it.
• Analytics: a web analytics platform, Google Search Console, the ad platforms, and a spreadsheet model that ties spend to outcomes.
• Project management: a shared calendar and a board that shows status without a meeting.
• Supplier management: writing a brief that gets good work, and reviewing an agency on output rather than on how pleasant the calls are.
• Customer contact: the best marketing managers sit in on sales calls and read support tickets every month.

What the role is not responsible for

Clarity here prevents most of the friction in the job. A marketing manager is accountable for creating and qualifying demand, for the message, and for the spend. The manager is not accountable for closing individual deals, for product pricing decisions made by leadership, for sales headcount, or for whether a salesperson calls a lead back. Where marketing is held to a revenue number, the lead follow up standard has to be agreed and measured alongside it, or the number is outside the role's control.

Turning this into a job description

Use the eight duty groups as the responsibility list, then add three things most adverts leave out: the single headline metric for the first year, the budget the person will control, and who they will manage. Candidates self select accurately when those three are stated. The adverts that attract the wrong applicants are the ones that list twenty duties and no number.

What is the difference between a marketing manager and a marketing director?

A manager is accountable for delivery against a plan. A director is accountable for the plan itself, for the budget size rather than its allocation, and for marketing's position in the leadership team. In companies under about fifty staff the same person often does both, which is worth naming in the objectives so the strategic work gets protected time.

Does a marketing manager need to be technical?

Enough to be credible, not enough to build. Read a tag manager setup, understand how a conversion is counted, know what a redirect and a canonical tag do, and write a clear brief for a developer. That level is achievable in a few weeks of focused effort and it changes how much a manager can supervise.

How many people does a marketing manager usually manage?

Commonly between nobody and six, plus suppliers. Many strong marketing managers manage no staff at all and instead direct two or three agencies, which is a real management load even without line reports.

What should a new marketing manager do in the first 90 days?

Weeks one to three: get the data straight, find out what is already being measured and whether it is being measured correctly, and talk to ten customers and the whole sales team. Weeks four to eight: fix the broken basics, which is usually tracking, the website's main pages and the lead handover. Weeks nine to thirteen: publish a plan with one headline metric, a budget split and a short list of things being stopped.

Which duties are most often missing from job adverts?

Three: owning measurement and attribution rather than inheriting somebody else's dashboard, keeping existing assets current instead of only making new ones, and the sales alignment work. All three are where the result comes from, and all three are quiet work that no one notices until it is absent.

One duty that has appeared recently

The duty list above covers planning, budgets, agencies and reporting. A recent addition is easy to miss because it sits in nobody's contract: watching what AI assistants say about the company.

In a ten person firm it is a monthly half hour. In a large one it is a named responsibility with a report. Either way it begins by asking the questions customers ask. Add it to the job description under reporting. AI Knows Us gathers the answers in one place.