What Marketing Management Is Actually Like

What does "growth marketing" actually mean at your company?

It means I'm responsible for generating pipeline. Which sounds simple until you realize that the definition of "pipeline" changes depending on who you ask. For me, pipeline means marketing-sourced opportunities that sales has accepted and is actively working. For Devon, our VP of Sales, pipeline means "meetings booked." For Raj, my boss, the Director of Marketing, pipeline means revenue influenced by marketing touches. These are three different numbers. They don't agree. They never will.

My actual day-to-day is running paid campaigns, mostly Google Ads and some LinkedIn. Managing our marketing automation in HubSpot. Working with Becky, our content writer, on landing pages and nurture sequences. Reporting on all of it weekly to Raj and monthly to the exec team. And then about 30% of my time, honestly, is just negotiating with sales about lead quality.

That last part. Can you give a specific example?

Sure. Last Thursday, Devon walks into our weekly pipeline review and says marketing leads are "garbage." His word. And he pulls up a list of 14 leads from the past two weeks that his team marked as disqualified. I'm sitting there and I pull up the same 14 leads in HubSpot, and here's what I find. Three of them were never contacted. Nobody called, nobody emailed. They just sat there for nine days and then got marked disqualified. Four of them were companies outside our ideal customer profile, which, fair, but those came through a campaign that Devon's own team asked me to run targeting "adjacent verticals" because they wanted more at-bats. And then seven of them were real conversations where the timing wasn't right. Not garbage. Just not ready to buy in March.

I showed all of this at the meeting. With screenshots. Because if you don't show screenshots, it becomes a feelings conversation, and in a feelings conversation, marketing loses every time. Raj backed me up. Devon said "okay, fair" and moved on. That whole exchange took maybe 20 minutes, but I spent an hour and a half the night before pulling the data and building the slide. That's the job. The analysis takes time. The defense takes time. The actual campaign work that generates the leads in the first place is maybe half my week.

An hour and a half to prepare for a 20-minute defense. That sounds exhausting.

It is. But it's also the part of the job I've gotten genuinely good at, and I think that's what they don't tell you in marketing courses. The creative stuff, writing ad copy, designing a campaign, building a landing page, that's maybe 20% of my time. The rest is proving that what I did worked. Or figuring out why it didn't.

Like, two weeks ago our Google Ads account got flagged for policy violations on three campaigns simultaneously. All three were running ads to landing pages that mentioned "field service," and Google's automated system decided that constituted a "restricted financial product." It's not. We make scheduling software for plumbers and electricians. But try explaining that to an automated review system. I spent the entire morning rebuilding landing pages to remove any language that Google's bot might misinterpret, resubmitted the ads, and then two of them got flagged again because the bot was also picking up copy on our navigation bar from a different page. I had to build standalone landing pages with no navigation. Becky helped with the copy. We had them back up by 3 PM, but that was a full day gone.

What was supposed to happen that day?

I was supposed to present our Q4 pipeline projections to the exec team. Raj covered for me. I sent him my slides at lunch with notes, and he presented them, which was fine except that the CFO had a question about our cost per opportunity trending up in January and Raj didn't have the context. So I ended up doing a follow-up meeting the next morning at 7:30, before I'd even had coffee, explaining that our CPO went up because we'd shifted budget to LinkedIn, which has a higher CPL but a higher conversion rate to opportunity, and the math actually works out favorably on a cost-per-closed-deal basis but it takes 90 days to show up because our sales cycle is 90 days. The CFO said "okay" and I could tell she'd already moved on. I'd been stressing about that number for two days.

That's a lot of explaining.

Marketing is explaining. I explain to sales why the leads are good. I explain to finance why the spend is worth it. I explain to the product team why we need a case study from that customer and not this one. I explain to Raj why I want to test a campaign that will probably fail. My roommate Clara is a vet tech. She comes home and tells me about a golden retriever that ate a sock. I come home and tell her I spent three hours explaining CPL benchmarks to a man who keeps asking if we can "just do more SEO." We both need a drink by 7.

How much of this job is internal sales. You are selling marketing to the rest of the company, constantly. You're selling the idea that what you do matters, that the numbers you're tracking are the right numbers, that the spend is justified, that the campaigns need time to work. If you're not comfortable with that, if you want to just make cool campaigns and see them go live, you will be frustrated every single day. I spend more time selling internally than I spend on any external campaign. Paolo, our demand gen contractor, once told me, "Your job is 60% marketing the marketing department." He was being generous.

Does the creative part still light you up?

Yeah. When it happens. I launched a campaign in November targeting companies that were still using paper work orders. The ad copy was "Your work orders shouldn't need a filing cabinet." Simple. Direct. We built a landing page with a calculator showing how many hours per week you waste on manual scheduling. That calculator took Becky and me two days to build and test. It drove 47 leads in the first month, 11 of which became opportunities, and three closed. That was $180,000 in new ARR from one campaign idea that I had while waiting for a burrito at Illegal Pete's. That feeling? That's why I do this. It just doesn't happen every week. It happens maybe four times a year, and the rest of the time you're in spreadsheets and Slack threads and meetings where someone asks you to "make the logo bigger."

You started in consumer packaged goods. Detergent, specifically?

Tide, actually. Not the whole brand, obviously. I was an assistant brand manager working on Tide Pods when they launched the new scent variants. My job was coordinating the packaging design process between our internal team and the agency. Which sounds simple, but that one scent variant, "Spring Meadow" or whatever it was, required 14 rounds of packaging approvals because somebody in regulatory wanted the warning label two points larger and that pushed the product name into the bleed zone, and then we had to resize the entire front panel.

I learned two things at P&G. First, brand management is project management with a marketing vocabulary. Second, every decision at a large company has to survive a committee. If you are someone who needs to see your ideas come to life quickly, this is not the structure for you. I am not that person. I actually like the process. I like building the strategy deck and presenting it and getting alignment. That's not a popular opinion in marketing, but it's an honest one.

How is retail brand marketing different from CPG?

In CPG, you own the brand top to bottom. You control the message, the packaging, the media placement, the promotion calendar. In retail, you are competing with your own company. We have a merchandising team, led by Rhonda, who controls what products get featured. We have a digital team that runs the website and email. We have a store operations team that decides what the in-store signage looks like. And I am supposed to make all of that feel like one coherent brand. Which is like trying to conduct an orchestra where half the musicians brought their own sheet music.

Rhonda and I have a good relationship, but we have fundamentally different priorities. She wants the spring circular to feature the 18 products with the highest margin. I want the spring campaign to tell a story about backyard renovation. Those are not the same thing. Sometimes they overlap. When they don't, she wins, because margin is a number and brand story is a feeling, and numbers win in retail.

Tell me about the brand tracking study.

Sure. Every quarter we run a brand tracking study through our agency. It's a consumer survey, 2,000 respondents, measuring aided and unaided awareness, brand favorability, purchase intent, and a few other metrics. We spent $4.2 million on our spring campaign. TV, digital video, social, some out-of-home in our top 15 markets. This is a meaningful spend for us. Not our entire budget, but about 35% of our annual brand spend.

The tracking results came back on a Tuesday. Unaided awareness dropped 2 points. Aided awareness was flat. Brand favorability was up 1 point, which is within the margin of error. Vincent, our CMO, who joined about eight months ago from a DTC brand, walked into my office at 4 PM and said, "We need to figure out what happened by tomorrow morning." Which is not how brand tracking works. You don't diagnose a 2-point drop overnight. There are a dozen possible explanations. Our main competitor launched a major campaign in the same window. We changed our media mix away from linear TV, which disproportionately reaches older homeowners who are our core audience. We reduced frequency in three of our top markets because of budget cuts in February. Any of those could explain it. All of them together probably do.

What did you tell Vincent?

I told him the truth, which is that brand metrics move slowly and a single quarter's results are not a crisis. Then I put together a 12-slide deck by 10 PM showing the media mix changes, the competitive spend data from Kantar, and our market-level results, because when you look at it by market, awareness actually went up in the 6 markets where we maintained frequency and dropped in the 9 where we cut it. That tells you something. That tells you the creative was working, the distribution was the problem. I showed Vincent the deck at 8 AM. He said "this is good, let's present it to the CEO." That's the other thing about enterprise marketing. Your work is often a deck that your boss presents to their boss.

That must be frustrating.

It's complicated. My name was on the deck. Vincent credited me in the meeting. But the CEO's response was directed at Vincent, and Vincent's follow-up actions were communicated to me. There's a filter between me and the people making the final decisions, and that filter is organizational hierarchy. My direct report Suki, she's a brand manager handling seasonal campaigns, she feels the same way about me. She builds the plans. I present them. She's talented and I try to give her visibility, but the structure is the structure.

My husband Arun is a dentist. He has patients. He fixes their teeth. They say thank you. The feedback loop is 45 minutes. My feedback loop is 18 months. I run a campaign now and I'll know if it worked by next winter. That requires a specific kind of patience. Arun thinks what I do is interesting, but I once tried to explain the difference between aided and unaided awareness at dinner and he said, very gently, "Is this the kind of thing where I'm supposed to find it interesting, or do you need me to actually understand it?" I laughed so hard I choked on my wine.

How political brand marketing is at a large company. Every department has opinions about the brand. Sales wants the brand to be aggressive. Product wants it to be innovative. The CEO wants it to feel premium. Store operations wants it to be clear and functional. My job is to make all of those people feel heard while building something coherent, and that means I spend a shocking amount of time in what I can only describe as brand diplomacy. Kenji, our creative director at the agency, once told me I should have been a diplomat. He meant it as a compliment. It felt like a diagnosis.

Do you still find it creative?

Occasionally. Last fall I pushed for a campaign that featured real employees from our stores. Not actors. Actual associates. We filmed in four stores in Tennessee and Georgia. One of the associates, a woman named Dolores who's been with the company 22 years, talked about helping a first-time homeowner pick out paint colors for her daughter's nursery. She started crying during the filming. The director wanted to cut it. I said keep it. That spot outperformed our agency-produced creative by 40% on completion rate and 28% on click-through. Dolores is now in our spring TV campaign. She sends me photos of herself on the display in her store. Those are the days that make the brand tracking studies and the media mix debates worth it. But I want to be honest. Those days are rare. Most days I'm reviewing legal copy for a circular and wondering if anyone will notice the difference between "Save up to 25%" and "Save 25% or more."

"Head of Marketing" at 28. That sounds impressive.

It sounds impressive until you realize the team is me. There's no one reporting to me. There's no marketing coordinator, no designer, no demand gen person. I write the blog posts. I run the LinkedIn ads. I update the website, which is a Next.js site that Leo, our CTO, built, and every time I need to change something beyond the CMS pages I have to ask Leo and he does it between 11 PM and 1 AM because that's when he codes on non-product things. I manage our social media, which is basically LinkedIn and a Twitter account that has 340 followers, most of whom are other AI startups. I built our email list from zero to about 1,100 subscribers. And I report to Cass, our CEO, who is a former Google PM and has strong opinions about everything I do.

The title is a recruiting tool. Cass told me that directly. She said, "We're calling you Head of Marketing because if I post a job for 'marketing coordinator at pre-seed startup,' nobody applies." She's right. The title got me in the door. The job is doing everything.

What does a typical week look like?

Monday is usually writing. I try to get a blog post drafted, something targeting a keyword we want to rank for. Right now I'm writing about meeting transcription accuracy, because that's what people search for when they're comparing tools like ours. I spend maybe 3 hours researching and writing, which feels insanely luxurious compared to my newspaper days when I'd write a 900-word story in 90 minutes. The difference is that I'm trying to rank in Google, not just be read once. Totally different kind of writing. More strategic, less fun.

Tuesday and Wednesday are campaign and operations days. I'm in HubSpot building nurture sequences, checking analytics in GA4, and usually troubleshooting something. Last week the UTM parameters on our LinkedIn campaign broke because I'd copied them from a template that had a hidden character in the source field, so all our traffic from that campaign was showing up as "direct" in GA4 and I couldn't figure out why for two hours. It was an invisible Unicode character. I wanted to scream.

Thursday is meeting-heavy. I have a 30-minute sync with Cass where she tells me what she's been thinking about, which always includes at least one idea that would require three months of work and $50,000 we don't have. Last week she asked if we should "do a podcast." I said, "Who is producing it? Who is editing it? Who is promoting it? Who is booking guests?" She said, "You." I said, "Then we're not doing a podcast." Friday I try to do something creative. Write ad copy. Make a landing page. Something that reminds me why I like this work.

Tell me about the LinkedIn campaign.

Cass gave me $3,000 a month for paid ads. That's our entire paid budget. LinkedIn CPCs for B2B SaaS are between $8 and $14 depending on the targeting. So $3,000 gets me, optimistically, 300 clicks. From 300 clicks, if I'm getting a 3% landing page conversion rate, that's 9 leads. In our first month we got 11 leads, which I was genuinely excited about until I looked at who they were. Two were from competitor companies doing research. One was a student writing a paper. Three were from companies with fewer than 10 employees, which is below our minimum for the product to make sense. So I had 5 real leads from $3,000 in spend. $600 per lead. Jamie, our SDR, reached out to all 5. Two responded. Zero booked a demo.

I brought these numbers to Cass and she said, "Should we pivot to PLG?" And I said, "PLG is a product strategy, not a marketing tactic. You can't 'pivot to PLG' because your LinkedIn ads didn't work in month one." She looked at me for a long time and then said, "Fair." Cass is smart. She's also impatient in the way that every startup CEO is impatient. She wants results in weeks because our runway is 14 months and every week without traction feels like a countdown.

Fourteen months of runway. How does that affect your work?

It makes everything feel urgent. When you have 14 months of cash and no repeatable growth engine, every marketing dollar feels like it's on fire. I can't run a brand campaign. I can't invest in SEO that won't pay off for six months. Everything I do has to produce a measurable result within 30 to 60 days, which rules out most of the marketing strategies that actually work long-term. Morris, one of our angel investors, emailed Cass last month with "thoughts on marketing" which included "have you considered TikTok?" and Cass forwarded it to me with no comment. I could feel the forwarding energy. Like, "deal with this." I replied to Morris directly, thanked him, and explained that our target buyer is VP-level at mid-market companies and they are not making purchasing decisions based on TikTok. He said, "Makes sense, just wanted to share." But those emails always carry a weight. An investor thinks about you once, sends a casual suggestion, and now I'm explaining our channel strategy to someone who bought 2% of the company for $50,000.

How lonely it is. At the newspaper, I sat in a room with other reporters. At the mid-size company, I was on a marketing team of eight. Here, nobody speaks my language. Leo and the engineers talk about product. Cass talks about strategy. Jamie talks about prospects. Nobody is thinking about positioning, or messaging, or whether our homepage headline is good, or whether we should A/B test the CTA button. My girlfriend Kendra is a paralegal. She has colleagues who do the same work. She can complain about a brief and someone gets it. I can't complain about a UTM parameter to anyone in my company because nobody knows what that is. I joined a Slack community for startup marketers and that's been more useful for my sanity than any management book. There are about 200 of us in there, all solo marketers, and the most common message is some version of "Is it just me or is this completely insane?"

Is it just you or is it completely insane?

Both. It is insane. And I also think it's the best way to learn marketing, because there's no one to hand things off to. If I don't know how to do something, I learn it that afternoon. I built our entire email automation in HubSpot by watching YouTube tutorials. I learned LinkedIn ads by spending $600 and watching what happened. I'm not great at any one thing, but I'm competent at everything, and at a startup that's more valuable than being world-class at one channel. Whether that's a good career strategy long-term, I honestly don't know. My friend Lucas, he's a paid search specialist at a big agency, he makes $20,000 more than me and only thinks about one thing all day. Sometimes I envy that. Most of the time I think I'm building something more interesting, even if it's harder to explain on a resume.