What does a Marketing Head do?
A marketing head owns the entire marketing function — brand, demand generation, content, performance media and the budget behind all of it — and answers for pipeline or revenue contribution. In Indian companies this title stands in for Head of Marketing or VP Marketing elsewhere, and the role generally reports to the CEO, founder or chief revenue officer.
A marketing head usually has around 10–18 yrs of experience and earns typically ₹30L–₹85L/yr in India. The day-to-day blends Marketing strategy, Budget allocation, Demand generation and more — this page gives you a ready-to-use marketing head job description template you can copy, plus the exact skills and salary employers expect.
Marketing Head job description template
Copy the 8 responsibilities, 6 requirements and 8 skills below into your job post, then edit the parts that are specific to your company — pay band, location and reporting line.
Select the text above to copy it manually if the button is unavailable.
What are a Marketing Head's key responsibilities?
A marketing head is typically responsible for the 8 duties below, which cover the day-to-day work most employers expect the role to own outright. Paste them into your job post as they are, or cut the ones another team already handles — a responsibility list that claims work the hire will not actually do is the fastest way to lose a candidate at offer stage:
- Own the annual marketing budget and allocate it across brand, media and events
- Set the pipeline or revenue-contribution target the function is measured on
- Build the team across performance, content, brand, design and marketing operations
- Select and negotiate with agencies, media partners and martech vendors
- Approve campaign strategy, positioning and the messaging house
- Review CAC, channel mix, attribution and payback period every month
- Align with sales leadership on lead definitions, SLAs and handoff quality
- Own brand reputation, PR responses and crisis communication
What qualifications does a Marketing Head need?
Employers hiring a marketing head in India usually ask for the 6 qualifications below, typically alongside 10–18 yrs of experience. Keep only the ones you will genuinely screen on: every extra must-have narrows the pool, and in the Indian market a long mandatory list filters out strong candidates whose background simply reads differently on paper:
- 10+ years across marketing with several years leading multi-channel teams
- Accountability for a pipeline, CAC or revenue-contribution number
- Fluency in performance media economics as well as brand building
- Experience running agency relationships and negotiating annual retainers
- Command of analytics and attribution — GA4, CRM reporting, cohort payback
- Ability to present marketing performance credibly to a board or investors
What skills should a Marketing Head have?
These are the 8 skills employers name most often on live marketing head listings in India. Treat the first few as the ones worth screening for directly and the rest as signals a candidate can pick up on the job — asking for all of them at once is what turns a reasonable role into an unfillable one:
Listing the three or four skills you genuinely screen on — rather than all 8 — is what keeps a marketing head posting from filtering out candidates who could do the job.
What does a Marketing Head earn in India?
Typical salary (India)
typically ₹30L–₹85L/yr
Experience range
10–18 yrs
These are typical ranges and vary by city, company and skills. For live, role-specific pay data, see the OnJob salary guide.
Marketing Head job description — FAQs
What is the difference between a marketing head and a marketing manager?
A marketing manager runs campaigns and channels inside a plan somebody else wrote. The function owner writes that plan, controls the budget, hires the team and defends return on spend to the CEO. Decisions shift from creative execution to allocation — which channels get funded, which agencies stay, and what the function is accountable for.
Is Marketing Head the same as CMO?
Head of Marketing and VP Marketing describe the same scope in global org charts. A Chief Marketing Officer usually carries a formal executive seat and, at larger companies, oversight of communications and customer experience too. Indian firms often use the shorter title for work that would be labelled CMO at a startup of similar size.
Which metrics is a marketing leader judged on in India?
Qualified pipeline, cost per acquisition and payback period dominate in B2B and SaaS, while consumer businesses weigh brand recall, retention and return on ad spend more heavily. Almost every board conversation eventually returns to marketing-sourced revenue, so attribution that the sales team actually agrees with is worth building early.
What does a marketing head earn in India?
Compensation typically sits at ₹30L–₹50L per year in growth-stage startups and ₹60L–₹85L at large consumer or enterprise brands, with bonus tied to pipeline or revenue goals. Consumer internet and BFSI generally pay above D2C and services businesses, and equity is common at venture-funded companies.