Marketing Manager
Runs the demand engine day to day: the site, the content, the campaigns, the launches and the numbers underneath them.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Pebl's single marketing listing sits in London while engineering sits in California — marketing follows the market, not the headquarters. For a startup this is the hire to make instead of a CMO: someone who executes a positioning the founder has already proven in conversation.
Education
No requirement. Writing ability is the screen; ask for two pieces they wrote that produced something measurable.
Experience
3–6 years, with hands-on ownership of at least one channel end to end. Match the motion rather than the industry: self-serve, SMB and enterprise marketing are different jobs.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where the buyer is a professional audience that detects outsiders instantly. In those markets, a practitioner who can write beats a marketer who must be briefed.
What it pays, roughly
$103,459 median, Canada — for Managers in communication (except broadcasting), the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures over 10,190 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads / Analytics certifications | Google Skillshop | Expected for a performance role; free and quick. |
| Meta Blueprint certifications | Meta | Relevant for paid social. |
| CIM qualifications | Chartered Institute of Marketing | Academic grounding; common in the UK. |
| HubSpot certifications | HubSpot Academy | Free, practical, specific to a stack many startups already run. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The founder writes everything. Nothing is outsourced, because the words are the product hypothesis.
First marketing hire: the site, the launch cadence, one channel done properly and measured. Not an agency — an agency with no in-house owner produces activity, not learning.
A small team by channel, a funnel with stage definitions finance agrees with, and a budget held against pipeline rather than impressions.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Marketing Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Revenue Operations Lead
- Product Manager (Product & design)
- Design Systems Lead (Product & design)
Marketing manager + product marketing in one person is the standard and good merge in B2B. Marketing + design is workable at seed if the person can actually do both; most cannot, and the output shows it.
Keep separate from
Demand generation and account management in one seat means the urgent customer always beats the long-horizon pipeline work.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Shows writing that produced measurable results
- Knows your cost per lead and per customer, or asks for the data on day one
- Has killed a channel that was not working
Red flags
- Reports activity volume, not outcomes
- Needs an agency to do anything
- No interest in talking to customers
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.
This role on a real job board
How a funded company words it. These are Pebl’s own open listings, quoted as published.
- Marketing Manager · London, United Kingdom
Source: Pebl careers, retrieved 2026-10-09.