Notes for owners · Business growth
How to advertise to marketing heads
Your buyer runs campaigns for a living. She can see your ad library, recognise your retargeting and price your media. What moves her is a specific observation about her own work, arriving in her budget window.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A marketing head is the only audience that can take your advertising apart. She knows what you paid for the placement. She can see how long the creative has been running, and that the enquiry form in front of her is scored the moment she submits it. So the usual persuasion does nothing. What gets a meeting is a specific, unarguable observation about her own marketing, delivered in the eight weeks of the year when she has budget to move.
She can check you, and she does
Meta's ad library is public. Anyone can look up every ad your company is running, and how long each one has been live. A marketing head evaluating an agency looks there before she replies, and what she finds is usually three ads, running unchanged for fourteen months, with a stock photograph.
She will open your website on her phone and watch it load. Then the blog, to see whether it stopped in 2023, a case study in her category, and your founder's name in search. The whole audit takes her four minutes and she does it while someone else is presenting.
That is the real bar. Your own marketing is the sample of work, whatever is in the deck.
Where she is, and when
LinkedIn genuinely is where this audience lives, which is not true of most of the roles on this site. She reads it early, before the first meeting, and again at night. She is in meetings from ten to six and will not take an unbooked call.
Beyond that, two or three industry newsletters she actually opens, and a WhatsApp group of marketers from her last three companies. The award shows and conferences where she is photographed. A podcast in her sector, and search when she has a specific problem. "GA4 consent mode implementation India" is a search a marketing head makes herself, at eleven at night, and it is worth more than any interest-based targeting you could buy.
What does not work on her
Outcome promises. "Triple your leads" reads as a claim from somebody who has never carried a number, because she knows leads triple when you loosen the definition of a lead.
A free audit offered cold. We sell one, so this is worth saying plainly: a marketing head receives several a week and they are all the same trick. The offer earns nothing. A single paragraph about a thing you noticed in her campaign earns the reply, and the audit can follow.
Awards and client logos as the whole pitch. She wants to know who worked on that account and whether they are still with you.
A demo that starts with your founding story. She has forty minutes, and she has already decided what she needs to see.
Retargeting her for six months after one visit. She sees the frequency, and it tells her you have nothing better to spend the money on.
The calendar decides more than the creative
| Moment | What is happening | What to send |
|---|---|---|
| January to March | Next financial year's budget is being argued | A scope and a number she can put in a line item |
| A new head joins | Agencies, tools and retainers get reviewed inside three months | A short, specific teardown and a reference in her sector |
| Funding raised or a new product signed off | Money exists and speed matters | Proof you have done this exact category before |
| The agency contract's last quarter | She is deciding whether to renew quietly | A conversation, not a pitch, and no comment on the incumbent |
| A campaign visibly failed | She is protecting her position | Nothing. Wait a month, then talk about the fix and not the failure |
The row people misread is the last one. Approaching the week after a public flop reads as circling, and she remembers who did it.
What she is actually buying
Not ideas. She has more ideas than hours. She is buying two things: a number her boss accepts, and cover against the risk of picking the wrong vendor.
The second matters more than any pitch admits. A marketing head who chooses a supplier that fails does not lose money, she loses standing. Which is why a known name with an average proposal beats an unknown with a better one. A named client she can ring is worth more than a testimonial she cannot verify.
So the material that travels well is the material that survives being forwarded without you. A one-page scope with what is delivered, what it costs, who does the work, and what happens if she stops in month three. For example, a Bengaluru firm selling marketing automation to manufacturers put its implementation scope and its exit terms on a public page. Enquiries did not jump. The ones that came arrived already half-decided, which is the point.
Half of them cannot buy anything
In a ₹200 crore company the marketing head signs. In a forty-person firm the title sits on a manager whose budget is approved line by line by the promoter. In a family business the promoter's son may be the real marketing head, with no title at all.
Check before you spend. Look at how many people report to her on LinkedIn, and whether the company has ever run a campaign she would have had to approve. Then ask a scoping question about money and see who answers. If the answer is "let me check", your audience is the person she checks with. Build everything you send to be shown to him.
This is why targeting by job title alone goes wrong on this audience more than on any other. The title is aspirational in half the market and the budget sits elsewhere.
What to do next
Pick fifteen companies whose marketing you could talk about in detail, and write down one true, specific observation about each. Not "your website could be better". Something like: the form on your enquiry page asks for a GST number before anyone has spoken to a human. Then send that one line to the person whose name is on it.
If you would rather be on the receiving end of that discipline, our free audit does it to your own marketing. Where enquiries come from, how fast they are answered, and what happens at the handover to sales. We are in Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru, and the report comes in writing.