Marketing Director in Southampton

We are BDO, an accountancy and business advisory firm providing the advice and solutions entrepreneurial organisations need to navigate today's changing world. We work with ambitious, entrepreneurially-spirited, and high growth businesses that fuel the economy, directly advising the owners and management teams that lead them.

The Markets, Sales & Clients (MSC) function is the driving force behind creativity and growth at BDO. Our main goal is to equip the business to win, covering most touchpoints of the customer journey. You will be supported to build your career while being yourself in the office. Help the firm succeed by staying ahead of the latest market trends, confidently implementing your ideas, and collaborating with a range of stakeholders. You will be rewarded with a great work-life balance and a career with real purpose.

The Marketing Director, sitting within the Sales & Marketing function, leads the firm's marketing capability, owning the marketing strategy aligned to the firm's business growth plans and outcomes, ensuring the delivery of measurable return on investment and commercial results across services, sectors, and markets. The role focuses on demand generation, client engagement, and value proposition development, working closely with Sales and the Brand & Communications team. It is deeply client-centric, ensuring marketing activity is grounded in client needs and delivers a high-quality, consistent service to internal business stakeholders.

As a member of the MSC leadership team, the Marketing Director collaborates with fellow Directors to align on overall MSC strategy, ensure a consistent people experience, and embed effective, scalable marketing processes. The role also leads marketing capability development, particularly focusing on digital marketing and the effective use of AI, fostering a culture of marketing excellence and continuous improvement.

In this challenging and rewarding role you will also:

• Marketing Strategy & Activation Planning: Develop and maintain a marketing strategy aligned to the firm's business growth plans, sector priorities, and desired outcomes. Translate strategy into clear activation methodologies, ensuring campaigns, digital, and content activity are consistently planned, executed, and measured.
• Campaigns, Digital & Content Leadership: Provide strategic leadership to the campaigns, digital, and content teams, ensuring activity is integrated, insight-led, and outcome-focused. Identify, design and lead campaigns to build awareness, credibility, and sustained engagement in priority markets.
• Sales Alignment & Collaboration: Work closely with Sales leadership to align campaigns and marketing activity to sales priorities and pipeline stages. Ensure marketing outputs provide Sales with clear context, insight, and value propositions at the point of handoff.
• Value Proposition Development & Activation: Lead the development and refinement of service-, sector-, and audience-specific value propositions. Work in close partnership with Brand & Communications to ensure propositions align to the firm's narrative and positioning.
• Data, Insight, Performance & ROI: Embed data and insight at the heart of marketing strategy, planning, and activation. Define clear success measures for campaigns, digital, and content activity.
• Leadership, Capability & Ways of Working: Lead, develop, and inspire a high-performing marketing team across campaigns, digital, and content. Establish consistent marketing processes, activation frameworks, and governance across the function.
• Client Centricity, Service Quality & Stakeholder SLAs: Ensure marketing strategy and activation are grounded in a deep understanding of client needs, behaviours, and expectations. Establish and maintain clear service standards and SLAs for marketing support to internal business stakeholders.

You will be someone with:

• Senior marketing leadership experience within professional services or consultancy.
• Proven experience developing and delivering marketing strategies aligned to business growth objectives.
• Strong expertise in campaign-led, digital, and content-driven marketing.
• Deep understanding of data, insight, and marketing performance measurement.
• Experience working in close partnership with Sales without owning sales outcomes.
• Experience leading digital and AI-enabled marketing capability development.
• High commercial acumen and confidence challenging assumptions with evidence.
• Professional marketing qualifications and commitment to continuous professional development.
• Experience operating within a matrix and multi-region organisation.
• Background across both in-house and agency environments.

Leadership Attributes:

• Commercially focused and outcome-driven.
• Insight-led, curious, and confident challenging the status quo.
• Collaborative, credible, and pragmatic.
• Structured yet adaptable.
• Comfortable operating in complexity and change.

Success Measures:

• Marketing strategy and activation clearly aligned to business growth priorities.
• Strong, consistent execution across campaigns, digital, and content.
• Measurable improvement in marketing effectiveness and return on investment.
• High-quality, sales-ready opportunities supported by marketing insight.
• A high-performing, future-ready marketing capability recognised for excellence.
• High levels of satisfaction from internal business stakeholders, reflected in consistent service delivery and adherence to agreed SLAs.

We are committed to agile working, offering every colleague the opportunity to work in ways that suit them, their teams, and the task at hand. At BDO, we help you achieve your personal goals and career ambitions, providing clarity and structure around career development. Mutual support and respect is one of BDO's core values, and we are proud of our distinctive, people-centred culture.

We look forward to the future. At BDO, we help entrepreneurial businesses to succeed, fuelling the UK economy. Our success is powered by our people, which is why we are always finding new ways to invest in you.