How to Know If You Have the Right Marketing Leader

First understand what tier you actually need

Before you can evaluate your current leader, it helps to understand what tier you actually need. The most common mistake isn’t a bad hire. It’s a mismatch between what you hired and what you expected

The most common mistake is paying for a Tier 2 leader but expecting Tier 3 outcomes, or hiring a Tier 3 title but getting Tier 1 execution. Clarify what you need before you evaluate what you have.

Why terminology isn’t competency

Marketing vocabulary can be weaponized, intentionally or not, to create the appearance of expertise where substance may be thin.

When your marketing leader tells you they are “optimizing CPCs across paid search while improving CTR through dynamic ad copy testing and shifting budget toward upper-funnel programmatic to build awareness with in-market renters,” that might be a precise description of a thoughtful strategy or it might be a string of industry terms that sounds impressive but doesn’t connect to any measurable business outcome you care about.

The problem is you can’t tell the difference if you don’t know the right questions to ask. And your marketing leader knows you can’t tell the difference. Many marketers genuinely believe they’re communicating effectively when they report in this language because they live inside these metrics every day. It doesn’t occur to them that the person across the table has no frame of reference for whether a 3.2% CTR is good, bad, or irrelevant.

Your job as a non-marketer executive is not to learn marketing terminology, but to evaluate marketing leadership the same way you evaluate every other function: by outcomes, strategic clarity, and the ability to connect activity to business results.

What great marketing leadership actually looks like

So what does a strong marketing leader in multifamily look and sound like? Not in terms of what tools they use, but how they operate.

They translate. They don’t lecture.

The best marketing leaders have a rare ability to explain what they’re doing in language that connects to how you already think about the business. They don’t present marketing metrics in isolation, but connect marketing activity to occupancy, lease velocity, and other KPIs your business cares about. When they talk about a campaign, they frame it in terms of qualified prospects, cost per lease, and how that compares to last quarter.

If your marketing leader can’t articulate what they’re doing in terms you already use to run the business, that’s a signal. It doesn’t mean they’re not good at their craft. It might mean they’re operating as a practitioner when the role requires a leader. Those are different jobs.

They own outcomes, not just activity.

There’s a critical difference between a marketing leader who reports on what they did and one who reports on what it produced.

Both statements might describe the same work, but only one tells you whether that work mattered. If your marketing leader consistently reports in activity terms without connecting to outcomes, they may not understand the connection themselves.

They’re honest about what’s not working.

This is one of the most reliable indicators of marketing leadership quality, and it’s the easiest one for a non-marketer to evaluate. Strong marketing leaders bring bad news proactively. They tell you when a campaign underperformed, when a channel isn’t delivering, or when a strategy needs to change. They do this because they understand that credibility is built through honesty, not spin.

Leaders who only present wins leave you flying blind. Every report is positive, every metric is trending up, and somehow every campaign was a success. If your marketing leader has never brought you a problem, they’re either exceptionally lucky or they’re curating what you see. In my experience, it’s almost always the latter.

They can prioritize and say no.

Multifamily marketing teams are perpetually under-resourced. A strong leader knows this and makes deliberate trade-offs. They can tell you what they’re choosing not to do and why, and they can articulate which initiatives have the highest revenue impact and which they’re intentionally deprioritizing.

Someone who hasn’t developed this muscle says yes to everything, does everything at 60% quality, and wonders why nothing is moving the needle.

Can they protect their own priorities?

This is the single most common dysfunction I see in multifamily marketing organizations, and it’s one that non-marketer executives often unknowingly create and reinforce.

In many property management companies, marketing functions as an order-taking department. Someone saw a competitor’s Instagram post and wants something similar by Thursday, a regional VP wants another QR code, the CEO wants a new brand video because they were at a conference and felt inspired. The requests come in from every direction, all of them feel urgent, and the marketing team says yes to all of them because they don’t feel empowered to say anything else.

This is a failure of leadership, but it’s not always obvious whose leadership is failing.

A marketing leader who accepts every request without question has accepted that marketing is a help desk, not a strategic function. If your marketing leader has never pushed back on a request from you or another executive, ask yourself why. Either they agree that every incoming request is more important than the work they were already doing (not possible) or they don’t feel empowered to advocate for their own priorities.

Both answers should concern you.

Three questions to ask in your next one-on-one

You don’t need to become a marketer to evaluate one. You just need three questions asked consistently, in plain language, in any regular one-on-one.

That’s what Part 2 is about. The full assessment framework across strategic clarity, analytical rigor, and team health, and the question most executives don’t want to ask themselves.

It publishes as the next edition of Prompted and will be titled “You Hired Them. Now Get out of the Way”.