Senior Marketing Manager

About Zelo

Zelo is an ADGM-regulated private financing platform backed by IHC, one of the largest holding companies in the UAE. We provide invoice financing, bank guarantees, and purchase invoice financing to SMEs transacting with credible buyer ecosystems — government entities, GREs, and large corporates. We're also building Zelo Procure, a procure-to-pay SaaS platform that digitises procurement workflows for enterprises and builds towards embedded financing.

The role

We're hiring our first Senior Marketing Manager to build Zelo's marketing function from the ground up. This isn't a role where you inherit a playbook, you're writing it. You'll own the full spectrum: organic content and brand, paid acquisition, revenue operations, and marketing-to-sales handoff architecture. You'll work in close coordination with sales, credit, and product teams to ensure every dirham of marketing spend translates into qualified pipeline that converts.

This is a builder's role. You'll stand up the infrastructure, prove the model, and then hire and lead a team underneath you as we scale.

What you'll own

Organic & Brand — Build Zelo's brand presence across LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and web. Launch founder-led thought leadership and employee advocacy programmes. Own the website as a lead capture channel — SEO strategy, product pages, case studies, and content marketing.

Paid Acquisition — Design and run multi-channel paid campaigns across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn, targeting SME borrowers for invoice financing and bank guarantees, procurement leaders for Zelo Procure, and external sales consultants for a referral programme. You'll own creative direction, audience segmentation, A/B testing, and budget allocation — with a mandate to deliver high-ROAS deals.

Revenue Operations — Own HubSpot as the marketing CRM. Build the full lead-to-revenue pipeline: lead scoring, lifecycle stages, SLA gates between marketing and sales, attribution modelling, and reporting that ties every lead back to spend.

Sales Coordination — Work hand-in-glove with the sales and credit teams. Marketing-generated leads need to meet the credit risk appetite and underwriting standards of a regulated financing platform. You're not just driving volume, you're driving quality that the credit committee will approve.

Team Building — content, paid, social, and RevOps hires underneath you. You'll own hiring, onboarding, and performance management for the marketing function.

What we're looking for

• 4–6 years of experience in B2B marketing, ideally in fintech, lending, payments, or SaaS — with at least some time spent in a startup or scale-up environment where you had to build rather than maintain.

• Demonstrable experience running paid campaigns on LinkedIn, Google, and Meta with clear ROAS accountability. You can talk fluently about CPL, CAC, conversion rates, and attribution — not just impressions and reach.

• Strong content instincts. You understand what makes a CFO or a business owner in the UAE stop scrolling, and you can translate complex financial products (invoice discounting, bank guarantees, procure-to-pay workflows) into compelling narratives.

• HubSpot proficiency — you've set up or materially improved a HubSpot instance, built workflows, and used it as a genuine revenue operations tool, not just a contact database.

• An AI-first mindset in how you approach marketing execution. You use AI tools natively for content generation, campaign ideation, audience research, creative testing, SEO, and workflow automation. You're not experimenting with AI — it's already embedded in how you work, and you have a point of view on where it creates leverage and where it doesn't.

• Experience marketing regulated financial products is a strong plus. You understand that ad copy needs compliance review, that you can't guarantee approval, and that landing pages need to mirror the specific product angle of the ad.

• UAE market familiarity. You understand the business culture, the role of government and GRE ecosystems, the SME landscape, and how B2B buying decisions actually happen here.

• You've built or scaled a marketing function before — even a small one. You know what it takes to go from zero to a functioning team with processes, tooling, and reporting.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

• Marketing becomes a consistent, measurable source of qualified deal origination.

• HubSpot is fully operational with clean attribution, lifecycle tracking, and marketing-to-sales SLA reporting.

• Zelo has a recognisable brand presence in the UAE SME financing space.

• Paid campaigns are running profitably across at least two channels with clear unit economics.

• You've hired at least 2–3 team members and have a functioning marketing operation.