Marketing Manager onboarding plan

What a strong ramp looks like for a new marketing manager. Week 1 universals + 30/60/90 day milestones, each with an accountable owner — manager, new hire, team, or HR.

Week 1

Get them productive on tools, oriented to people, and clear on what success looks like in their first 90 days.

1. 1Day 1: workspace + tooling set up before they arrive (laptop, accounts, Slack, email). New hire's first email should be 'everything just works.'Manager
2. 2Day 1: 30-min welcome with their manager — share the team's mission, their first project, and book recurring 1:1s.Manager
3. 3Day 1-2: meet & greet calls with 4-6 people they'll work with most. 15-20 min each, calendar-blocked in advance.Manager
4. 4Day 3: have them ship something small (a Slack post, a document, a tiny PR) — confidence-building, momentum-setting.New hire
5. 5Day 5: review the 30/60/90 plan together. New hire confirms it sounds achievable; manager confirms it's the right shape.Manager
6. 6End of Week 1: HR / People check-in. Surface friction (access issues, missing context, mismatched expectations) early.HR

Days 1-30

Understand the funnel, the brand, the existing playbook.

1. 1Audit existing marketing channels with data: traffic source by channel, conversion rate, CAC. Identify the 'real' top channels.New hire
2. 2Read every existing brand doc, positioning brief, and ICP document. Identify drift between writing and current execution.New hire
3. 3Talk to 5 sales + 3 CS people. What's the 1-2 things marketing makes harder for them? Easier?New hire
4. 4Ship one small visible win — improve a landing page, write one email, refresh one piece of cornerstone content.New hire
5. 5Talk to 5 customers (ideally including 1 churned customer). What made them buy? What almost made them not?New hire

Days 31-60

Own a major campaign or channel. Improve one metric meaningfully.

1. 1Own one major campaign or channel end-to-end. Specific outcome, specific success criteria.New hire
2. 2Make one positioning sharpening — a hero headline, an ICP refinement, a category narrative.New hire
3. 3Build the marketing → sales hand-off process for the leads you generate.New hire
4. 4Set up the analytics you need for ROI visibility (UTMs, attribution model, weekly digest).New hire
5. 5Run one experiment with a real hypothesis and explicit success criteria. Win or lose, document it.New hire

Days 61-90

Own a quarterly plan + show measurable impact.

1. 1Own the next quarterly marketing plan. Where you'll invest, what you're cutting, how you'll measure.New hire
2. 2Show measurable impact: lifted one key metric (signups, pipeline, ARR-influenced, awareness) by ≥15%.New hire
3. 3Hire your first direct report (or make the case to leadership for the role).New hire
4. 4Build cross-functional rituals — monthly marketing/sales review, quarterly product/marketing sync.New hire
5. 5Retro with manager. What surprised you about the brand, the funnel, or the team?Manager

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Onboarding plans for other roles