Head of Marketing - HAL

About SC Ventures

About HAL

About the role

Strategy

• Lead HAL's annual marketing planning process translating business goals into strategy with budget allocation, headcount plan, channel mix, and OKRs signed off by leadership before the year begins.
• Own the marketing calendar end-to-end: rolling 90-day campaign plans with clear owners, budgets, channel mix, and success metrics aligned to UAE market moments (Ramadan, National Day, expo seasons) and HAL's commercial milestones.
• Build and maintain real-time marketing dashboards covering the full funnel across all three revenue lines with clear attribution models, CAC/LTV reporting, finance referral pipeline metrics, and a single source of truth across all marketing inputs.
• Lead monthly and quarterly performance reviews with the leadership team presenting spend vs. output, channel ROI, cohort evolution, and forward-looking recommendations.
• Build and lead a high-performance marketing team structured onboarding, clear career paths, skills gap analysis, and a test-and-learn culture where every significant hypothesis is formally tested and documented each quarter.
• Partner with the CEO and commercial leadership on investor and board-level marketing narratives translating marketing performance into business impact language for SC Ventures stakeholders.

Business

• Own the marketing strategy for HAL's finance referral business generating qualified leads from buyers and sellers who need trade finance, working capital, invoice discounting, or BNPL with segmented campaigns by buyer/seller profile and full attribution back to marketing spend.
• Build and own HAL's AdTech growth strategy evaluating and deploying programmatic, native, and sponsored listing ad formats as a marketplace revenue stream.
• Model partnership-driven revenue scenarios co-funded campaigns, centred around digital marketplace and embedded financial product promotions, and data monetisation opportunities with full P&L visibility per partner and per channel.
• Develop annual and quarterly marketing growth models: bottom-up GMV contribution forecasts, CAC curves by channel, LTV cohort projections, and payback period modelling translating marketing investment directly into revenue outcomes for leadership and investors.
• Own retention and lifecycle marketing for all three audiences churn prediction and reactivation campaigns, loyalty and referral programmes for high-GMV users, and lifecycle programmes that increase order frequency and category breadth over time.
• Build cross-border marketing playbooks for UAE-India expansion covering localisation, channel strategy, partnership activation, and brand adaptation for new geographies.

Digital & Performance Marketing

• Own all digital marketing channels paid, organic, social, email, and WhatsApp with full budget accountability and channel-level ROI reporting.
• Define and execute a comprehensive organic search strategy covering on-page SEO, technical SEO, off-page authority building, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) ensuring HAL surfaces prominently in AI-assisted search.
• Manage SEM campaigns across Google, Meta, and regional platforms; own CAC, ROAS, and budget allocation with a structured A/B and multivariate testing cadence.
• Build Arabic-English bilingual SEO/SEM frameworks and ensure all digital execution is culturally authentic not simply translated for the UAE market.
• Own the full performance funnel paid social, display, retargeting, and WhatsApp-driven conversion flows with clear attribution models governing budget decisions.

Brand, Content & Corporate Communications

• Build HAL's brand from scratch master value proposition, founding narrative, tone of voice, visual identity, and brand guidelines covering all digital, print, WhatsApp, and partner co-branding touchpoints.
• Own and evolve HAL's content marketing engine: a bilingual (English and Arabic) editorial programme spanning LinkedIn, blog, email, WhatsApp, and trade media generating organic demand and building brand authority.
• Develop a thought leadership programme positioning HAL's leadership as the authoritative voice on B2B digital trade, supply chain finance, and marketplace economics in the Gulf.
• Own PR and earned media strategy building UAE and regional media relationships, managing press releases and spokesperson preparation, and owning crisis communications protocols.
• Design and execute viral marketing campaigns engineered for organic reach leveraging WhatsApp forwards, LinkedIn, and trade media with virality loops built into the product itself.
• Ensure brand consistency across all seller, buyer, and finance referral touchpoints from onboarding kits to post-trade communications.

WhatsApp-Native Marketing & Automation

• Own HAL's WhatsApp marketing strategy as a first-class channel broadcast campaigns, conversational acquisition flows, catalogue-based commerce journeys, re-engagement sequences, and compliant opt-in growth mechanics.
• Design and implement end-to-end marketing automation workflows for seller onboarding, buyer re-engagement, and finance referral nurturing integrating the marketing stack with HAL's WhatsApp layer, CRM, and platform data.
• Build and manage the market stack end-to-end: MAP (HubSpot / Salesforce MC / Marketo), CDP, WhatsApp BSP, intent data platforms (6sense / Bombora), enrichment tools (Clearbit / Apollo), and ABM tooling.
• Track WhatsApp-specific engagement metrics open rates, response rates, opt-out rates, click-to-order conversion and use these to continuously refine messaging and segmentation.
• Stay at the forefront of WhatsApp Business API capabilities and proactively bring relevant innovations into HAL's marketing stack.

B2B Ecommerce & Product Marketing

• Apply deep knowledge of B2B ecommerce buying behaviour long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder decisions, procurement-driven purchasing across all marketplace categories to craft campaigns that convert sellers, buyers, and finance referral prospects.
• Own product marketing: translate every new feature, category launch, and platform capability into clear messaging and structured GTM launch playbooks covering positioning, channel mix, collateral, and success metrics.
• Build and maintain a comprehensive sales enablement library: pitch decks, one-pagers, category benefits guides, ROI calculators, objection-handling scripts, and onboarding kits for the commercial team.
• Design catalogue and trade marketing campaigns (seasonal deal events, new category launches, deal alerts) and account-based marketing programmes targeting high-value distributor and retail chain accounts.
• Own competitive positioning maintaining a live competitive intelligence database ensuring HAL's messaging is always sharply differentiated and build customer success story programmes capturing case studies and GMV growth stories from early sellers and buyers.

Customer Segmentation, Market Research & Insights

• Build and maintain a dynamic segmentation model across HAL's seller, buyer, and finance referral base by trade type, category affinity, geography (emirate-level), order frequency, GMV tier, and financing behaviour and own the ICP framework, updated quarterly.
• Own HAL's market intelligence function: continuously tracking competitive landscape, buyer/seller sentiment, category trends, pricing dynamics, and emerging trade behaviours across the UAE and GCC.
• Commission and lead primary research programmes qualitative interviews, field ethnographies at trade hubs, focus groups, and quantitative surveys with findings directly informing product and GTM decisions.
• Synthesise secondary research from industry reports, government data, trade publications, and regional ecommerce indices into clear strategic recommendations for leadership.