Head of Content: What the Role Requires
A Head of Content is the senior leader responsible for building and running a content function that drives measurable business outcomes. Not just editorial output, not just brand voice, but a content operation that connects directly to pipeline, retention, and market positioning.
Most companies hire for this role too late, scope it too narrowly, or confuse it with a senior editor. The result is a content team that produces a lot and contributes little. Getting this role right is one of the more consequential hiring decisions a marketing leader makes.
Key Takeaways
- A Head of Content is a commercial operator first, a creative leader second. The best ones understand pipeline, not just prose.
- The role sits at the intersection of strategy, distribution, and measurement. Hire someone who can hold all three at once.
- Most content teams underperform because they optimise for volume and visibility rather than for demand creation at every stage of the funnel.
- A strong Head of Content will push back on briefs, challenge channel assumptions, and refuse to produce content that has no clear business purpose.
- The reporting line matters. Content that reports into brand produces different outcomes than content that reports into growth or revenue.
In This Article
Why Most Companies Get This Hire Wrong
When I was running agencies, I watched clients make the same mistake repeatedly. They would brief us on content strategy while simultaneously hiring a Head of Content who had been promoted from a writing or editorial background. The person was talented. They understood craft. But they had no framework for connecting what they produced to what the business needed.
That is not a knock on writers. It is a structural problem. Content leadership requires a different skill set than content creation. You need someone who can read a P&L, understand where the business is trying to grow, and reverse-engineer a content operation that supports that direction. That is a commercial operator’s job, not an editor’s job.
The confusion runs deeper than job titles. Many organisations still treat content as a support function for other channels: SEO needs blog posts, social needs copy, sales needs collateral. So the Head of Content becomes a production manager with a senior title. They are reactive by design. They fill briefs rather than set direction.
A genuine Head of Content does the opposite. They come to the table with a point of view on where the business should be investing, which audiences are underserved, and what content can do that paid media cannot. That requires confidence, commercial literacy, and the willingness to push back.
What the Role Actually Covers
The scope of a Head of Content varies by organisation size and maturity, but there are core responsibilities that belong in this role regardless of context.
Content strategy is the obvious one. That means deciding what topics to own, which formats to prioritise, and how content maps to the buying experience. It also means making active decisions about what not to produce, which is harder than it sounds when every stakeholder has a content request and a deadline.
Editorial standards and brand voice are equally important. A Head of Content sets the bar for what gets published and what does not. They build the frameworks that allow a team to produce at scale without drifting from quality or positioning. This is where the editorial background becomes genuinely useful, provided it is paired with commercial discipline.
Distribution and channel strategy often get overlooked in content job descriptions, but they belong here. Content that is not seen does not exist. A strong Head of Content thinks about owned, earned, and paid distribution as part of the same system. They understand how content feeds SEO, how it performs in email, how it gets amplified through partnerships and creators. Platforms like Later’s go-to-market content resources illustrate how distribution thinking has evolved, with creator-led amplification now a serious part of how content reaches new audiences.
Measurement and reporting round out the core scope. Not vanity metrics. Not page views as a proxy for impact. A Head of Content should be able to articulate what content contributed to pipeline, how organic search is performing against commercial intent keywords, and where content is accelerating or stalling deals in the funnel.
If you are thinking about how this role fits into a broader go-to-market structure, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that sit around content and shape how it should be positioned.
The Funnel Blind Spot That Undermines Most Content Teams
Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel activity. It was measurable, it was attributable, and it felt efficient. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was that a lot of what performance marketing appeared to capture was demand that would have converted anyway. We were fishing in a pool we had not stocked.
Content has the same problem, but in reverse. Most content teams invest heavily in top-of-funnel awareness and mid-funnel education, then hand off to sales or paid channels for the close. The result is a content operation that looks productive on traffic dashboards but has a weak connection to revenue.
The better model is a Head of Content who thinks about the full arc. What does someone need to see before they have heard of us? What do they need when they are evaluating options? What content removes friction at the point of decision? That is a different editorial brief than “write something useful about our category.”
There is a useful analogy here. Someone who tries on a piece of clothing in a store is far more likely to buy than someone who browses the rail. Content that gets someone to engage deeply, to return, to share, to reference in a sales conversation, that is the equivalent of the changing room. It moves people from passive awareness to active consideration. A Head of Content who understands that distinction will build a very different content programme than one who is optimising for reach alone.
The BCG commercial transformation framework makes a related point about where growth actually comes from. It is not from capturing existing intent more efficiently. It is from reaching new audiences and creating new demand. Content is one of the few channels that can do both, if it is built with that ambition.
How to Structure the Content Function Around This Role
Structure follows strategy. Before you design the team, you need to know what the content function is trying to achieve and over what time horizon.
In early-stage companies, a Head of Content is often a team of one plus freelancers. The priority is establishing a point of view, building an owned audience, and creating the foundational content assets that support sales. Speed and quality matter more than scale.
In growth-stage companies, the function typically expands to include specialist writers, an SEO-focused content producer, a video or multimedia resource, and increasingly a content operations role to manage workflow and tooling. The Head of Content shifts from doing to directing, which is a transition that not everyone makes cleanly.
In mature organisations, the content function can become a genuine centre of excellence, with embedded content leads across product, sales enablement, and brand. The Head of Content becomes a senior stakeholder in go-to-market planning rather than a delivery resource. That requires a different kind of leader, someone who is as comfortable in a commercial planning meeting as they are reviewing editorial calendars.
Scaling any function without losing what made it effective in the first place is genuinely hard. BCG’s work on scaling agile teams is relevant here, even outside a pure agile context. The principles around preserving quality while growing capacity apply directly to content operations.
The Reporting Line Question Nobody Asks Loudly Enough
Where a Head of Content sits in the org chart shapes almost everything about what they produce and how it gets measured.
Content that reports into brand tends to optimise for consistency, tone, and narrative. That is valuable, but it can drift toward protecting the brand rather than growing the business. The briefs become defensive. The metrics become soft.
Content that reports into demand generation or growth tends to optimise for search visibility, lead volume, and pipeline contribution. That is more commercially grounded, but it can strip out the editorial ambition that makes content genuinely worth reading. The result is technically optimised content that nobody shares and nobody remembers.
The best arrangement I have seen is a Head of Content who reports into the CMO or VP of Marketing with a dotted line to revenue leadership. That dual accountability keeps the function honest. It forces a conversation about commercial outcomes without reducing content to a lead generation machine.
When I was building out agency teams, the content and strategy functions that performed best were the ones where the leader had genuine access to business data. Not sanitised marketing dashboards. Actual commercial performance. They could see what was converting, what was stalling, and where the business needed to grow. That context made every editorial decision sharper.
What to Look for When Hiring
The candidate profile for a Head of Content is specific, and the shortlist gets shorter the more clearly you define it.
Commercial literacy is non-negotiable. They should be able to talk about content in terms of pipeline contribution, audience growth, and revenue influence. If their case studies are all about traffic or engagement without any connection to business outcomes, that is a signal.
Strategic range matters. Can they build a content strategy from scratch? Can they inherit an existing operation and improve it without burning it down? Can they work across SEO, social, video, and long-form without defaulting to their personal preference? The best candidates have range and a point of view.
Comfort with data is essential, but not in a technical sense. A Head of Content does not need to be a data scientist. They need to be able to interpret performance data, identify what it means for editorial decisions, and communicate it clearly to non-marketing stakeholders. Tools like Hotjar and platforms like Semrush give content leaders genuine visibility into how content is performing and where the gaps are. A strong candidate knows how to use that visibility to make better decisions.
Team leadership is obvious but worth stating. A Head of Content will manage writers, editors, freelancers, and often external agencies. They need to give clear briefs, hold quality standards, and develop people. The transition from individual contributor to leader is where many talented content people struggle. Ask specifically about how they have managed underperformance and how they have developed junior talent.
Finally, and this is the one that is hardest to screen for in an interview: the willingness to say no. The best Head of Content I have worked with was someone who would push back on a brief if it did not have a clear business purpose. Not obstructively, not defensively, but with a clear alternative and a better question. That kind of editorial discipline is rare and genuinely valuable.
How to Set This Role Up for Success
Hiring the right person is only half the job. The other half is giving them what they need to operate effectively.
Start with clarity on objectives. What is the content function expected to contribute in the first 90 days, the first year, and over a three-year horizon? Those three time horizons require different activities and different measures of success. If you cannot answer that question before the hire, you will spend the first six months negotiating it retrospectively.
Give them access to commercial data early. Not after they have settled in. From day one. A Head of Content who understands the business model, the customer acquisition economics, and the product roadmap will produce better content faster than one who is working from a brand deck and a content brief.
Build in a feedback loop with sales. Content that is not informed by what sales hears in the field will drift from what buyers actually care about. A regular cadence between the Head of Content and sales leadership, even a monthly 30-minute conversation, will surface the questions, objections, and language that should be shaping editorial decisions.
Video is increasingly part of the content mix, and a Head of Content who dismisses it is working with an incomplete toolkit. Vidyard’s research on video in go-to-market teams points to significant untapped pipeline potential for organisations that integrate video content into their revenue process. That is a strategic conversation the Head of Content should be leading, not reacting to.
Finally, protect the function from becoming a request fulfilment service. Every team in the business will want content. The Head of Content needs the authority to prioritise strategically rather than respond to whoever shouts loudest. That authority has to come from the top. If the CMO or CEO does not visibly back the content strategy, the function will fragment into reactive production and the strategic value will disappear.
There is more on how content fits into the broader commercial picture across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including how to align content investment with acquisition and retention goals at different stages of growth.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
