Senior Digital Marketing Manager (Paid)

Brief Overview

Honestly, this is a pretty cool role.

We’re working with one of the UK’s leading leisure businesses, and they’re looking for a Senior Digital Marketing Manager to take ownership of their paid advertising strategy across a really varied mix of events, exhibitions and experiences.

This isn’t a role where you’ll simply be handed a budget and asked to run some campaigns.

You’ll be responsible for the strategy, the budget, the performance and, importantly, understanding how paid media actually contributes to the wider commercial success of the business.

And there’s another reason we think it’s worth a look…

The role is initially a fixed-term contract, but there’s a very strong possibility it will become permanent at the start of the new financial year. So, we’re looking for someone who would be genuinely interested in staying on rather than someone looking for their next short-term freelance project.

So, what will you actually be doing?

Quite a lot! You’ll take the lead on the paid media strategy, managing significant budgets and making sure investment is going where it will have the biggest impact.

That includes:

* Owning the overall paid media strategy and growth plan
* Managing six-figure budgets and making the call on where investment needs to move
* Driving improvements in CPA and ROAS
* Running campaigns across Google Ads, PPC, Meta and other paid channels
* Managing a mixture of big, burst campaigns alongside always-on activity
* Juggling lots of fixed-date campaigns and making sensible decisions when everything seems to be launching at once!
* Developing audience targeting and segmentation
* Working closely with creative teams to make sure campaigns have the right content behind them
* Testing new channels and approaches where the numbers stack up
* Making sure reporting genuinely tells the story of what paid media is delivering
* Getting into the detail around tracking, attribution and conversion
* Working with the digital team on GA4, Google Tag Manager and conversion tracking
* Managing agencies and external partners
* Leading and developing a direct report

What are they looking for?

This is where we’re going to be quite specific. You’ll need seriously strong PPC and Meta experience, and it needs to be hands-on. We’re not looking for someone who has spent the last few years purely managing a strategy from a distance. You’ll have experience of owning a paid media function, setting the strategy and targets, managing six-figure budgets and making decisions based on performance. You’ll also be comfortable with a fast-moving environment where there are lots of campaigns happening at once, often with immovable deadlines.

We’d expect you to have around 8+ years’ performance marketing experience, alongside strong knowledge of:

* Google Ads and Meta Ads
* PPC and paid social
* CPA and ROAS
* Conversion tracking and attribution
* A/B testing
* GA4 and Google Tag Manager
* Paid media reporting and analytics

You’ll also need to be confident working with senior stakeholders and explaining performance in a way that makes sense to people who don’t live and breathe paid media.

Experience in leisure or entertainment? Even better.

If you’ve worked in live entertainment, ticketing, venue marketing, attractions, visitor experiences or events, that would be really useful. But it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker if you haven’t. What matters most is that you understand performance marketing, know your platforms inside out and can connect paid activity with genuine commercial results.

And you?

We’re looking for someone who is calm when things get busy, commercially minded, curious and happy to get stuck into the detail. Someone who can look at a spreadsheet and spot when something doesn’t quite add up. Someone who can talk strategy with senior leaders in the morning and get properly hands-on with a campaign in the afternoon. And someone who enjoys the challenge of working out what makes people click, convert, and ultimately buy.

Salary is around £52,000 to £55,000, and hybrid working is on offer, with three days in the office!

If that sounds like you, we’d definitely like to hear from you.