Director of Marketing

Responsibilities

• The relationship. You are the face of MakePop to that client. You run the meeting cadence: set it, prep it, lead it, follow up on it.
• The strategy sprint. You run the engagement-opening sprint that produces the client's ICP, problem set, positioning, and offer. Our COO is in every sprint you run as your backstop. That does not go away once you are ramped, it is how we hold the bar and how the sprint itself keeps getting better.
• The marketing plan. You turn the sprint into the plan, and you own the plan as it changes.
• Orchestration of execution. Creative, media buying, paid social and search, influencer, email and SMS, e-commerce. You direct all of it. There is no team of specialists reporting to you, that is deliberate, and it is the whole idea of the company. Today part of the work runs through our AI platform and the rest runs through our founders and engineers. Your job is to direct that work, not to staff it and not to perform it. You are not the person building campaigns inside ad manager, and you will not become that person when the platform falls short. Our COO backstops that, so you stay on the client and the plan.
• The playbook behind the work. For everything the platform does not do yet, you decide how it should run, get it run, and write it down. Those playbooks are what engineering turns into product.
• Analysis and the story it tells. You read the numbers, decide what they mean, and tell the client a clear story about what happened and what we do next.
• Client comms and access. Accounts, data, assets, approvals. You keep the engagement unblocked.
• Project management of the work. With the platform doing the heavy lifting on tracking and follow-through.
• Carrying a book that size is only possible because the platform does the work an agency normally throws bodies at. Your job is to be the judgment on top of it.
• What you answer for is retention. Not hours logged or deliverables shipped. Whether the founder feels real momentum and keeps paying us. Loop throughput and performance economics are how you get there, and how we see trouble coming, but the number that matters is whether your brands stay.

Requirements

• Analysis. You can pull performance data apart yourself and reach a defensible conclusion. This is the single hardest thing to teach and we are not going to teach it.
• Fluency in the metrics that drive decisions. ROAS, CPA, contribution and gross margin, LTV, and how an attribution model shapes what you are looking at. Not platform metric trivia: whether Meta is counting a link click or an ad click, impressions versus ad views, Meta's default attribution window against GA4's model, the technical definition of impression share. Nobody will quiz you on that. Knowing it is the platform's job, and telling you when it changes your read is also the platform's job.
• Creative judgment. Given eight ad concepts you can say "one and two, combined with the hook from six" and be right. Your first instinct is audience, offer, pricing, persona. ROAS and CTR are how you find out whether you were right, not how you decide.
• Concreteness. You can turn a strategy into this brand's next three tests. Frameworks and positioning decks are where your work starts, not where it ends.
• Feedback our engineers can build from. You are the first person outside the founders to run this platform, so what you report is what gets built. We need it specific and prioritized: what you were trying to do, where it broke, what the workaround cost you, and how often it happens. Not "it's clunky." You will have a direct line to the engineers and a standing slot to use it, and using it well is a requirement of the job rather than a favor you do us when there is time.
• Storytelling, in two directions. You help the brand tell its story to its market, and you tell the results story to the client and to us.
• Client rapport that survives bad news. Clients trust you because you are straight with them, not because you say yes to everything. You never overcommit. Nothing escalates past you.
• Being energized by people. Client calls should be the good part of your week. If another call on the calendar makes you wince, this is the wrong job.
• Working AI-first. You already reach for AI to do the work, not to make the work look done. You are willing to abandon a way of working you are good at because a better one exists.
• Translation. You can put any of it in plain language for a founder who is not a marketer.

Preferred

• - CPG or health & wellness experience
• - Agency or fractional experience across multiple concurrent brands
• - Utah based, or comfortable with meaningful early time working closely with our team in Mountain time