Growth Marketing Lead

About RunLoyal

RunLoyal is a vertical SaaS and payments platform for pet care businesses boarding, grooming, training, daycare, and dog parks. We're a growing platform with strong product-market fit and a healthy sales conversion engine.

Our 2026 north star is profitability. The constraint isn't product or sales conversion both are performing. The constraint is top-of-funnel demand, and the leverage point is growth marketing: making the platform legible to the right buyers, in the right channels, at the moment they're searching for a solution and turning every customer into a compounding source of expansion and word of mouth.

We're hiring a Growth Marketing Lead to own that end-to-end.

The Role:

This is a full-stack growth role. Demand and pipeline generation is the #1 priority channel ownership, content strategy, AEO, and the measurement layer that ties them together. Product marketing positioning, launches, sales enablement sits inside this remit, not separate from it.

You'll inherit a foundation. We are laying the measurement layer, channel baselines, and instrumentation over the next 90 days. Your job is to operate that foundation, extend it, and compound it not rebuild it.

It's positioned for a mid-tier growth marketer stepping into a leadership scope. You won't have direct reports on day one. By the end of year one if the work is landing you'll be defining the org structure of a growth team and hiring into it.

This is also a deliberately AI-augmented role. AI has reshaped what a single growth operator can do paid social campaign management, content production, audience research, creative iteration. We expect the person in this seat to operate at that new ceiling, not the old one. Our existing motion already includes AI agents for social outreach, AI-assisted content generation, and AI-driven analytics. The next hire should extend that posture, not relearn it.

What You'll Own:

North Star - Monthly qualified leads

Compounding metric

Net Revenue Retention. Acquisition without retention is leaky-bucket marketing. You'll own the marketing levers that compound revenue from existing customers add-on adoption, customer marketing, expansion content, lifecycle programs.

Leading indicator

Visitor → QL conversion rate, tracked by channel, updated weekly. Per-channel conversion is the dial you control; QL volume is the lagging outcome.

(QL = an ICP-fit business with verified intent typically a demo request that meets our qualification criteria.)

You own Visitor through QL. Sales owns QL through Close. The hand-off is a qualified lead in the CRM.

Responsibilities:

1. Demand and pipeline generation (primary)

• Own the paid and organic channel portfolio paid social, paid search, SEO, email, organic social, partner referrals as a single performance engine
• Run paid social end-to-end with AI-augmented workflows. The Meta ecosystem now lets a single operator do what used to require an agency pod creative variants, audience iteration, copy testing, optimization briefs, all generated and refined with AI in the loop. We expect you to operate at that leverage
• Audit, reallocate, and brief agency partners with data, not opinions
• Stand up new channels as scoped projects AI agents on social and messaging surfaces, website chat, ICP-specific landing pages, competitor comparison pages
• Test new ad surfaces with clean experiment design

2. Content strategy

• Own content as the demand-gen engine, not as a separate function. Every piece of content has a channel destination, a query target, and a measurable conversion path or it doesn't ship
• Plan and execute the editorial calendar across blog, AEO, sales enablement, and product launches
• Use AI tooling to scale production drafts, variants, translations, comparison frameworks at a pace that didn't exist 12 months ago
• Build a content engine that feeds AEO, paid landing pages, and sales conversations as a single connected system

3. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

• Execute our AEO program: canonical FAQ hub, ICP-specific buyer's guides, competitor comparison pages, entity-consistency audit, review mobilization on G2 / Capterra / Software Advice / GetApp
• Earn placements in the third-party category roundups LLMs cite when buyers ask "what's the best software for a dog boarding business"
• Track citation rate against a benchmark query set and lift it quarter-over-quarter

4. Product marketing

• Own positioning, messaging, and the canonical entity description across every owned surface
• Drive launches for new features and add-ons tie launch to in-product discovery, sales enablement, content, and AEO
• Build sales enablement assets that close more of the deals our demo-to-close rate is already creating.

5. Customer marketing, Product Marketing & NRR

• Marketing-led add-on adoption discovery, in-product education, lifecycle email
• Customer storytelling that compounds case studies, video testimonials, community content
• Convert satisfied customers into reviews, referrals, and word of mouth that feeds back into acquisition.

6. Analytics - operate and extend

• Operate the unified GTM dashboard and per-channel Visitor → QL baseline laid by the contractor engagement
• Extend instrumentation to cover NRR-relevant signals add-on adoption funnels, customer marketing engagement, expansion paths
• Weekly GTM scorecard published to the team

What We're Looking For:

Background

• 4–7 years in growth marketing, demand generation, or full-stack product marketing roles at B2B SaaS companies
• Track record of owning a demand gen number QLs, MQLs, pipeline, ARR contribution and moving it. This is the #1 requirement
• Hands-on with HubSpot (or equivalent CRM), GA4, Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads. You don't outsource a UTM audit
• Strong content background you can write the comparison page, brief the agency, and edit the buyer's guide in the same week
• Vertical SaaS, SMB SaaS, or marketplace experience preferred. Pet industry experience not required domain interest is.

AI-native working style

This is non-negotiable. We want someone who:

• Uses LLMs as a daily multiplier content drafts, research, competitive analysis, copy variants, dashboard sketches, customer interview synthesis
• Operates paid campaigns at the new AI-leveraged ceiling, not the agency-era one
• Is comfortable building lightweight agents for outreach, content workflows, or analytics or learning to, fast
• Treats AEO / LLM-search as a core marketing discipline, not a buzzword
• Can write a Claude prompt that produces a usable deliverable in one shot, and knows when to iterate

If your default reaction to "the LLM can probably do this part" is "show me," we want to talk.

Operating posture

• Comfortable in early-stage ambiguity. We have a 90-day plan, not a 3-year playbook
• Strong writer. Most of our buyers research on their phones; the words on a page are the product, often
• Data-driven, but you know when to ship a comparison page on Tuesday rather than wait for the perfect one on Friday
• High agency. You'll have a CEO, a Head of Product, and a Sales lead in your corner but the growth motion will move at the speed you set.

Stretch into leadership

This role is structured so the right person grows into a Head of Growth seat as we scale. By month 12, we'd expect you to:

• Have hired and onboarded 1–2 marketers under you
• Be contributing to board-level GTM reporting alongside the CEO
• Own marketing budget and channel strategy at the company level

If you're a strong growth marketer ready for the next step but not yet handed the keys at your current company, this is the seat for that step.

Tools You'll Use Day-to-Day

Marketing & analytics: HubSpot, GA4, Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, Looker Studio

AI / agents: Claude (extensive), custom agents on social and messaging surfaces

Internal: Notion, Slack, Google Workspace

How to Apply

Send us:

1. A short note on why this role specifically the demand-gen-first, AI-augmented, mid-tier-to-leadership shape of it fits where you are
2. One example of a demand metric you owned and moved, with the specifics (channel, baseline, lift, time)
3. A link to a piece of work you're proud of a comparison page, launch announcement, paid creative system, dashboard, or anything that shows how you think
4. Optional but encouraged: a Claude artifact (prompt + output) that you'd put on the table as evidence of how you work with AI

We read every application. First conversations are a screening call, a 45 minutes with our Head of Product, then a trial brief a single deliverable, scoped to a few hours, that lets both sides see how we'd work together. And finally a working session with the CEO, Head of Product and Head of Sales.

RunLoyal is a small, high-trust team. We move fast, we tell each other the truth, and we don't waste each other's time. If that's the environment you do your best work in, we'd love to hear from you.