Marketing Manager

Manchester

Brand & Marketing team

Established PLC

Salary depending on experience, plus performance bonus

AIM Smarter is a community-driven technology platform for the promotional products industry. 2,300+ distributor members, brand partners, and modern merch sellers, all under one roof.

AIM iQ is the platform underneath it, and it is AI-first: sourcing across a curated network in seconds rather than an afternoon, live inventory, mock-ups generated without waiting on a designer, artwork made print-ready automatically. It is a $28 billion industry served mostly by small, fiercely capable independent businesses. Most of them are still quoting from spreadsheets and chasing stock on the phone.

We are growing. We need someone to own how that growth happens.

What this role is

This is not a campaign delivery job. It is not a brand role. And it is not a job where someone else owns the number.

There are two halves to it and they carry equal weight. The first is reach, the people we need to reach are not one audience. The new entrant solo owner-operator, the seasoned ten-person distributor with a sales floor, the rep inside a member business, the brand partner on the other side of the marketplace. Four different buyers, four different reasons to care, four different campaigns.

The second is depth. The moment a distributor lands on the platform or in the network, looks around, and decides whether this changes how they work or becomes another tab or membership they never use.

“Acquisition without adoption is a leaking bucket you keep paying to fill. Adoption without acquisition is a very good product too few people have found. This role owns both.”

You will work closely with our Brand & Culture Strategist, who owns how AIM sounds and what we stand for. She sets the story. You decide how it reaches people, and whether it worked.

What you would actually be doing

Building and running the acquisition programme end to end through paid, organic, email, partner, events and community. Briefing it, building it, launching it, measuring it, and killing the parts that are not working. Segmenting properly, so that the sole trader and the ten-person distributor are not receiving the same message.

Redesigning the journey from sign-up to first sourced product, first quote and first order, and instrumenting every step of it. Building the lifecycle and in-product programmes that drive feature adoption, extra seats, and the move from free to paid. Owning the engagement numbers and reporting them honestly, including in the months they go the wrong way.

Turning what you learn from members into something the product team can act on, and turning what the Brand & Culture Strategist gives you into campaigns that land.

The kind of person this is actually for

You have spent three or more years marketing a SaaS, platform or marketplace product, and you already think in funnels, cohorts, activation and churn. We are not going to teach you that.

You have owned both halves — acquisition and engagement. This is not a role where you can be strong at one and passable at the other. We will test both, separately.

You use AI in your own work every day, not occasionally. We will ask what is in your stack, what it replaced, and what you tried that did not work.

You are fluent across a modern tech stack including Claude (or equivalent) and HubSpot.

You have the temperament for a small, connected team. There are no layers here and nobody else to build the campaign for you. What you contribute to acquisition shows up in the community. What the brand team shapes shows up in your campaigns.

You do not need a degree. You need evidence that you have moved a number, and the ability to show us how you did it.

What AIM is like

It is an in-person role because the work requires immersion. You learn by being inside the conversations, the decisions and the dynamics. The team is connected, and departments do not operate in silos here.

This is an established company with real infrastructure and industry relationships, backed by a listed group. But it has huge goals, and it wants people with the drive to help shape that.

Most of our members are in North America, so it’s not unusual to find yourself finishing later to overlap with them and our US team, and you would travel to industry events in the US and the UK a few times a year. Alongside the salary there is a performance bonus, split evenly between the acquisition and the engagement side of the job, and access to a technical team to build an AI-native marketing function properly.

How to apply

Send your CV, but do not let it do all the talking. Alongside it, send us half a page or better still a short video on one campaign or programme you owned end to end. What you were trying to move, what you did, and what actually happened. Including the parts that did not work.

We are far more interested in how you think than in a cover letter.

AIM Smarter is based in Manchester. This role requires you to be Manchester-based and in the office. Remote applications will not be considered. Applicants must have the right to work in the UK; we are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

AIM Smarter is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from every background and are glad to make reasonable adjustments at any stage — just tell us what you need.

Equals One is an advertising and recruitment agency working on behalf of our client to promote this vacancy. You may be contacted directly by the employer should they wish to progress your application. Due to the number of applications we receive, we are unable to provide specific feedback if your application is unsuccessful.

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Marketing Manager