POSITION DESCRIPTION
PAID SOCIAL DIRECTOR
About Us
We are a digital performance marketing agency for fashion, lifestyle and beauty brands.
With over a decade of experience, we’ve earned the trust of premium brands and retailers, and are leading the way in e-commerce growth. Our team of deep thinkers and creative minds are united in delivering exceptional results for our clients. We’re expanding our client portfolio and are looking for thoughtful digital marketers to join us!
The Opportunity:
The Paid Social Director is responsible for leading Thoughtful’s paid social capability across strategy, execution, innovation, and commercial impact. This role ensures paid social (primarily Meta, with a strong command of TikTok, Pinterest, and other major platforms) drives scalable growth for ecommerce-focused clients, while evolving Thoughtful’s offering, standards, and reputation in the market.
The role blends deep channel expertise with leadership, client influence, and commercial accountability - acting as a senior strategic partner to clients and a key contributor to agency growth.
Key Responsibilities:
Paid Social Strategy & Channel Leadership
- Own and evolve Thoughtful’s paid social strategy across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and all other major platforms, with a strong ecommerce and performance lens.
- Define best-practice frameworks for account structure, creative testing, media scaling, and measurement.
- Lead strategic planning for key Tier 1 ecommerce clients, ensuring paid social aligns with broader growth objectives.
- Partner with the Chief Growth Officer to shape paid social as a core driver of agency differentiation and growth.
Client Leadership & Commercial Impact
- Act as senior strategic lead on nominated Tier 1 client accounts, providing clear, confident counsel on growth opportunities.
- Lead paid social components of QBRs, growth roadmaps, and performance reviews.
- Identify and support upsell opportunities (creative testing, CRO, new platforms, incrementality testing).
- Ensure paid social performance directly contributes to client retention, satisfaction, and commercial outcomes.
Team Leadership & Capability Building
- Lead, mentor and develop the paid social team, building depth across strategy, execution, and optimisation.
- Set clear standards, expectations, and development pathways for Paid Social Managers and Specialists.
- Support the Performance Director and Head of Ops with resourcing, workflow planning, and capability scaling.
- Foster a high-performance, curious, and test-and-learn culture within the team.
Innovation, Testing & Platform Leadership
- Stay ahead of platform changes, ecommerce trends, and privacy/measurement shifts.
- Design and oversee structured testing frameworks across creative, audiences, formats, and bidding strategies.
- Build strong relationships with platforms and publishers, ensuring early access to betas and innovations.
- Collaborate with Creative and Strategy teams to evolve paid social creative thinking and performance storytelling.
Data, Measurement & Thoughtful Index
- Champion data-led decision making, ensuring paid social performance is clearly measured and communicated.
- Leverage Thoughtful Index and internal reporting frameworks to articulate impact beyond ROAS alone.
- Support experimentation around incrementality, MMM inputs, and advanced attribution where relevant.
Qualifications and Experience:
- 7-10 years experience in paid social / performance marketing within an ecommerce-focused agency.
- Extensive expertise leading Meta-first growth strategies for DTC or ecommerce brands at scale, and comprehensive experience across all major paid social platforms such as TikTok, Pinterest and Reddit.
- Demonstrated leadership experience managing and developing high-performing paid social teams.
- Strong commercial acumen with experience influencing client growth, retention, and upsell.
- Experience working with complex ecommerce setups (catalogues, feeds, creative volume, lifecycle marketing).
- Tertiary qualification in Marketing, Business, or related discipline preferred.
Skills and Competencies:
- Deep expertise across all major paid social channels (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.), with an emphasis on Meta, and a strong understanding of all key platforms to drive strategy, diagnose performance, and manage team execution.
- Strong strategic thinker with the ability to translate performance data into clear growth narratives.
- Confident client communicator, able to influence senior stakeholders.
- Commercially minded, balancing performance outcomes with profitability and scalability.
- Collaborative leader who thrives in cross-functional environments.
- Curious, adaptive, and forward-thinking in a fast-evolving media landscape.
- Alignment with core company values.
Measures of Success:
- Paid social channels consistently deliver strong, scalable performance for ecommerce clients.
- High client satisfaction, retention, and trust at a senior stakeholder level.
- Clear growth in paid social capability, team confidence, and strategic maturity.
- Successful adoption of new platforms, formats, and testing methodologies.
- Contribution to agency revenue growth through upsell and retention.
- Paid social recognition internally and externally as a core Thoughtful strength.
What’s on offer
We love the thrill of agency life – it’s fast-paced, dynamic, and rewarding. We appreciate the challenges too, so we value work-life balance and approach everything thoughtfully. Other reasons our team loves working at Thoughtful include:
- Opportunity to advance your career as the company grows
- Regular in-house training from industry leaders
- Performance incentives for exceptional work
- Flexible working options and wellness leave
- Generous gifts from awesome clients
- Regular social events and free Mecca coffee all day!
Our hiring approach
We’ve designed our recruitment process to be open, supportive, and thoughtful of your time.. Each stage is an opportunity for us to get to know each other better and make informed decisions. We’ll typically follow the steps below:
- Screening: Our hiring team will review your CV, cover letter, and screening questions.
- Technical Interview: We’ll go deep on your technical skills, experience, and special talents. You may be asked to do a case study or take-home task, but we’ll let you know beforehand.
- Culture-Fit Interview: This interview is designed to help us assess alignment on core values and ways of working.
- Reference Checks and Offer: At this final stage, we’ll do reference checks with two contacts before extending you an offer.
Don’t tick all the boxes?
While a stellar CV and experience are important, we care more about you, the person. If you’re passionate about e-commerce and digital marketing and delivering exceptional client results, we’d love to hear from you.
