Senior Manager: Demand Marketing

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Job Description

The Senior Manager: Demand Marketing is the lead who owns and operates the entire Growth Generation & Marketing capability for Digital Channels & Rewards. This role is the translation layer between Business Owner commercial objectives and marketing execution — converting Rewards and Digital Channels targets into integrated marketing strategies, campaign plans, and measurable outcomes across acquisition, engagement, retention, brand, and demand orchestration.
The Senior Manager carries dual accountability: commercial performance (delivering members acquired, activation rates, engagement metrics, and marketing ROI against Business Owner targets) and team capability (building and leading a high-performing marketing team structured around JTBD-aligned roles that can scale across two Business Owners without cannibalisation or resource conflict). This is a working leadership role — the Senior Manager sets strategy, leads the team, and personally owns the Business Owner interface for marketing performance, but also gets into the detail on campaign strategy, channel mix decisions, and spend optimisation when the complexity demands it.
The role operates within the tight-and-loose governance model: the Senior Manager owns marketing strategy, campaign planning, channel execution, and creative direction (tight), while Business Owners own commercial targets, proposition strategy, and use case prioritisation (loose). The Senior Manager is accountable for translating BO objectives into marketing plans and reporting back on performance with a commercial narrative — not for setting the commercial objectives themselves.
The Senior Manager also serves as the primary coordination point between Demand Marketing and the other Product owners & lead pillars within the function: AI Personalisation Products, Data & Insights COE, Data Engineering, and Data Architecture. Marketing execution depends on outputs from all four — segmentation data, personalisation engine recommendations, campaign analytics, and data pipeline reliability — and the Senior Manager must actively manage these internal dependencies to ensure the marketing machine runs.

Key Responsibilities

Marketing Strategy & Commercial Planning

• Own and develop the overarching Demand Marketing strategy for GRiD, translating Rewards and Digital Channels Business Owner objectives into integrated annual and quarterly marketing plans.
• Define the channel strategy and budget allocation across paid search, paid social, display/programmatic, organic/SEO, lifecycle/CRM, adviser, and brand channels — optimising the mix for maximum commercial impact within budget constraints.
• Develop and maintain an integrated annual marketing calendar spanning Rewards and Digital Platform, aligned to retail events,fiscal/regulatory events (Budget Speech, tax year-end), product launches, and adviser cycles.
• Set campaign-level targets (CAC, ROAS, conversion rate, activation rate, retention rate) in alignment with Business Owner commercial objectives, and hold the team accountable for delivery.
• Lead quarterly marketing planning sessions with the Rewards BO and Digital Channels BO, presenting proposed plans, trade-off options, and resource allocation recommendations.
• Identify and prioritise cross-promotion opportunities between Rewards and Digital Platform to maximise incremental value without cannibalisation.
• Define the marketing investment case: justify budget requests with projected ROI, build the commercial narrative for marketing spend, and present to Finance and the Executive.

Team Leadership & Capability Building

• Lead, develop, and performance-manage the Demand Marketing team of 8 direct reports across acquisition, retention, digital growth, campaign operations, creative production, content, and design.
• Build a high-performing team culture centred on commercial accountability, data-driven decision-making, creative excellence, and pace of execution.
• Ensure the team operates as an integrated unit: Rewards acquisition, Digital acquisition, retention, and brand are separate Lead accountabilities, but the Senior Manager ensures they function as a coordinated engine rather than four siloed workstreams.
• Prioritise the Digital Growth & Acquisition Lead hire as the highest-priority recruitment action — this net-new role addresses the historical structural attention deficit for Digital Channels and is critical to the function’s operating model.
• Drive AI tool adoption across the team: ensure the Content & Brand Producer, Content Specialist, and Senior Graphic Designer are actively leveraging AI-powered tools for scalable production, and that adoption targets are met.
• Manage contractor, dedicated, and agency resource allocation: ensure the team has the right capacity at the right time, making trade-off decisions on contractor extensions (, dedicated ownership questions (e.g., Lebogang Mgiba), and agency scope.
• Create career development pathways for team members: structured learning plans, stretch assignments, and progression conversations that retain specialist talent.
• Manage the marketing budget: allocate, track, and optimise spend across media, production, tooling, and agency costs, reporting to the Executive on budget utilisation and efficiency.

Business Owner Interface & Commercial Reporting

• Serve as the primary marketing interface with both Business Owners: the Rewards BO and the Digital Channels BO receive a single, coherent marketing narrative from this role.
• Deliver monthly marketing performance reports to each Business Owner covering acquisition volumes, CAC, ROAS, activation rates, engagement metrics, retention rates, brand health indicators, and marketing ROI — with actionable recommendations.
• Translate raw campaign data into commercial narratives: Business Owners need to understand not just what happened, but what it means commercially and what should change.
• Proactively surface opportunities and risks to Business Owners: emerging audience trends, competitive shifts, channel performance anomalies, and budget implications that require BO awareness or decision.
• Manage priority conflicts between Rewards and Digital Business Owners through transparent trade-off discussions: when both BOs need the same resources or when campaigns risk cannibalisation, the Senior Manager facilitates resolution.
• Establish and maintain structured operating rhythms with each BO: weekly campaign stand-ups, monthly performance reviews, quarterly planning sessions.
• Seek quarterly BO satisfaction feedback and continuously improve the operating relationship.

Cross-Platform Demand Orchestration & Performance Optimisation

• Own the integrated demand generation approach: ensure Rewards and Digital Platform campaigns reinforce each other, cross-promote where appropriate, and present a consistent customer experience regardless of entry point.
• Lead weekly marketing performance reviews with the Lead team: review campaign health, channel performance, spend efficiency, and pipeline coverage — making real-time reallocation decisions.
• Establish a continuous improvement discipline: systematic A/B testing cadence, creative optimisation loops, channel mix experimentation, and marginal CPA analysis.
• Own the marketing technology strategy within Demand Marketing: ensure the MarTech stack (marketing automation, CRM, attribution, analytics) is fit for purpose and evolving to support the function’s ambitions.
• Drive the integration between marketing execution and AI Personalisation: ensure campaign strategies leverage NBA engine outputs, content personalisation recommendations, and dynamic optimisation capabilities.
• Coordinate with the Data & Insights COE on campaign analytics, attribution modelling, and insight delivery — ensuring the marketing team has the data it needs to make decisions.
• Lead post-campaign analysis discipline: ensure every significant campaign has a structured debrief with documented learnings that improve future execution.

Brand Strategy & Adviser Channel Marketing

• Own the marketing function’s relationship with Group Marketing on brand governance: ensure all Demand Marketing output operates within the Group brand architecture and CI guardrails.
• Lead the Rewards and Digital CI execution within marketing outputs, with the Rewards Retention & Engagement and Senior Graphic Designer as the day-to-day executors.
• Coordinate the marketing response to brand CI changes: when the Rewards brand refresh or Digital Platform CI updates land, ensure the team transitions smoothly with updated assets, templates, and guidelines.
• Own the adviser channel marketing strategy: ensure adviser-facing campaigns, materials, and communications receive dedicated attention and are not crowded out by consumer-facing work.
• Partner with distribution teams (L&S) on adviser rollout strategies, launch campaigns, and adoption programmes.
• Manage the coordination mechanism that prevents distributed teams (e.g., bank, segments) from taking Rewards propositions to market outside agreed framing.

Internal Dependencies & Cross-Pillar Coordination

• AI Personalisation Product Lead: coordinate on how NBA, content personalisation, and chatbot outputs integrate into campaign strategies; ensure marketing briefs include personalisation requirements.
• Data & Insights COE Lead: commission campaign analytics, segmentation outputs, and behavioural insights; ensure embedded analysts deliver actionable data to the marketing Leads.
• Data Engineering Lead: escalate data pipeline issues affecting campaign data flows, attribution pipelines, or audience activation.
• Data Architect / Data Steward : align on campaign data taxonomy, UTM governance standards, and POPIA compliance for marketing data processing.
• Technology / Engineering: coordinate on technical dependencies for campaign execution (tracking instrumentation, landing page deployment, app store assets, technical SEO).

Required Skills & Experience

• Tertiary qualification in Marketing, Digital Marketing, Business, Commerce, or a related field. Postgraduate qualification advantageous.
• Minimum 8–12 years of experience in marketing, with at least 3–5 years in a senior marketing leadership role managing multi-channel teams and significant media budgets.
• Proven track record leading marketing functions that deliver measurable commercial outcomes: customer acquisition at target CAC, marketing ROI > 3:1, and demonstrable engagement/retention lift.
• Deep expertise across the full marketing channel mix: paid search, paid social, display/programmatic, organic/SEO, lifecycle/CRM, email, push, in-app, brand, and adviser/intermediary channels.
• Strong commercial acumen: ability to translate marketing metrics into business impact narratives, build investment cases for marketing spend, and negotiate resource allocation with Business Owners.
• Experience leading and developing marketing teams of 6–12 people across specialist roles (performance marketing, lifecycle, brand, creative, content, operations).
• Experience managing marketing budgets of R10m+ per annum with clear spend accountability and ROI optimisation.
• Strong stakeholder management: ability to operate as a trusted commercial partner to Business Owners, presenting performance transparently and managing priority conflicts constructively.
• Experience with marketing technology stacks: marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, attribution tools, and analytics platforms.
• Data-driven marketing mindset: comfort with A/B testing, attribution modelling, marginal CPA analysis, and data-driven budget reallocation.
• Experience in demand generation across both B2C and B2B2C (adviser/intermediary) audiences.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills: ability to produce executive-level reports, present to C-suite, and communicate strategy clearly to diverse stakeholders.

Preferred Experience

• Financial services, loyalty programmes, or rewards ecosystem experience.
• Experience operating in a shared-service or matrix model serving multiple Business Owners simultaneously.
• Familiarity with AI-driven personalisation and how marketing execution integrates with NBA, content personalisation, and dynamic optimisation engines.
• Experience with the tight-and-loose governance model: owning execution within federated commercial accountability.
• Experience leading marketing functions through operating model redesigns or organisational restructures.
• Exposure to SAFe/Agile delivery models and cross-functional squad operating rhythms.

Skills

Accounting, Action Planning, Analytical Thinking, Budget Management, Computer Literacy, Database Reporting, Data Classification, Data Compilation, Data Controls, Data Modeling, Evaluating Information, Executing Plans, Market Analysis, Market Research Analysis, Report Review

Competencies

Business Insight

Collaborates

Communicates Effectively

Cultivates Innovation

Customer Focus

Decision Quality

Manages Complexity

Strategic Mindset

Education

NQF Level 10 – Doctorate

Closing Date

11 May 2026 , 23:59

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

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