Senior Growth Strategist

Location: Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa About Advantage HQ Advantage HQ sits at the intersection of performance marketing and creator-driven growth. We manage more than $850 million in annual media spend across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, run 80,000+ creator partnerships every month across a network of 400,000+ influencers, and use Meteoric AI, our proprietary intelligence platform, to power discovery, outreach, whitelisting, and creative decision-making at scale. We are trusted by more than 200 high-growth DTC brands across beauty, wellness, lifestyle, and health. Our team of 100+ growth operators, strategists, analysts, and creatives drives meaningful bottom-line impact through performance creative, paid media, influencer marketing, and conversion optimization. Advantage HQ is not just an agency. We are a scalable growth platform with a proven track record, an ambitious team, and a culture built for A-players. The Role We are looking for a Senior Growth Strategist to own the growth, performance, and strategic direction of a portfolio of high-growth consumer brands. You will be expected to understand each client’s business, identify the highest-leverage growth opportunities, and mobilize a cross-functional team to execute against them. Working across paid media, creative strategy, influencer marketing, offers, funnels, and conversion optimization, you will turn fragmented marketing activities into a focused and executable growth strategy. You will lead cross-functional growth pods, partner directly with founders and senior marketing leaders, and make sure the right decisions are made quickly. When performance is strong, you will identify how to scale it. When performance falls behind, you will diagnose the issue, build the recovery plan, and drive it through to execution. Success in this role means your clients grow, your relationships compound, and the teams around you consistently operate at a higher level. What You Will Own Client Growth Strategy Own the growth strategy for a portfolio of high-growth DTC brands. Develop a deep understanding of each client’s business model, economics, customer, products, positioning, and competitive landscape. Translate business goals into actionable growth roadmaps across paid media, creative, creators, offers, funnels, and conversion optimization. Identify the highest-leverage initiatives that can materially improve revenue, customer acquisition, profitability, and scale. Build quarterly growth plans with ambitious targets, clear priorities, and measurable outcomes. Continuously evolve the strategy based on performance data, customer insights, creative learnings, and changes in the market. Performance and Commercial Outcomes Take direct ownership of client performance, retention, and portfolio growth. Identify opportunities to profitably increase media spend, expand into new channels, improve monetization, and deepen the client relationship. Understand the commercial mechanics behind growth, including CAC, MER, ROAS, contribution margin, conversion rate, average order value, retention, and payback period. Turn complex performance data into clear decisions and decisive actions. Challenge assumptions, surface risks early, and prevent accounts from drifting without a strategy. Success will be measured by outcomes, not by the number of meetings held or reports delivered. Cross-Functional Pod Leadership Lead cross-functional growth pods spanning paid media, creative strategy, influencer marketing, project management, ad operations, and conversion optimization. Create clarity around the strategy, priorities, responsibilities, and next actions for every client. Run high-quality weekly growth meetings focused on performance, decisions, accountability, and removing blockers. Ensure that the team is not merely completing tasks, but executing against a coherent growth thesis. Raise the quality and speed of thinking across the pod. Hold team members accountable while creating an environment in which strong operators can do their best work. You may not directly manage every person in the pod, but you will be responsible for aligning them and driving the collective output. Testing and Growth Execution Build a consistent pipeline of high-impact tests across creative, paid media, offers, landing pages, funnels, and creator-led acquisition. Increase testing velocity without sacrificing strategic quality. Partner with creative strategists to translate customer insights and performance data into stronger concepts, angles, hooks, and formats. Partner with paid media teams to improve campaign structure, budget allocation, scaling decisions, and overall efficiency. Work with influencer and creator teams to identify opportunities for high-performing content, whitelisting, and scalable creator partnerships. Ensure that successful tests are scaled quickly and unsuccessful tests generate useful learnings. Eliminate bottlenecks. Nothing important should sit idle because ownership is unclear or a decision has not been made. Client Leadership Become a trusted strategic partner to founders, executives, and senior marketing leaders. Lead client conversations with clarity, confidence, commercial judgment, and a strong point of view. Communicate proactively, particularly when performance changes, risks emerge, or a significant opportunity is identified. Deliver sharp weekly updates that explain what happened, why it happened, what the team is doing, and what comes next. Lead monthly and quarterly reviews that create conviction in the strategy rather than simply recapping historical performance. Strategic Communication Ensure clients and internal leadership always understand where performance stands, what matters most, and what actions are being taken. Present strategies in a way that is commercially compelling, analytically grounded, and easy to act on. Communicate with urgency and precision. Avoid vague updates, unnecessary complexity, and reporting that does not lead to decisions. Share winning strategies, patterns, and learnings across the organization so that every pod benefits from what is working. What We Are Looking For 5+ years of experience in growth strategy, performance marketing, e-commerce, paid acquisition, or a closely related discipline. Proven experience owning growth outcomes for meaningful DTC or consumer brand portfolios. A strong understanding of paid social, performance creative, customer acquisition, offers, landing pages, and conversion optimization. Experience working with significant advertising budgets and making commercially important decisions. The ability to interpret performance data and convert it into clear strategic actions. Strong knowledge of metrics such as CAC, MER, ROAS, contribution margin, conversion rate, average order value, retention, and payback period. Experience leading cross-functional teams or pods in a fast-moving environment. Confidence working directly with founders, executives, and senior client stakeholders. A track record of retaining and growing client relationships through strong thinking and execution. Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. A high degree of ownership, urgency, judgment, and personal accountability. Ideal Experience Experience working with high-growth DTC brands across beauty, wellness, health, lifestyle, consumer subscriptions, or e-commerce. Experience at a leading performance marketing agency, growth consultancy, consumer brand, or high-growth technology company. Experience managing multiple brands while maintaining a high strategic standard across the portfolio. Experience scaling brands from early traction to significant monthly revenue and media spend. Experience integrating paid media, creative, influencer marketing, CRO, and offer strategy into one growth plan. Experience leading executive-level business reviews and difficult performance conversations. Experience improving account retention, expanding client relationships, or identifying new revenue opportunities. Experience using AI, automation, and modern analytics tools to improve decision-making and operating leverage. You Will Probably Love This Role If... You want to own outcomes rather than simply advise from the sidelines. You think like a founder and treat every client’s business as though it were your own. You naturally look for the constraint preventing a business from growing faster. You are equally comfortable analyzing a performance dashboard, challenging a creative strategy, and leading a conversation with a CEO. You enjoy turning ambiguity into a clear strategy and an executable plan. You move quickly, communicate directly, and dislike watching opportunities sit idle. You believe the best client relationships are built through results, strong judgment, and proactive leadership. You are competitive and want your portfolio to outperform every other portfolio in the company. You want to work with ambitious brands, meaningful budgets, exceptional operators, and a platform capable of executing at scale. This Role Is Probably Not for You If... You prefer to coordinate work rather than take responsibility for the outcome. You need someone else to tell you what the strategy should be. You rely on reporting activity instead of making decisions. You avoid difficult conversations when performance is behind plan. You are comfortable allowing deadlines, opportunities, or client concerns to drift. You see paid media, creative, influencer marketing, and CRO as separate departments rather than interconnected growth levers. You blame execution teams when results fall short instead of leading the recovery. You are looking for a predictable corporate environment with limited accountability. What Success Looks Like Your clients achieve measurable improvements in revenue, acquisition efficiency, profitability, and scale. Your portfolio meets or exceeds its growth, retention, and commercial targets. Clients see you as an indispensable strategic partner rather than an external service provider. Growth opportunities are identified early and converted into action quickly. Every client has a clear strategy, a strong testing roadmap, and an aligned cross-functional team. Your pods operate with urgency, accountability, and a consistently high standard of execution. Performance issues are surfaced and addressed before they become relationship problems. Winning strategies and learnings are shared across Advantage HQ, raising the standard of the entire organization. Compensation & Location $180,000 to $320,000 USD in total annual compensation, including base salary, performance bonus, and equity. Fully remote. We have built the infrastructure for high-performance distributed teams and trust our people to do their best work from wherever they work best. North America preferred, specifically the United States or Canada. If you are excited by the opportunity to own the growth of ambitious consumer brands, lead exceptional cross-functional teams, and operate with the accountability of a business owner, we would love to hear from you.