Growth & Lifecycle Marketing Manager in Manchester

AIM Smarter is a community-driven technology platform for the promotional products industry, bringing together 2,300+ distributor members, brand partners and modern merch sellers. Underneath it sits AIM iQ, our AI-first platform built to make running a promotional products business faster and easier. From sourcing and live inventory to mock-ups, artwork and intelligent business tools, we are building technology around the way this industry actually works.

We are looking for an experienced growth and lifecycle marketer who knows how to take strong marketing and make sure it reaches the right people, through the right channels, at the right moment. You will own the machinery behind that. That means understanding our audiences deeply, segmenting them properly in HubSpot, building and managing email and CRM journeys, deciding where and how campaigns are distributed, tracking what happens next and using the data to continually improve acquisition, activation, engagement and retention.

You will work closely with our Brand & Culture Strategist and content creation team, who own how AIM sounds, what we stand for and the creative direction of the marketing. They create the signal. You make sure it reaches the right people, and prove whether it worked.

Your non-negotiables

• 3+ years in growth, lifecycle or performance-led marketing, ideally within a SaaS, platform or marketplace business.
• Demonstrable, hands-on HubSpot experience. You should be comfortable personally building and managing lists, segmentation, workflows, email campaigns, lifecycle stages, automation and reporting.
• Strong email and CRM marketing experience, including audience segmentation, behavioural targeting, nurture journeys, testing and optimisation.
• Strong analytical ability. You should be comfortable moving between campaign performance, CRM data, funnels, cohorts and customer behaviour and turning that information into decisions.
• Proven ownership of both acquisition AND retention. You need evidence that you have helped bring people in, helped move them towards conversion, and helped keep them engaged afterwards.

What you would actually be doing

• You will take the audiences AIM Smarter needs to reach and build the infrastructure and strategy for reaching them properly.
• You will own HubSpot as a marketing tool: creating meaningful audience segments, maintaining lifecycle logic, building automated journeys and making sure our CRM data actually informs what marketing we send.
• You will build and optimise email programmes around behaviour rather than simply sending the same campaign to everyone.
• You will decide how campaigns should be distributed across email, paid, organic, partner, event and community channels, based on who we are trying to reach and what we know about them.
• You will map the journey from first interaction through sign-up, activation, engagement, conversion and retention, identifying where people move forward and where we lose them.
• You will measure what happens. Not just opens, clicks and impressions, but whether marketing changed behaviour.
• You will bring those findings back into the business: what worked, what didn’t, who responded, who didn’t, and what we should do differently next time.

The audiences you will be working with

The people we need to reach are not one audience. There is the owner-operator running everything themselves. The established distributor with a sales team. The individual rep inside a member business. The supplier or brand partner on the other side of the marketplace. Different people. Different behaviours. Different reasons to care. Your job is to understand those differences and make sure our marketing reflects them.

Acquisition is only half the job

Getting someone through the door matters. What happens afterwards matters just as much. For AIM iQ, that means understanding the journey from discovering the platform to signing up, sourcing a first product, returning, exploring more of the platform and ultimately making it part of how they work. For the wider AIM Smarter community, it means understanding what keeps members engaged and where there are opportunities to deepen that relationship. 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. You will be expected to understand and influence both.

How you work

You are naturally curious about the numbers behind the marketing. You want to know why one audience responded and another didn’t. Why someone opened but didn’t click. Why people signed up but never came back. Why one segment converts differently from another. You are comfortable getting into HubSpot yourself to find out. You test, learn and adjust rather than relying on assumptions. You can take a lot of information and turn it into a clear decision about what happens next. And while data informs your decisions, you understand that there are real people behind it.

AI is part of how we work

AIM iQ is an AI-first platform and we want our marketing function to work with the same mindset. You should already be comfortable using AI in your own work, whether that is Claude, ChatGPT or equivalent tools, and be curious about how AI can make segmentation, analysis, research, automation and marketing operations smarter. We are interested in people who experiment, learn quickly and find better ways of working.

What AIM Smarter is like

This is an established company with real infrastructure, industry relationships and a large existing community, backed by a listed group. But we are building quickly. The team is connected and departments do not operate in silos. You will work closely with brand, content, product, technology, sales and our US team. This is an in-person role because that proximity matters. You learn by being inside the conversations, decisions and dynamics of the business. Most of our members are in North America, so there will occasionally be later finishes to overlap with our US team and community. There will also be opportunities to travel to industry events in the US and UK. Alongside salary, the role includes a performance bonus linked to the growth and engagement side of the job.

How to apply

Send us your CV. We will be looking closely for evidence of hands-on HubSpot experience, email and CRM marketing, audience segmentation, analytical decision-making and measurable acquisition and retention results. You do not need a particular degree or a perfectly linear career. You do need to be able to show us what you have actually done. AIM Smarter is based in Manchester. This role requires you to be Manchester-based and able to work from 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. 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.