Digital Marketing Lead in Edinburgh

This is the digital lead seat at IF. You’ll own paid, performance and social commerce across the agency — the full digital picture, not just one corner of it.

Day-to-day, that means running paid media across Meta, TikTok, Google and beyond, growing our clients’ organic social channels, and scaling their TikTok Shops as a genuine commercial channel. You’ll sit alongside Jo shaping how brand and performance come together, lead the digital team, and front the performance conversations with clients.

It’s hands-on. You’ll be in the platforms, reading the numbers, making the calls. If you want a role where you stay out of the detail and direct from a distance, this isn’t it.

It’s a maternity cover. But we’d rather be upfront: if the right person comes in and makes the seat their own, we want to keep them. The role, the clients and the agency are all growing.

You’ll need to be able to:

• Own the numbers: daily, weekly, monthly performance across paid media, organic social and social commerce. No surprises, no fluff — you know what’s working and what isn’t before anyone asks.
• Run paid properly: budget strategy, planning and optimisation across Meta, TikTok, Google and the wider paid stack — tied to client KPIs and protective of every pound spent.
• Lead awareness and acquisition: joined-up paid and organic social campaigns that actually move the needle, not two teams working past each other.
• Grow social commerce: scale our clients’ TikTok Shops through shop optimisations, affiliates, shoppable content and paid. A real strength of the agency — and a channel you’ll be expected to push further.
• Front the client conversation: monthly performance updates that land. Confidence, clarity, what’s working, what’s next. Clients trust you because you tell them the truth.
• Lead the digital team: support Jo in keeping momentum up, developing the team, and making sure paid, social and commerce pull in the same direction.
• Keep the plates spinning: own the marketing calendar across clients. Multiple brands, multiple plans, nothing dropped.
• Brief creative well: TikToks, Reels, social content, paid assets — good briefs in, good work out. You know the difference between a brief that sets creative free and one that hamstrings it.

THE TICK BOX STUFF:

• 5+ years in paid media and performance marketing, with real hands-on platform experience — not just oversight.
• Strong across the full paid stack: Meta and TikTok essential, Google and programmatic a real plus.
• Solid organic social experience — you understand it, you can brief it, you can measure it.
• Social commerce or TikTok Shop experience a genuine bonus — or deep affiliate/marketplace experience you’ll transfer fast.
• Agency-side experience — you know how to juggle multiple brands without the wheels coming off.
• Confident in front of clients, especially on the hard numbers — you own the story, good or bad.
• Some team leadership or mentoring experience — you don’t need a big title, but you’ve brought people up with you before.
• Comfortable working alongside creative — you see performance and brand as the same job.
• The commute to Altrincham is no bother.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?

• Flexi-working: 60:40(ish) in our swanky Altrincham office
• Annual leave: 25 days from day one, rising a day per year to a max of 30 (if continue after mat cover).
• Health & wellbeing: we’ll contribute toward your gym, meditation app, or nail appointment. Whatever brings you inner peace.
• Team socials: funded fun for everyone, once a quarter.
• Personal development: never stop learning. On us. Annual personal training and development programme.
• Good stuff day: once a year, we do good, together.
• Tuck shop: a fully-stocked, fully-free trolley of good (and not so) stuff.
• The right tool for the job: your very own MacBook Air.
• Friday free at three: after all, what are Fridays made for?

WHO ARE IF.?

We’re a brand commerce agency based in Altrincham. Twenty years in, and an official TikTok Shop Partner, we believe brand and performance should work together — not sit in different rooms — and everything we do runs through our Shift > Engage > Convert framework.

We work with brands like Faith in Nature, YHA, Knowsley Safari, Marston’s, Freshpet and Kärcher. Some for over a decade. That’s not an accident — it’s because we do the work properly, tell clients when there’s a better way of doing something, and back brand thinking with commercial results.

If that sounds like your kind of place, we’d like to hear from you.