Head of Growth Marketing in Bristol

Location: Bristol | Hybrid (minimum two days per week in the Bristol office)

Partnership: Exclusive, retained search

Why this role is interesting

• Build the engine from scratch: You will step into a post-launch, pre-product-market fit start-up with a healthy budget and the autonomy to design, test, and scale a multi-channel marketing function.
• A product with true clinical depth: Sylva is not a generic wellness app. It is a highly sophisticated, AI-powered platform built on rigorous clinical evidence, currently on the MHRA Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) regulatory pathway.
• Make a tangible societal impact: Your work will directly determine whether families navigating the complex, stressful UK SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) system get the support they need when they need it most.
• Direct collaboration with the founder: You will report directly to the CEO, Ben Cosh, operating with high accountability, absolute autonomy, and a complete lack of corporate bureaucracy.

About Sylva

Our client, Sylva, is a pioneering UK healthtech start-up. They have built an AI-powered family support platform that helps parents of neurodivergent children navigate SEND systems, school transitions, and daily parenting challenges. Sylva sits in the critical gaps of the current healthcare system. With assessment waitlists stretching from two to five years, and co-occurring conditions like anxiety and burnout placing families under clinical levels of stress, Sylva provides immediate, 24/7, research-backed guidance. Their commercial model is B2G2C. They sell enterprise licences to public sector institutions, NHS integrated care boards (ICBs), local authorities, schools, private medical insurers, and employee benefits platforms. These organisations then distribute Sylva to the families they serve. While they also run a direct-to-consumer channel to refine the product and build a grassroots evidence base, the institutional business is how they scale.

The opportunity

Sylva has spent the last six months testing channels, working with fractional leaders, and using external agencies. They have proven the demand and verified the clinical safety of their platform. Now, they need an in-house marketing owner to bring coherence, structure, and a highly experimental mindset to the entire stack. This is a dual-level marketing challenge. To succeed, you must build credible, evidence-led demand with institutional B2B and B2G commissioners, while simultaneously sparking grassroots pull and community advocacy from the parents using the app. You will inherit a marketing budget of approximately £120,000 to allocate across paid media, PR, events, and tools. Your goal is simple: build a repeatable, predictable marketing machine.

What you will be doing

• Institutional demand generation: Develop and execute a marketing strategy targeting B2B and B2G decision-makers across NHS ICBs, local authorities, multi-academy trusts (MATs), and employee benefits providers. Produce high-quality content, case studies, and collateral that translate Sylva's clinical data and user outcomes into a compelling business case for commissioners. Define and own the quality and volume of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) entering the institutional sales pipeline.
• Grassroots advocacy and brand: Create grassroots demand so that when institutional commissioners hear about Sylva, families in their local area are already actively asking for it. Manage a PR agency to secure earned media across education, health, and parenting trade press, positioning Sylva as the leading voice in neurodiversity support. Maintain a coherent brand narrative that speaks directly to the distinct needs of parents, SENCOs, commissioners, and trust leaders without losing its core identity.
• Rapid experimentation and growth: Run rapid, low-cost marketing experiments across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and community hubs like Reddit to capture problem-unaware and solution-unaware audiences. Work closely with the product and engineering teams to identify growth loops and referral mechanics inside the application itself. Rigorously track attribution, weekly spend, and customer acquisition costs, scaling the experiments that work and immediately killing the ones that do not.

What we are looking for

• Experience: Healthtech, edtech, or govtech background: This is essential. You must understand how public sector buyers think, how public institutions adopt technology, and what makes a business case resonate with a commissioner. Complex or two-sided marketing models: Proven experience marketing to both an institutional buyer (B2B/B2G) and an end-user consumer (D2C) simultaneously. Hands‑on execution: You must be comfortable working as a team of one initially, managing external freelancers and agencies, and diving into the analytical tools yourself.
• Skillset: High data literacy: You think in funnels, cohorts, CAC, LTV, and conversion attribution rather than vanity metrics. Organic community building: A track record of driving grassroots engagement and advocacy, not just relying on paid acquisition. Regulatory comfort: Experience working within a regulated environment where marketing claims must be accurate and language matters.
• Mindset: Comfort with ambiguity: You enjoy the early‑stage start‑up environment where systems are not yet built, categories are undefined, and you are building the plane while flying it. Curious and ego‑free: You prioritise learning and evidence over opinion. In‑office commitment: You value team camaraderie and are genuinely excited to spend at least two days a week in the Bristol office.

What this role is not

• This is not a pure performance marketing role. If your background is solely focused on CPA optimisation, paid media spend, and ROAS spreadsheets, you will find this role frustrating. Brand, community, PR, and institutional pipeline are equally important parts of the mix.
• This is not a purely strategic management role. You will not have a large internal team to delegate to on day one. You will be rolling up your sleeves to write copy, run tests, and analyse data yourself.