Chief Marketing Officer

Compensation: £75,000 plus performance bonus and other incentives

Location: London, UK

Virtue Vets is a premium chain of modern veterinary clinics offering high quality of general and advanced vetcare in neighbourhood clinics. We are on the web and on Instagram.

Role Overview

We are looking for a startup Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to own and scale marketing in an explosive manner. This is a hands‑on leadership role at a startup, ideal for someone who can think, plan and do rapidly. High‑energy, intense motivation and an eye for detail are a must. You must care about the business, like it is your own. You must live and breathe client acquisition, revenue growth and ROAS.

Prior Experience

You must have held a CMO or Marketing Director title before. You must have scaled a similar D2C or consumer services startup with physical/retail and digital presence. A good example of such a company is Third Space. Direct experience in gyms, dental or aesthetic clinics, spas, hospitality, events planning or with members clubs is required.

Overall Responsibility

You will be responsible and accountable for devising, planning and executing marketing initiatives, in order to drive revenue and client engagement. This role carries responsibility for client acquisition, increasing per client revenue and maintaining client retention. Our marketing is multi‑channel role and you will lead our team who work across all digital and traditional marketing channels.

Collaboration

The CMO will work closely with Strategy, Clinical, Operations, Technology and Finance functions to ensure Marketing is tightly aligned with business objectives and growth targets.

Brand

You will be responsible for refining and elevating our brand identity, and for clearly articulating our differentiated positioning and value proposition to prospective and existing clients.

Data Literacy & Analytics

You must be a natural at consuming and analysing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data to draw insights. You must be good at extrapolating anecdotal data where no large datasets exist. You must have mastery over interpreting data from Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite and various other paid search reporting tools. You must know how to measure marketing spend and impact on a highly granular level. You must have deep experience with A/B testing.

Budget & ROI

You will be responsible for managing the marketing budget and showing evidence of high ROI. You must be motivated to do more with less. You should consistently find ways to improve functional cost and efficiency. You must understand how to measure and improve ROAS. You must be fully conversant with the usual KPIs - CPS, CPC, CAC, LTV and churn measurement.

First Principles Thinking

Given the nascent and evolving nature of marketing to pet parents, you must appreciate the importance of quick trial‑and‑error marketing. You must nimbly adapt strategy and tactics based on experiments. Instead of simply applying generic marketing techniques, you must devise new and bespoke ways of reaching and influencing pet parents. For this, you must naturally have a scientific approach to marketing and be aware of the latest academic and professional research and trends in this area.

Presence

You must be physically present at our clinics, to absorb the richness of detailed information and to study the nuances associated with client acquisition and engagement. Given the high‑energy and tactile nature of our environment, an active and hands‑on approach is needed, and you must do the heavy lifting.

Responsibilities

• You must be a pet parent with experience in the UK market - someone who understands the pain points, selection criteria and the main customer journeys - through their lived experience and that of other pet parents they know.
• Devise a strategy that integrates all our marketing channels factoring in the rationale for each and the strong interplay between those channels.
• Data‑driven assessment of each channel's efficacy, to reallocate spend and resources.
• Have expert level understanding of the latest SEO, Instagram and Google Search algorithms. You must be an expert at paid search.
• Analyse data from Meta Business Suite alongside data sources linked to other channels and paid search.
• Provide creative direction and curation to generate eye‑catching and captivating content. Choice of words, images, videos and other creative decisions are very important for our brand, and you must critically evaluate if the chosen content projects our brand effectively through all channels.
• Upgrade our website and continually improve customer journeys using data.
• Run effective e‑mail and communications campaigns.
• Have extensive social media and video ads experience, beyond having been an SMM.
• Events, street marketing and tours are an important pillar of our strategy, and you must be able to plan, curate and execute a high impact events calendar which represents our brand and leads to client acquisition.
• You must know how, when and where to deploy outdoor advertising and leafletting to create local awareness.
• You must be able to identify and create accretive synergistic collaborations with impactful influencers and local businesses.
• You must lead our PR strategy in order to raise our profile in the broader market.

Tools

• Meta Business Suite
• Google Analytics
• Excel
• Powerpoint
• WhatsApp
• Mailchimp for comms
• Hubspot, Zoho or other CRM tools
• IVR, Chatbots and other CRM automation
• Good understanding of how APIs work

Why Join

• Executive‑level ownership and influence
• Ability to shape the company’s growth story
• Build something meaningful from the inside
• High autonomy, high impact, high expectations, high rewards