About us

SMG is an award-winning network of specialist commerce agencies - Threefold, Capture and our tech led agency, Plan-Apps. At SMG, our people are at the heart of everything we do and we are proud to provide opportunities for career growth, recognising and rewarding great work, and doing this within an inclusive, highly flexible, and innovative environment.

We are dedicated to support our employees to be the best version of themselves both inside and outside of work. We have an extraordinary culture built by exceptional people and it’s because of this that we’ve been recognised by Best Companies within the top 5 best Marketing & Media agencies to work for, with a World Class and Outstanding accreditation across the past 2 years.

Across the group, we have a shared mission to lead connected commerce marketing.

Read a summary of what each of our agencies do here!

The role

We are looking for a Client Director to join us and work on one of our exciting retailer partnerships. This role will see you manage a portfolio of FMCG brand clients alongside building stakeholder relationships with our retailer partner. You will be accountable for creating market leading retail media campaigns; from initial strategy development and briefing, through to implementation and evaluation.

What you'll be doing

We pride ourselves on creating challenging and exciting opportunities, meaning that no two days are the same. However, here's an idea of what your responsibilities will look like:

• Business leadership: You will be responsible for supporting and defining the direction of the team and setting the agenda for where they focus their time. You will constantly be seeking out ways to build our client base, growing revenue over time and ensuring we grasp every new business opportunity. You will also be focussed on improving processes and the way we do business, enabling us to be more efficient.
• Commercial leadership: You will have significant commercial responsibility, ensuring that a clear plan is in place to support the team with delivering against the internal and external targets. You will also play a key role in developing the annual budget so experience in commercial forecasting and P&L budget management are essential.
• Team management: You will lead a talented team of direct reports, who could range in level from Client Associate to Senior Client Manager. This will be all-encompassing, from creating and managing their workplans, through to performance reviews and delivering on the job coaching. You will need to continually assess the team structure and resource levels in line with business growth. You will play an active role in recruitment.
• Client / partner management: You will support the team with building solid relationships with our clients, being ultimately responsible for delivering a great client service that closes business and ensures continued loyalty. In our business, you always have two sets of clients – our retailer partner and our branded clients. You need to be able to always land a solution that delivers for both, navigating your way through potentially complex situations and managing relationships with a number of senior stakeholders. Understanding the business needs of both our partner and our clients are critical.
• Campaign execution: You will be responsible for ensuring fantastic quality of output from your team in executing brilliant campaigns that embody our proposition of creative thinking and precision planning. A key part of this role is building relationships with Marketing to push the boundaries on the campaigns that we can deliver, including the development of the retailer media estate from in-store to online to our first party data proposition.
• Campaign analysis: We have an in-house insight team who will evaluate every campaign we deliver, it will be your responsibility to ensure the team are delivering these results to our clients in a timely manner whilst also taking learnings forward to inform future campaigns. You should be comfortable with evaluation metrics including ROI, sales uplift and impressions.
• Cross-team collaboration and communication: Your team will work alongside a number of others in the business. It will be your responsibility to ensure that you work collaboratively with your counterparts in other business areas, ensuring effective communication and that the team operates smoothly as one unit.
• Contribution to organisational projects: We are a young business, growing fast. Our ambition is to create the company that everyone would like to work for. Whether it’s leading our training and development efforts, managing our PR and marketing agenda, or helping us find the next generation of talent for our business, our expectation is that you’ll get stuck in and help us to build an outstanding business.

What you'll need to have / be

We are looking for an experienced hire who can demonstrate clear industry knowledge and expertise. We are seeking someone with significant client facing, commercial and business leadership experience, likely from a marketing, sales or media background. Previous experience in planning and executing commerce media campaigns could be an advantage.

Specifically, the candidate must be able to demonstrate:

• Coaching and development of a high performing team.
• A proven track record in delivering business growth in a fast-paced, challenging environment.
• Significant experience in a client or customer facing role.
• Strong commercial acumen, able to work seamlessly with data & financial reporting.
• Flawless attitude at all times in all environments, with a strong will to succeed.
• The ability to work with multiple senior stakeholders to deliver best in class client service, at all times.

P.s. we try really hard to make sure that we list only essential criteria here, BUT if you think you can do an amazing job, yet don't have every single thing on this list, we'd still love to hear from you.

The best bits

Here at SMG we are dedicated to continuously reviewing and improving our benefits package to offer the best that we can for our people. We have a whole page dedicated to our benefits here, but here's some of our favourites...

💰 Generous discretionary bonus scheme

🧘‍♂️ £1,200 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!) towards your personal wellbeing and passions

🫶 4 additional Wellbeing Days - one to be taken each quarter, dedicated to focusing on your wellbeing

📚 £500 yearly “Uni Fund” towards learning and development

🎧 Free headspace subscription

🕐 4pm Friday finishes all year round

🥳 Two fully paid conferences a year at Summer & Winter, as well as a dedicated team that put on activities and celebrations throughout the year

The process

1. We will invite you to a first interview which we try to keep relatively informal, so it gives you the opportunity to share your authentic self. The hiring team will be looking to understand more about your experience and why you're interested in working with us.
2. There will be a second interview which will last a little longer, and involve some form of task to showcase your ability to do the role.
3. We then invite you to a meet & greet which is an opportunity for you to meet the team you'll be joining and ask them questions about the role and wider business.

🌟 Helping you shine 🌟

We are committed to helping you shine and show your full potential by making any changes you might need throughout your application. If you need an alternative way of applying for this role, support with understanding the role and its requirements, changes to be made to the way we hold our interviews, or anything else, then please reach out to us. You can either let us know on your application form or contact the people team to discuss how we can help on careers@smg.team.

🤝 SMG are proud to be an equal opportunities employer 🤝 

We are fully committed to providing equality in the workplace and ensure all opportunities for, and during employment, will be afforded to individuals fairly and irrespective of age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race including colour, ethnic or national origins and nationality, religion or belief or sexual orientation ("the protected characteristics"). We want our organisation to reflect the diversity of our communities and we welcome applications from people from all backgrounds. More information on what we are doing can be found here.

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