Director, Performance & Lifecycle Marketing

Hometown Soccer Holdings; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Hometown Soccer Holdings is expanding its performance and lifecycle marketing leadership to drive fan acquisition, conversion, and renewals across its MLS NEXT Pro club portfolio. This hands-on Director will set paid media strategy, own attribution with data partners, and build local playbooks for club markets, while central teams support scale.

The role requires deep experience in paid media and lifecycle programs, measurement, and the ability to translate playbooks into fast, effective

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in performance, growth, or lifecycle marketing with direct hands-on ownership of both paid media and email.
• Demonstrated management of meaningful paid budgets across paid social, search, and programmatic channels.
• Experience building and operating lifecycle programs in a marketing automation or email service platform such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Attentive, or Iterable.
• Proven ability to build an attribution and measurement point of view and defend it to senior leadership.
• Experience managing agencies and vendors against clear performance standards.
• Comfort operating as both strategist and executor, building campaigns rather than only planning them.
• Experience writing playbooks or operating standards that other teams executed successfully.
• Experience in sports, ticketing, live entertainment, or membership and subscription businesses is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own paid media strategy, channel mix, and optimization across the portfolio and for each individual club.
• Plan, build, and optimize paid social, search, programmatic, and retargeting campaigns.
• Set club-level media budget guidance and hold spend accountable to defined outcomes.
• Manage media agency and vendor relationships: briefs, standards, performance reviews, and the build-versus-buy call.
• Define the campaign execution standards every market operates within, including tracking, naming, and lead-source conventions.
• Own email marketing execution across all clubs and, as needed, HSH central channels.
• Design and operate lifecycle journeys: welcome, nurture, pre-season, matchday, post-match, win-back, renewal, and lapsed-fan programs.
• Partner with Fan Data & Marketing Intelligence on audiences and list health — Fan Data owns segmentation strategy and measurement; this role owns execution.
• Build and run the audience and offer testing roadmap as a continuous program rather than one-off experiments.
• Maintain email operational quality: QA, rendering, accessibility, cadence governance, and send calendars across clubs.

Skills

Paid media ownership

Lifecycle programs

Marketing automation

Attribution & measurement

Vendor management

Strategic execution

Playbook authoring

Sports industry experience

Job description

Hometown Soccer Holdings (HSH) is building locally rooted MLS NEXT Pro clubs, deeply connected to their communities and poised for long-term success. As HSH scales its club portfolio, the organization is investing in the centralized performance marketing capability needed to fill stadiums and grow fan revenue in every market. The Director, Performance & Lifecycle Marketing will own acquisition, conversion, paid media, email and lifecycle execution, and funnel performance across the entire HSH club portfolio. Reporting to the Vice President of Marketing, this leader will set paid media strategy and buying standards, build and operate the lifecycle programs that move fans from first touch to first match to renewal, and own marketing attribution in partnership with Fan Data & Marketing Intelligence. The Director will build the local campaign playbooks that allow club marketing teams to launch strong campaigns inside clear guardrails, while central handles the work that genuinely requires scale and specialization. This is a high-impact opportunity for a hands-on performance marketer who is equally credible in a media plan review and inside the campaign build itself. The ideal candidate brings deep paid media and lifecycle experience, a defensible point of view on measurement and attribution, and real enthusiasm for building playbooks that make other people faster.

Responsibilities

Paid Media

• Own paid media strategy, channel mix, and optimization across the portfolio and for each individual club
• Plan, build, and optimize paid social, search, programmatic, and retargeting campaigns
• Set club-level media budget guidance and hold spend accountable to defined outcomes
• Manage media agency and vendor relationships: briefs, standards, performance reviews, and the build-versus-buy call
• Define the campaign execution standards every market operates within, including tracking, naming, and lead-source conventions

Email & Lifecycle Marketing

• Own email marketing execution across all clubs and, as needed, HSH central channels
• Design and operate lifecycle journeys: welcome, nurture, pre-season, matchday, post-match, win-back, renewal, and lapsed-fan programs
• Partner with Fan Data & Marketing Intelligence on audiences and list health — Fan Data owns segmentation strategy and measurement; this role owns execution
• Build and run the audience and offer testing roadmap as a continuous program rather than one-off experiments
• Maintain email operational quality: QA, rendering, accessibility, cadence governance, and send calendars across clubs

Conversion & Funnel Performance

• Provide landing page and conversion optimization input; partner with club-level web and CMS owners on implementation
• Support ticketing lead generation in partnership with VP, Ticket Sales — marketing generates demand
• Own marketing attribution and performance reporting in partnership with Fan Data & Marketing Intelligence
• Diagnose funnel breakdowns end to end — targeting, creative, offer, landing experience, checkout — and drive the fix
• Brief Creative Services against performance needs and feed test results back into creative direction

Club Enablement & Local Partnership

• Build local campaign playbooks so club marketing leads can launch consistent campaigns
• Define and maintain the thresholds for what a market can run independently versus what routes to central for review
• Train local marketing resources on campaign standards, tracking discipline, and budget stewardship
• Intake local market hooks, offers, and community targeting intelligence and reflect them in campaign builds
• Own the performance segment of the recurring central/local operating cadence
• Set and publish service levels for campaign support requests from club markets
• Additional duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in performance, growth, or lifecycle marketing with direct hands-on ownership of both paid media and email.
• Demonstrated management of meaningful paid budgets across paid social, search, and programmatic channels.
• Experience building and operating lifecycle programs in a marketing automation or email service platform such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Attentive, or Iterable.
• Proven ability to build an attribution and measurement point of view and defend it to senior leadership.
• Experience managing agencies and vendors against clear performance standards.
• Comfort operating as both strategist and executor, building campaigns rather than only planning them.
• Experience writing playbooks or operating standards that other teams executed successfully.
• Experience in sports, ticketing, live entertainment, or membership and subscription businesses is strongly preferred.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

Hometown Soccer Holdings is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a staff that reflects the communities our clubs play in. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Reasonable accommodations are available at any point in the application or employment process.