Senior Performance Marketing Manager (Remote, Pietermaritzburg)

Blacksmith Agency; Pietermaritzburg; Remote; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith Agency LLC is seeking a Senior Performance Marketing Manager to lead our PPC and SEO department. You will own channel strategy, budget decisions, and client-facing leadership, while the strategists handle execution.

This is a management seat focused on strategy, quality, and results. You will recruit and shape the department, ensuring alignment with client outcomes and agency standards.

Qualifications

• 7+ years across paid media and SEO.
• Experience managing multiple accounts across clients.
• Strong client-facing and reporting skills.
• Ability to own department strategy and budget decisions.
• Comfortable leading a small team of specialists.

Responsibilities

• Own channel strategy and budget allocation as accounts scale.
• Lead PPC and SEO strategists; set quality standards and reviews.
• Ensure honest and accurate client reporting and attribution clarity.
• Be the client-facing owner when accounts underperform.
• Drive hiring plans and conduct first-round interviews.

Skills

Strategic leadership

Team management

Cross-channel marketing

Client facing

GA4 proficiency

Google Ads proficiency

SEO understanding

Tools

Google Ads

GA4

Search Console

Meta Ads

Microsoft Ads

Job description

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Senior Performance Marketing Manager you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open.

Blacksmith Agency

• Marketing
• Full time
• Remote (USA, Canada or South Africa)

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Senior Performance Marketing Manager you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open.

This is a management seat, not a senior individual contributor one. You will not be building campaigns, and on technical SEO your strategist will know more than you do. That is the arrangement, not a gap. You carry channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale. The strategists carry the execution of it, and you carry whether the department delivers.

What You Own

• The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist: their quality bar, their development, their reviews, and the call when someone is not going to get there.
• The standard the work is held to. What a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, how an account is reported. You write it and you hold two specialists to it.
• Client results across the whole function, including whether our reporting is honest. Nobody here is auditing attribution and GA4 accuracy today.
• The escalation when an account is at risk. You diagnose it, you direct the strategist who fixes it, and you are on the call with the client.
• Channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale.
• What we tell sales we can credibly deliver, before it gets sold.
• The hiring plan for the department, and first-round interviews for your own team, within about a quarter.

What You Need

• Strategists or specialists who have reported to you, where their reviews, their development and the decision when someone was not working out were yours. Managing accounts is not this.
• 7+ years across paid media and SEO. Owning one channel while sitting beside the other does not count here.
• Enough depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta and Microsoft Ads to tell good work from work that merely looks good. That is a lower bar than doing it and a higher bar than reading a report.
• One account you turned around that you can talk through: the metric, the figure before, the figure after, and why the change worked. Whose hands were on the keyboard matters far less than whether the diagnosis was yours.
• Comfortable being the client-facing owner when an account is underperforming. That call comes to you, not to the strategist.
• Agency experience carrying many accounts at once.

Please do not apply if

• Nobody has ever reported to you, or you have never owned someone's review or had to performance-manage anyone.
• You have only ever run one channel.
• All of your experience is in-house on a single brand.
• What you actually want is to keep building campaigns yourself. That is not a lesser ambition, it is a different job, and this is not it.

None of these are preferences we bend on. They are how we screen, so applying anyway costs you an hour and gets you a no.

Process

Three conversations, then a decision. A thirty minute screen with our recruiter, a first round with the founder this seat reports to, and a final. No take-home project and no panel interview.