Growth Marketing Manager

WALDEN LOCAL MEAT CO.

Growth Manager

Location: Remote or Hybrid

Type: Full-Time

Reports to: Chief Marketing Officer

What we do... The Short Version

Walden Local delivers regeneratively raised meat from 30+ family farms to ~23,000 member families across the Northeast. We have a retention engine that works. What we don't have is a dedicated person whose entire job is turning demand into members-efficiently, measurably, and at a pace that funds the farms we've committed to.

That's this role. You'll own acquisition: the strategy, the agency relationship, the media plan, the landing pages, the conversion math, and the number at the end of the month. Not in theory. In a dashboard you built, pulling from tools you selected, tracking spend you approved against results you can defend.

We're hiring a creative agency to produce the brand work. We need someone else on our side of the table who's smart enough to brief them well, sharp enough to know when the work isn't working, and hungry enough to build the internal muscle that eventually makes the agency optional.

About Walden Local

We partner with independent family farms across the Hudson Valley, Finger Lakes, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine to deliver 100% grass-fed beef, pasture-raised chicken, pork, lamb, and wild-caught seafood directly to members' doors. We've held B Corp status since 2013. We pay farmers roughly 3x commodity rates. Our membership model means the people who eat our food are invested in the farms that raise it.

The growth opportunity is real and specific: densifying our current footprint, capturing out-of-territory demand, and building a magnetic brand with the kind of word-of-mouth velocity that paid media should accelerate, not replace. The question isn't whether people want this. It's whether we can convert them fast enough to keep pace with our farm partnerships.

What You'll Actually Do

Own Acquisition Strategy & Execution (40%)

• Own the member acquisition number. You'll set revenue and net new member targets with the CMO, build the plan to hit them, and be accountable for the result.
• Develop and manage the acquisition media strategy across paid social (Meta, TikTok), paid search, and emerging channels-initially through an agency partner, increasingly through internal capabilities you build.
• Manage the agency relationship day-to-day: set briefs, review creative, approve media plans, challenge performance, and ensure the work reflects the brand. You're the client, not the audience. Act like it.
• Manage acquisition budgets with the rigor of someone spending their own money. Know your CAC by channel, by campaign, by cohort. Know which dollars are working and which are performative.
• Build the reporting infrastructure to track acquisition performance end-to-end: from impression to click to signup to first delivery to 90-day retention. If you can't see it, you can't fix it.

Conversion Rate Optimization (25%)

• Own the conversion funnel from ad click to membership signup. Every landing page, every form, every step in the flow is yours to improve.
• Build and run a disciplined testing program: A/B tests on landing pages, signup flows, pricing presentation, social proof, and offer structure. Hypothesize, test, measure, decide, repeat.
• Work with the systems team (or directly, if you have the chops) to implement changes. We're not a company that needs a 6-week sprint to change a headline.

Growth Creative & Agency Management (20%)

• Partner with our creative agency to develop acquisition creative that actually converts-not just wins awards. You'll own the brief, the feedback loop, and the performance data that tells you whether the work is working.
• Develop creative testing frameworks: know which messages, formats, hooks, and proof points drive signups, and feed that intelligence back to the agency and internal content team.
• Build a library of high-performing creative assets and understand why they work. Pattern recognition across hundreds of ad variants is the job.
• Collaborate with the Content Creator on organic-to-paid content pipelines. The best performing paid creative often starts as organic content that proved itself.

Build the Growth Function (15%)

• This role starts as a team of one managing an agency. Your job is to prove the model, then build the team. When the numbers justify it, you'll make the case for internal media buying, dedicated CRO resources, or additional channel specialists.
• Evaluate and recommend the marketing technology stack: attribution, analytics, landing page tools, testing platforms. We're not over-tooled-we need someone to build the right foundation.
• Develop SOPs, playbooks, and documentation so that growth knowledge lives in the company, not just in your head or the agency's.
• Partner with the MX team to close the loop between acquisition quality and downstream retention. Not all members are equal. You need to care about who you're acquiring, not just how many.

What You Bring

Non-Negotiables

• 4–7 years in growth marketing, performance marketing, or demand generation with direct ownership of acquisition metrics (new members/customers, revenue) and media budgets.
• Hands-on experience managing paid media across Meta and Google-in-platform, not just reviewing agency reports. You need to know when a media plan is lazy, when a bid strategy is wrong, and when creative fatigue is tanking performance.
• Experience managing an agency or external media partner. You've held vendors accountable, rewritten briefs that weren't good enough, and made the call to change direction when data demanded it.
• Fluency in acquisition economics: CAC, LTV, payback periods, cohort analysis, channel contribution. You think in unit economics, not vanity metrics.
• CRO experience: you've run landing page tests, improved conversion funnels, and can explain the statistical rigor behind your testing methodology without hand-waving.
• You can build a dashboard, write a SQL query (or learn fast), and navigate GA4, Motion and Meta Ads Manager without someone holding your hand.

Strong Preferences

• Experience in DTC subscription or membership businesses. You understand recurring revenue, churn dynamics, and why acquiring the right member matters more than acquiring the most members.
• You've worked on a small marketing team where growth wasn't a department-it was you. You're comfortable owning the whole funnel, not just a channel.
• Comfort with AI tools for analysis, creative iteration, and workflow automation. We use Claude extensively and expect you to as well.
• Experience with Shopify, BigCommerce, Klaviyo, or similar ecommerce and email platforms.
• You care about food, agriculture, sustainability, or mission-driven businesses. Not required, but the people who thrive here tend to care about what we're building, not just the growth problem.

Bonus Points

• You've built an in-house growth function from scratch-transitioned from agency-dependent to agency-optional.
• Experience with geographic expansion or market entry for a DTC brand.
• You understand attribution beyond last-click and have opinions on incrementality testing, MMM, or post-purchase surveys as measurement tools.
• You've worked in food & bev, agriculture, or CPG.

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $90,000–$115,000 depending on experience and demonstrated acquisition track record.

Here's what else comes with the role:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Unlimited Paid time off + company holidays.
• 5 lbs of Walden Local products every week.
• Real budget authority. You'll manage meaningful media spend and have the autonomy to allocate it where the data says it belongs.
• Direct line to the CMO. No layers. No approvals committee. Fast decisions, fast learning, fast results.
• A team that values sharp thinking over seniority, and conviction backed by data over consensus.

How to Apply

Send us:

• Your resume.
• A short note (not a cover letter) that answers two questions:
  • (1) What's the most efficient acquisition channel you've managed, and what made it work?
  • (2) If you had a $50K/month media budget and a 28,000-person waitlist to convert, what's the first thing you'd do and why?
• Optionally: a case study, dashboard screenshot, or growth analysis you're proud of. Anonymize as needed. We want to see how you think, not who you worked for.

Send everything to: jobs@waldenlocalmeat.com

No recruiters. No agencies pitching their own people. No AI-generated cover letters.