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One of the coolest online marketing jobs around!
We are working with The Golf Warehouse (TGW.com) in their search for a world-class Director of Online Marketing based in scenic Wichita, Kansas.
HARRY’S COMMENTS: “Golf.” Little word. BIG market. According to PGA statistics, there are 15,450 golf courses in America — nearly 5 courses for every city, county, parish, berg, hamlet, and organized borough on record. A quick Google search offers a glimpse of who’s teeing it up, and how much money (an average) they make. And even if these numbers are exactly right, you can rest assured that the golf market has long been a favorite of direct marketers due to its “rabidity.”
Golfers are passionate (to the point of insane) about golf and will often go to great lengths to take strokes off their game. It’s war out there on the golf course, whether the stakes involve money, the simple piece of mind that comes with knowing that you played your best, or bragging rights against a robot …
The Golf Warehouse: For the love of the game.
Founded during the internet boom of the late 1990’s, The Golf Warehouse (“TGW.com”) established itself as an early leader in online retail. The company has never been shy about innovating and has done a great job of keeping up with advances in club and ball technology – which required extensive renovation and redesign of many golf courses in the 1990s, which led to further advances in club and ball technology.
Funny how that works.
At one point in the 1990s, the National Golf Foundation initiated a campaign to build a course a day to keep up with the demand. Most of those courses are still in use today. All the while, TGW focused on one thing: Making golfers happy by helping them improve their game. According to industry statistics, the number of golfers per 18 hole course sits just below 1800. That’s a lot of rabid, affluent buyers. The best kind there are.
Your job will to GROW SALES and ACQUIRE NEW CUSTOMERS. (Profitably!)
TGW seeks an innovative, analytically-biased customer acquisition gunslinger to take full ownership of its traffic and sales goals. This new Director’s sole responsibility will be expanding TGW’s online reach while providing strategic lift for its sister sporting goods retail sites. In 2012 TGW was acquired by Northern Tool in a deal that combined the size and considerable strengths TGW, Northern Tool, and Sportsman’s Guide.
In addition to golf, TGW is into baseball, softball and soccer — making this role ideal for any sports lover.
You will be responsible for all aspects of online marketing, including paid search, organic search, affiliate marketing, retargeting, CSE’s, and third-party markets. Additionally, in cooperation with the firm’s social network and m-commerce strategist, you’ll direct TGW’s efforts in social media marketing and mobile commerce.
As usual, I spent more than an hour on the phone with this role’s hiring manager, and I have a massive amount of information to share with qualified candidates. (My industry research for this assignment exceeded 50 pages.)
The right person for this position will have an entrepreneurial spirit and be highly analytical. Moreover, we’re looking for someone with “strategic agility” in the area of multichannel, multitouch customer acquisition. In the golf space, the customer acquisition landscape changes daily, and what worked yesterday (or even this morning!) might not work 10 minutes from now.
That’s why it’s essential that TGW’s new Director of Online Marketing continuously evolve TGW’s customer acquisition strategies. And you can’t learn from your mistakes if you are afraid to fail. TGW’s culture is all about testing and learning and relentlessly improving in the process.
If you have the passion for online marketing, a love of sports, and the desire to work in an entrepreneurial culture, this is definitely the right position for you.
View Harry Joiner’s profile
Responsibilities:
- Drive online marketing traffic and sales growth in the TGW and sister brands’ online channels.
- Identify new OLM growth opportunities for both existing and new channels.
- Implement an annual business plan that targets key growth in the online marketing channel
- Serve as the single day-to-day point of contact for all of our existing online marketing vendor partners and internal stakeholders.
- Establish regular reporting that can be distributed throughout the company and support our data-driven decision-making culture.
- Monitor trends and make adjustments to marketing tactics based on analytic data.
- Lead natural search sales improvement through implementation of SEO best practices by means of internal resources and cooperating with vendor partners.
- Manage the expansion of TGW and its sister brands’ reach into social network and other emerging online channels.
- Lead the efforts in m-commerce expansion and adapting features and functionality in the TGW mobile platform to drive positive customer experience and conversion in the channel.
- Measure and track ROI for all online marketing efforts.
- Positive and productive working relationships within the marketing team focused on achieve results together
- Develop strong connections across departments to achieve company objectives
KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIs):
- Increase online marketing program demand via sales per visit improvement tactics, while optimizing commercial investment
- Drive lifts in new customer acquisition via online marketing programs
- Lift sales results in natural search through continued implementation of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices
- Track record of producing measurable results that exceed business expectations
- Drive quality traffic at acceptable ROI targets
- Responsible for annual sales and spend budgets – create and measure outcomes against expectations
- Manage a $6M+ advertising budget and optimize the ROI for advertising investments
- Create new programs to test and further support key growth initiatives in base business, new customers and overall web traffic initiatives
Minimum Qualifications:
- 6-10 years of previous online marketing management experience. Preferably retail.
- Knowledge and experience in e-commerce marketing, emphasis in paid search, affiliate marketing, comparative shopping engines and marketplaces, behavioral retargeting, and product feeds.
- At least 5 years of experience driving positive sales results with paid search, either directly or managing a vendor partner or both.
- Strong project management skills and attention to detail.
- Strong analytical skills with particular experience mining data and developing conclusions based on Omniture, Google Analytics, or other web analytics platforms. Must have the ability to convert insight into action.
- Experience building and managing performance dashboards and reports.
- Working experience in search engine optimization (SEO).
- Must be innovative with a proven ability to grow business through new initiatives.
- Experience directly managing the forecast and budgets for multiple channels and the ability to reforecast quickly as the business requires it.
- Ability to prioritize efforts based on projected business impact
- Experience with attribution methods – connection marketing spend to sales results
- Ability to understand, summarize and communicate complicated topics into easily understood language (identify most important information)
- New customer 12 month value – understand the new customer investment metrics
- Ability to find new customers at within cost per new customer targets
- Use of limited internal resources and select productive vendors to produce positive results
- A ‘can-do’ attitude with the ability to ‘get things done’, and to roll sleeves up, highly pragmatic
Applications for this position are being coordinated by Allan Seibert. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Allan for additional information that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the intensely competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.
