Performance Marketing Lead

Job Description

About the job

Local is scaling how thousands of restaurants, hotels, and hospitals across the GCC take payments and build guest loyalty — and so far, growth has come almost entirely from word of mouth and direct sales. We’re hiring our first dedicated performance marketing lead to build a paid acquisition engine from the ground up: campaigns, tracking, and conversion optimization that keep qualified venues flowing into our pipeline.About Local

Local replaces slow card machines with QR-code payments that let guests pay in under 30 seconds, while giving venues the customer data and automated loyalty tools they’ve never had. We’re trusted by 200+ venues across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, including brands like Fuddruckers, Nando’s, and Chili’s. We’re a small, fast-moving team, and this will be one of our first dedicated marketing hires — you’ll shape the function, not inherit one.About the Role

This is a player-coach role built around performance marketing. You’ll set acquisition strategy and execute it yourself in the early months — launching and optimizing paid campaigns across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn, building out tracking and attribution, and turning ad spend into qualified pipeline for sales. Twelve months in, success looks like a performance marketing program with clear CAC/ROAS targets, a repeatable paid-plus-inbound engine, and — if the results justify it — a small team or agency bench to scale further.What You’ll Do

•    Plan, launch, and optimize paid campaigns across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn to drive qualified leads from restaurants, hotels, and hospitals — owning budget, bidding, creative testing, and daily optimization

•    Build out tracking and attribution (GA4, Google Tag Manager, conversion pixels/APIs, UTM discipline) so every dirham of spend is measurable back to pipeline and revenue

•    Define and own the metrics that matter — CAC, ROAS, MQL-to-SQL conversion, pipeline contribution — and report them to leadership on a regular cadence

•    Design and run inbound lead generation programs: landing pages, forms, nurture sequences, lead scoring, and marketing automation that hand sales-ready leads to the sales team

•    Build the supporting content engine — case studies, landing pages, and sales enablement material — sized to convert paid and inbound traffic, not brand-building for its own sake

•    Partner closely with sales and product to keep targeting and messaging aligned with what’s actually winning and losing deals

•    As budget and results allow, bring on contractors, freelancers, or agencies to extend paid media and content capacityWhat We’re Looking For

Required:

•    5+ years in B2B performance marketing, with hands-on ownership of paid acquisition end-to-end — strategy, budget management, bidding, and optimization

•    A track record of running paid campaigns (Google, Meta, LinkedIn) that produced measurable pipeline and revenue, not just clicks or impressions

•    Fluency in tracking and attribution — GA4, Google Tag Manager, conversion APIs/pixels, UTM structures — and comfortable diagnosing why a funnel is leaking

•    A data-driven approach — comfortable owning CAC, ROAS, and LTV, and defending budget decisions with numbers

•    Experience with marketing automation and CRM tools

•    Strong enough writer/editor to produce or closely direct the content that supports paid and inbound campaigns

•    Startup-ready: happy to be hands-on and build from scratch without an established playbook or large team

Preferred:

•    Experience marketing to hospitality, restaurants, or vertical SaaS/fintech

•    Familiarity with the GCC market (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE) or other emerging markets

•    Experience managing agencies, freelancers, or a small performance marketing team

•    Arabic language skills