Interim Marketing Manager

Salary: Up to £50k pa
Reporting to: Marketing Director
Direct reports: 3
Location: Home based with occasional travel into London
Contract type: Fixed term for up to 12 months
Expected Start date. End of May 2025

Who you’d be working with…

The Advantage Travel Partnership is the UK’s pre-eminent business network representing travel agents and travel management companies.

Its members are all independently owned travel businesses who operate across 750 locations throughout the UK, representing a large proportion of the UK’s travel agency landscape. In addition, Advantage’s global network footprint continues to expand with representation in 83 countries across 96 network partners who work together in servicing corporate accounts.

Collectively, as a global network our members generate over £15.6 billion in global sales annually - with £7.6 billion from travel sales from its UK membership - and cater for many millions of holidaymakers and business travellers by assisting them with their travel arrangements. 

What you would be doing…

This is an amazing opportunity to join a fantastic company at a very exciting time.  You, as Marketing Manager, would report to our highly skilled Marketing Director and work alongside 12 really friendly marketing professionals.  The whole team works really closely together and is tightly connected with the wider business, our member partners and business partners.  This will give you a great opportunity to bounce ideas off and learn from each other.

This is an amazing opportunity to be part of a fantastic company at a very exciting time. This could be your next step up the career ladder and be the perfect jump into a role where you can hone your skills whilst being exposed to many other aspects of the marketing mix.  

You, as the Interim Marketing Manager, will report to our Marketing Director and will work closely alongside them playing a key role in supporting them in managing the day-to-day management of the marketing team as well as overseeing the comms team in a managerial capacity.

You will have a Senior Marketing Executive, a Marketing Executive and a Marketing Assistant report directly to you. Additionally, you will work alongside the wider marketing team to help deliver the many different projects we work on at any one time. It’s a busy team that pulls together to reach the end result and is always looking for new ideas too.  

The overall purpose of your job is to oversee the wider communications strategy for the business ensuring you work with all departments and stakeholders to ensure that their key news and objectives are added into the communications strategy and wider comms plan, ensuring they are delivered in a timely and professional manner keeping within the brand guidelines and standards of the organisation.

This role focuses heavily on managing cross-departmental communications and content creation, which could involve anything from creating a wide-scale multi-channel B2B campaign content plan, to project managing the production of a social media campaign or managing the full marketing plan for a corporate event or conference involving managing large scale event collateral production.  

Having an aptitude for working across multiple communication channels and in content creation as well as a keen eye for detail, is vital to the success of this role.   

The group marketing team supports the business in three fundamental ways: 

• Marketing our own brands to retain existing and attract new members and partners.  
• Marketing to our members to promote both our own and our partners products and services (B2B). 
• Marketing directly to consumers and clients on behalf of our members to retain existing and acquire new business for them (B2C).  

Campaign management 

It’s non-stop in the marketing team and you will be kept on your toes juggling a wide range of jobs. It’s good fun though and enjoyable to feel part of a team at the very beating heart of the business.  

There could be any number of campaigns running or being planned at one time, from small B2B business partner campaigns to working on communication plans for larger scale fully integrated B2C peak season campaigns using direct and digital tactics. The team often pulls together to bring a campaign together which ultimately is what this role is about. You would be the main point of contact in the team for managing the overall communications calendar for the business, and with your team's support will facilitate many of the communications we send out across our different audiences at one time so they launch on time and meet our senior management teams, business partner or members objectives. 

You will also be involved in a marketing support capacity with some of our bigger conferences and events including our annual overseas conference, our dedicated cruise sector conference, our annual awards ceremony event and our wider events programme.   

Much of the activity we run is tried and tested, however we continually challenge ourselves to innovate and try new things. Your creative input here is valued as much as anyone else’s in the team, so you will be expected to come to the table with ideas and not be afraid to try something new.  

Communications 

As a membership organisation, we are in regular contact with our members and with our business partners to keep them abreast of industry news, and commercial updates, promote our marketing campaigns and extensive range of events, and inform them about the broad range of services we offer them.  

Our member communications span email, video, social media, web pages, presentations, events and more. The content is varied and the frequency of emails, posts, articles, releases etc. that we put out is high.  

Social media specifically plays a big part in our communication strategy, using all channels in different ways. Engagement is the name of the game and we try and mix it up and use different formats to spark interest and get the conversation started – from video to gifs, competitions and more.  

To help support our comms strategy you will be expected to not just be a ‘doer’ but become an innovator and not scared of trying new ideas. You will also need to be extremely well organised to ensure everything you are working on is fed into the business’s communication plan in an engaging way and in a timely fashion.   

An editorial eye is key for the role with the ability to understand and embrace the tonality of the brand and the content style we adopt through our different communication channels across the business.

To do this, you would…

• Be responsible for delivering our communications and campaign schedules through cross team management.
• Have good ideas around content creation and be up to speed on digital marketing trends and thought leadership content delivery
• Implement and manage large-scale multi-channel campaigns from start to finish
• Have a strong understanding of general marketing principles with a more in-depth view on engagement through content – both on and offline 
• Thrive in a busy environment, getting your head down when required but also not afraid to pipe up, challenge ideas and bring new ones to the table 
• Have managed at least one direct report in a previous role 
• Have excellent written, copy writing and proof-reading skills, plus have an exceptional eye for detail 
• Be commercially aware and able to make decisions based on the current external environment 
• Have a good level of understanding of social media marketing, in order to support the wider team  
• Be very organised and able to juggle multiple tasks where priorities can change at the drop of a hat 
• Be happy to attend member and supplier and events, and on occasion present on behalf of the marketing team 
• Be a confident decision maker  
• Support the Marketing Director and the wider marketing team
• Be a great team player and have a great sense of humour, after all there’s no reason why work shouldn’t be fun!  

To be successful in this role, you would have experience of…

• Successfully delivering against high targets in a similar environment
• Building relationships with business partners/suppliers by phone/email/face to face
• Able to comfortably liaise with business members and address their needs
• Working with the leisure/business travel sector
• …and happy with doing your own support work and administration
• Keeping up to date with all the industry challenges

And be…

• Degree educated ideally with a relevant marketing qualification 
• Have at least 5 years’ experience in a travel marketing role or similar 
• An excellent team player
• Well versed in member engagement
• A great communicator
• Able to work independently with a level of autonomy
• Naturally enthusiastic and committed
• Knowledgeable and aware of the business & products
• Interested in your own self-development
• A strategic thinker
• An excellent planner and organiser
• Able to adapt and work flexibly
• Creative and yet analytical at the same time
• A natural influencer and negotiator
• Able to prove your right to work in the UK

What you get in return..

You want to apply?  Excellent.  Here’s how…

It’s easy. All you need to do is send us your up-to-date CV. Send all details and questions to [email protected].

Due to not having a sponsorship license, we can only accept applications from people within the UK who can prove their right to work.

At Advantage, we embrace the diversity of culture, gender, physical capability and thought. We firmly believe that true innovation cannot happen without this real-life variety in our working community. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment where people of all walks of life aspire to work.