Advertising Manager

As Zellis’ Advertising Manager, you will own and scale our paid media strategy to drive marketing performance across the UK and Ireland. Your mission is to maximise lead generation, pipeline contribution, and ROI from paid advertising channels, including PPC, paid social, content syndication, and influ2. This is a pivotal role in accelerating growth through smarter, data‑led advertising, while laying the groundwork for expanded brand visibility in the medium term.

Key Responsibilities

• Campaign Strategy & Execution: Develop, execute, and optimise multi‑channel advertising campaigns that generate high‑quality leads and strengthen digital visibility across HR and payroll audiences.
• Channel Ownership: Manage and scale paid media channels (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, programmatic, and content syndication providers), ensuring consistent ROI and alignment with performance goals.
• Data & Performance Optimisation: Continuously test creative, copy, bidding, and targeting strategies to improve conversion rates and cost efficiency.
• Reporting & Insights: Produce regular performance dashboards, analyse spend efficiency, and provide actionable insights to the Director of Performance Marketing.
• Budget Management: Plan and manage paid media budgets, forecasting spend and returns accurately.
• Strategic Growth: Support the evolution of Zellis’ advertising programme from pure performance marketing to include longer‑term brand awareness and reputation‑building initiatives.
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Demand Generation, Content, and Brand teams to ensure advertising aligns with campaign narratives, messaging, and visual identity.

KPIs

• Lead generation: Volume and quality of leads attributed to paid media campaigns.
• Cost efficiency: Target cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA).
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): Campaign ROI relative to investment.
• Pipeline contribution: Share of revenue pipeline influenced or sourced via paid channels.
• Engagement metrics: Click‑through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and audience quality across key platforms.
• Budget adherence: Forecast accuracy and spend optimisation month‑to‑month.
• Channel growth: Performance improvement and diversification of paid media channels.
• Brand visibility (phase two measure): Growth in reach, impressions, and share of voice from upper‑funnel activities.

• Experience: Extensive hands-on experience managing performance advertising campaigns across PPC, paid social, and/or content syndication channels within a B2B environment (HR tech, SaaS, or professional services preferred).
• Advertising platforms: Strong command of Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and Meta Ads Manager; experience with programmatic or ABM platforms (e.g. Demandbase, 6sense) is a plus.
• Analytics & optimisation: Proficient in campaign reporting, A/B testing, and performance optimisation using tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce. Comfortable translating data into actionable insight.
• Creative and strategic mindset: Able to develop compelling ad copy and creative concepts while maintaining a performance-driven approach to testing and learning.
• Budget management: Skilled at planning, allocating, and forecasting advertising spend to maximise ROI across multiple campaigns.
• Collaboration: Strong communicator with the ability to work cross-functionally with Demand Generation, Brand, and Content teams to align messaging and goals.
• Commercial focus: Results-driven, numerically literate, and motivated by measurable business impact such as MQLs, pipeline contribution, and revenue influence.
• Adaptability: Thrives in a fast-paced, data-driven marketing environment and comfortable evolving strategies as business priorities expand toward brand awareness and thought leadership.

At Zellis we create market-leading HR & Payroll products and services, to power exceptional employee experiences so that you and your people do better. Our multi-award-winning products pay over five million employees a year, with almost half (42%) of the FTSE 100, 50% of the top retailers and 30% of the top universities in the UK & Ireland as customers, making us the largest provider of Payroll and HR software and managed services.

Our vision is to be the clear leader in pay, reward, analytics, and people experiences. We're passionate about creating an environment where people want to join, belong to, and be part of a progressive organisation. Our values, which were defined with input from all of our 2,000 colleagues, we live and breathe every day:

• Unstoppable together.
• Always learning.
• Make it count.
• Think scale.

Our people are critical to our ongoing success; we’re proud of our inclusive culture that gives you the platform to grow, challenge the status quo and play a crucial role in further enhancing our market position as the leading provider of HR & Payroll software and services. With Zellis you’ll have the chance to stretch and challenge yourself in an environment that’s varied, flexible and hugely supportive.

We also love to reward and recognise our brilliant colleagues. As part of your benefits package, you’ll receive:

• A competitive base salary.
• 25 days annual leave, plus your birthday off and the opportunity to buy additional holiday.
• Private medical insurance.
• Life assurance 4x salary.
• Enhanced pension scheme with company contributions up to 8.5%.
• A huge range of additional flexible benefits across financial & personal wellbeing, lifestyle & leisure.