MANAGER CRO PAID MEDIA

Essential Function:The Manager, CRO Paid Media is a performance-driven paid media strategist responsible for improving and scaling Sally Beauty’s paid social content and supporting processes across platforms, including Meta, TikTok Shop, and YouTube (affiliate). This role exists to increase new customer acquisition and overall marketing performance by improving paid content performance, building a disciplined always-be-testing (ABT) creative program, and supporting growth initiatives for our national brand partners. 

Reporting to the Director of Paid Media & SEO, this individual will be the day-to-day owner of the paid content function and will lead one to two new team members who are responsible for trafficking assets to our paid media agency, managing content deliverables and planning documents, and collaborating with other teams to design and implement creative testing. The role will be our primary interface with brand marketing and creative teams, as well as merchandising, analytics, and our external advertising agency and platform partners to translate the FY27 paid media vision into a testable, scalable paid content calendar that delivers measurable performance outcomes.  This is a hybrid role reporting into the support center at Legacy West in Plano Texas.

Responsibilities

Serve as the strategic and day-to-day owner of Sally Beauty’s paid content and creative testing program in order to increase new customer acquisition and paid media performance across Meta, TikTok Shop, YouTube, and affiliate channels, partnering with marketing, merchandising, creative, analytics, and agency partners.

Paid Content Strategy and Creative Execution – 35%

• Develop and execute the FY27 creative vision for paid media content — translating brand team themes and quarterly GTM moments into paid media messaging
• Own paid media briefing and creative collaboration — partner with the creative and organic social teams to develop consideration-tailored assets that earn more site and in-store traffic, drive new customer acquisition, and enable test-and-learn across paid social channels
• Define a paid social strategy distinct from organic social — differentiating brand-building content from direct-response content that quickly names the customer pain point and Sally Beauty’s solution
• Drive new customer acquisition for owned brands and key national brands by leveraging the overlap between merchandising priorities (newness, assortment expansion) and consumer interest

Creative Testing and Performance Optimization – 35%

• Develop briefing frameworks for UGC and media assets that align content to message pillars, GTM moments, category priorities, and persona targeting.

• Design tests and lead readouts in partnership with the Analytics team — translating results into creative learnings that shape the next brief and production cycle

• Monitor paid content performance weekly and monthly at the asset, creator, theme, and channel level (e.g., new customer counts, ROAS, CPA, site and store traffic) — identifying creative fatigue early and iterating, scaling, or retiring content accordingly

• Improve paid content performance to increase new customer acquisition, and synthesize testing and performance results into clear strategic narratives for the Director and senior leadership

• Prepare and optimize performance data for Media Mix Modeling (MMM) updates and attribution discussions — advocating for accurate measurement of paid content’s contribution

• Partner with agency and platform representatives on campaign execution, performance reviews, new ad formats, and platform best practices — driving accountability and continuous optimization

• Monitor best-in-class paid content and competitive activity inside and outside beauty — regularly flagging threats and opportunities to the Director

Team Leadership, Asset Trafficking and Cross-Functional Collaboration – 30%

• Lead, mentor, and develop one to two coordinator / specialist team members, providing day-to-day guidance, performance feedback, and career development support

• Oversee asset trafficking to ensure creative is delivered accurately and on time to every channel

• Partner with the Manager, Paid Media & SEO, brand marketing, merchandising, creative, and analytics to align paid content to product launches, promotions, and seasonal moments

• Represent paid content in quarterly GTM planning cycles and support the Director in agency briefings, media plan reviews, and leadership presentations as needed

Knowledge, skills & abilities requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or a related field (or equivalent experience) preferred
• 5+ years of related digital marketing experience with a focus on paid social, paid content, or performance creative, preferably in Retail, Beauty, or CPG
• Hands-on experience with paid media platforms (Meta, Google, YouTube; TikTok and affiliate platforms a plus) and demonstrated ability to design, run, and read out creative tests
• Experience sourcing, briefing, and managing creators and UGC content, including content editing and trafficking workflows — ideally building or scaling an in-house content operation
• Demonstrated ability to translate performance data into strategic and creative recommendations — strong analytical mindset with comfort in Excel, Google Analytics, and reporting dashboards; familiarity with MMM and attribution preferred
• Experience working with external agency and platform partners — ability to brief, manage, and hold partners accountable to performance targets
• Experience leading, mentoring, or developing team members
• Beauty, retail, fashion, or lifestyle industry experience preferred

Competencies & attributes

• Creatively minded and analytically rigorous — able to judge what makes content resonate and prove it with data, building a narrative from performance metrics and never satisfied with a headline number without understanding the drivers beneath it
• Test-and-learn mindset — treats every asset as a hypothesis, is comfortable being wrong quickly, and turns learnings into the next brief
• Strong storyteller and brief writer — able to translate customer insight, brand themes, and category priorities into clear creative direction for creators and partners
• Collaborative and cross-functional — able to work effectively across Paid Media & SEO, brand marketing, merchandising, creative, analytics, and agency partners without losing channel-level accountability
• People leader and coach — develops coordinators and specialists, sets clear expectations, and builds scalable processes
• Detail-oriented — manages content calendars, trafficking, budgets, and reporting with precision
• Adaptable and agile — comfortable operating in a fast-moving retail environment where priorities shift, platforms evolve, and trends change faster than the planning cycle
• Self-starter with a growth mindset — proactively identifies gaps and opportunities without waiting to be directed and takes ownership of outcomes

Working conditions & physical requirements

Location: Hybrid | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at the Sally Beauty Support Center, Legacy West (Plano, TX); Remote Thursday and Friday

The typical working environment is in the support center office, and the work is sedentary. Typically, the associate may sit comfortably to do the job. However, some tasks and activities may be walking, standing, bending, carrying light items such as papers, files, books, and small parts, driving an automobile to a store location, etc. These activities are not frequent and do not require significant physical demands to perform the work.

While involving everyday risks or discomforts, the work environment is designed with standard safety precautions. These precautions, typical of offices, meeting and training rooms, retail stores, residences, or commercial vehicles, include using safe