Growth Marketing Manager

Why this role, why now:

Debate Mate built its name teaching communication skills in schools, then took the same method into the boardroom. Over 200,000 professionals later, the corporate arm has grown mostly on reputation and referral, and the marketing has never had a dedicated owner. You would be the first. Add to that Deb, our first AI learning companion, launching into a market that does not yet know it needs us. It is a rare moment: an established organisation moving fast into new territory, with a team small enough that you help shape the direction rather than just execute it.

Key Areas of Responsibility:

This is a doing role. You own initiatives end to end: you write the brief, build the assets and the copy, ship the work, and report on how it did. None of it gets handed to an agency.

01. Content and Channel Marketing

• Be responsible for the end-to-end: strategy, calendar, writing, design, and replying to people in the comments
• Writing and producing the newsletter, from the idea through to the send and the post-mortem
• Writing for a B2B audience across formats: case studies, client stories, long-form articles, landing pages, email sequences, video and podcast scripts
• Building the case studies that prove what we do. We have trained people at 214 companies, and almost none of it is written down
• Designing what carries the messaging: graphics, carousels, short-form video, event collateral, one-pagers
• Getting our internal experts on the record. Our coaches and senior team know things the market wants, and most of it currently lives in their heads
• Optimising for search and for email. Knowing which subject line worked, and being able to say why
• Opening new channels where our audience already is, and proving whether they work
• Running campaigns with the Head of Product & Marketing around product launches, including Deb, our AI learning companion
• Reporting honestly on performance. That includes the things that flopped

02. New Business Outreach and Events

• Planning and delivering our own showcase debates: the internal events we run to put Debate Mate in front of prospective clients. Venue, guest list, format, run of show, follow-up
• Responsible for managing the networking breakfast programme, from who gets invited to who actually turns up
• Researching and booking panels, speaking slots and podcast appearances for our CEO and senior team
• Finding the conferences and exhibitions worth attending, sponsoring or exhibiting at, then making the case for each one
• Managing our presence at those events: stand, collateral, lead capture, follow-up
• Building and maintaining outreach lists and sequences alongside the wider team

03. Ideas and Experiments

• Generating routes to market that nobody asked you for
• Testing them fast and cheap, without waiting for permission
• Bringing one properly unconventional idea to the table each quarter, and being ready to argue for it
• Using AI as a force multiplier, not a novelty. We use Claude every day, and we are building our own AI product. You will be expected to build these tools into your research, first drafts, campaign builds and reporting, so that you output like a bigger team

04. Working Across the Business

• Supporting the Head of Product & Marketing on strategy, positioning and go-to-market planning
• Working with the delivery team so what we market matches what happens in the room
• Taking custody of our brand guidelines and tone of voice. You own them, you enforce them, and you update them when they stop working
• Occasional support at client sessions and our own events, including some early mornings and evenings

What we want from you:

Mindset

• One to three years in a marketing, growth, events, or comparable role. Background matters less than what you have built and how you think
• Entrepreneurial. Spots the opening and acts on it without being asked
• Finishes things. Starting is the easy part
• Thick-skinned about rejection. Most outreach gets ignored, and that is part of the job
• Wants to build a function, not maintain one
• A builder, not just a contributor. You have made something from scratch, a campaign, a launch, a side project or a small business, and you can point at it and say you built it
• Into AI properly. You already use tools like Claude or ChatGPT in your own work, and you have real opinions about where AI is taking marketing rather than enthusiasm for the idea of it
• Commercially minded. You think in opportunities and revenue, not opens and impressions

Marketing and Content

• Demonstrable experience creating content for social media.
• Writes clearly and with an edge. No waffle, and able to shift tone between a FTSE 100 director and a room of graduates
• A portfolio. We want to read three things you have written and look at three things you have designed
• Confident in Canva and the Adobe suite, particularly Photoshop, InDesign and Premiere Pro
• Produces design work good enough to sit in front of a client who pays us six figures
• Working knowledge of SEO, email marketing platforms and content management systems. You do not need to be an expert. You do need to know what the numbers mean
• Understands what makes someone stop scrolling, and can explain why

New Business and Events

• Has organised events of some kind, at any scale, from a society social to a conference
• Will approach people cold, in writing and in person
• Can find the right event, the right contact and the right angle without being handed a list
• Organised enough to run four strands at once and drop none of them

Communication and Relationships

• Builds relationships quickly with senior people, inside and outside the organisation
• Can walk into a room of strangers and represent Debate Mate properly
• Accurate written work. A typo in client-facing copy is not survivable

General

• Confident across Google Workspace: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, Drive
• Comfortable with, or quick to pick up, the tools we run on: Canva, Capsule CRM and Mailchimp. You do not need hand-holding on the basics of marketing ops
• Believes communication skills matter, and believes in the social mission the corporate revenue funds
• Experience in a startup, social enterprise or any small team where you wore several hats
• Video editing, particularly Premiere Pro or CapCut
• Familiarity with CRM systems, email marketing platforms or marketing analytics
• Experience writing B2B content into large organisations, especially L&D, HR or professional services buyers
• An existing network in events, L&D or corporate training

This role is for you if...

• You love building and shipping things yourself, and want a lot of ownership
• You are excited by helping shape an AI-first marketing function from the front
• You thrive in a small team where everyone does the work

It is probably not for you if...

• You are mainly looking to manage a team or oversee other people's work
• You prefer a big, structured organisation with specialists to delegate to
• You want to focus on strategy and planning rather than execution

Our Values:

Make it Happen

Whether there is an action to take, a plan to pull off, or a scary new thing to throw yourself into, just do it. Debate Mate is a problem-solving, solutions-focused, action-taking organisation. It may be last minute, it might be really hard, it could be hard to imagine, but at Debate Mate we make it happen.

Communication is Queen

Whether persuading a teacher to attend an event, convincing a client to make a deal, or coaxing a colleague to proofread an email, always embody the skills that we teach. Debate Mate, a female-founded organisation, empowers people to use their communication to be a better version of themselves, which means we have to practise what we preach. A conversation is a powerful thing. Talk to each other, be empathetic, be kind, disagree agreeably, and speak your mind. Communication is queen.

Heart in the Hustle

Whether it is the children we teach, the work we do, the clients we meet, or just your colleagues and you, we lead with passion and purpose. At the centre of Debate Mate is our social mission, the Schools programme that got us all hooked on what we do. We care about making a difference, and that makes us go the extra mile, but we do it while taking care of each other and ourselves. No matter how big the struggle, we put the heart in the hustle.