Growth Marketing Lead CN, HK and SEA (Remote, Singapore) Asia

About the role

This role will be part of the APAC Growth Team, helping build our active merchant base and establish Shopify’s leadership in the world’s biggest E-commerce market. China, SEA and Hong Kong (region) are in the purview of this role : experience of having led teams in these countries across paid-marketing, growth marketing and growth optimizations in any of these countries is must for this role. Native Chinese language proficiency is a must.

Shopify is now entirely remote and working towards a future that is digital by default. However, in order to manage time-zones, working with agencies and other partners, Singapore is the preferred location for this role.  

Context 

The Growth Marketing Lead is responsible for leading the Paid Marketing team, Growth Experiments team, SEO and other teams managing different growth levers in China, HongKong and SouthEast Asia. Some of these teams, such as paid marketing, report directly into the Growth Marketing Lead, while others, such as SEO, report into their functional teams. The Growth Marketing Lead owns the merchant number in China, HongKong and SouthEast Asia for Shopify. 

The growth marketing lead  also influences merchant activation and retention in the region ,  and is responsible for identifying gaps in the funnel, devising experiments to plug gaps, and doubling down on successful experiments. The growth marketing lead  is the conduit between growth and other teams such as Revenue, PR, brand marketing and offline marketing.

In short, the growth marketing lead is responsible for China, HongKong and SEA to deliver active merchant growth, and owns the active merchant number for the region.

Responsibilities: 

• Planning :

  • Identify segments of merchants in the country that we can target, and prioritize these segments on the basis of most ideal product-market fit to go after the most meaningful segment for growth

  • Develop local market strategy, evaluate the marketing channels (both local, such as Baidu, and global paid channels) that can contribute in the strongest way to active merchant growth. Lead the Paid Marketing team to scale and optimize these channels, and build a pipeline of new paid channels that could potential growth levers in the future. 

  • Lead the Growth Experiments Team  to analyze the funnel in China, HongKong and SouthEast Asia, to identify the strongest optimization opportunities in the funnel. Lead the team to develop a pipeline of experiments, help prioritize experiments for the highest impact, and ensure continuous execution of experiments in China, HongKong and SouthEast Asia

  • Align the finance team on period targets on funnel parameters (leads, merchants and active merchants), and  optimal budget allocations for the geography to deliver the merchant numbers for the region

• Acquisition : Marketing channels and central growth teams 

  • Work with the paid marketers in the team to identify the right local paid marketing channels in China (Baidu, Sogou, etc). Develop channel specific plans, while guiding paid-marketing experts to ensure continuous optimization / scaling on these channels

  • Align central marketing channels on targets for the year with paid search, Facebook, Display and other paid marketing teams 

  • Work closely with the paid marketing teams on budgets and phasing for the region, while ensuring that we’re ramping up to our committed merchant numbers by channel

  • Identify and experiment any new local paid marketing channels that could bring active merchants 

  • Align and influence with the affiliate team to growth and nurture the affiliate ecosystem in the region while delivering on the affiliate merchant targets 

• Activation : Funnel optimization 

  • Building a through understanding of the funnel and gaps in the funnel, both quantitatively and qualitatively

  • Identifying areas in the funnel where the biggest opportunities lie : such as sessions / leads / onboarding / retention

  • Identifying a list of experiments that can be run across the funnel, prioritizing and scheduling these experiments to be run continuously

  • Working with the developers, designers and content writers from the growth run team to run these experiments, and with marketing experiments to interpret results well.

  • Analysing experiment results, sharing learning with the larger growth teams.

  •  Sharing feedback periodically with the product team on product improvements that can significantly improve merchant onboarding.

• Retention : 

  • Building a good understanding of merchant churn and identifying levers that could help us reduce churn, devising and executing experiments that build our learning on churn, and influence the central retention team to execute the

• Interfacing with other organizations

  • Influencing PR team on the communication strategy, including the kind of narrative and the publications, that best aligns with our identified merchant segments 

  • Working closely with brand marketing teams from the revenue organization 

    • At a strategic level to ensure that our brand compass / north star aligns well with merchant segments in China, Hong-Kong and SEA.

    • Tactically, and more periodically, to ensure key messages in awareness campaigns are aligned with the strongest growth levers in the region , and channels used for communication are the best suited for the most important merchant segments.

  • Working closely with product and product research teams to ensure relevant research stimuli, right recruitment, and clarify any local nuances in interpretation of research.