Creative Strategist

Salary £40-50k DOE

Manchester City Centre – Hybrid

Forward Role are working with a fast-growing beauty retail business to find a Creative Strategist to own and drive their performance creative strategy across Meta and Tik Tok paid ads - someone who can turn customer insight and performance data into creative that genuinely scales.

This is a deliberately niche brief, and that's by design. My client isn't looking for a content person or a creative who follows trends and produces nice-looking assets. They need someone who sits at the intersection of creative, performance marketing, data and consumer psychology - someone who understands direct-response creative and consumer behaviour, is comfortable living in the numbers, and can make strategic creative decisions because of what the data tells them, not instead of it.

This is a genuinely key hire for them, one at the heart of some ambitious growth plans over coming years – if you’re interested in taking your career to the next step in a rapidly growing, genuinely exciting eCommerce brand then this might be the role for you…

• Own the creative strategy and testing roadmap across Meta and Tik Tok ads
• Analyse performance data to understand why creatives are winning or losing - hooks, angles, formats, messaging, offers, CTAs and more
• Identify new creative angles and hypotheses, and build structured tests around them
• Develop briefs for creators, UGC, designers and the internal content team that are genuinely performance-led
• Turn customer pain points, reviews, objections, trends and insights into compelling creative concepts
• Work closely with the Performance Marketer to connect creative decisions directly to CAC, ROAS/MER, CTR, CVR and ultimately revenue
• Track creative fatigue and continually feed new concepts into the pipeline
• Take winning creatives and iterate and scalably produce variations, rather than constantly starting from scratch
• Develop different messaging strategies by product, audience and stage of funnel
• Stay ahead of emerging Tik Tok and Meta formats and competitor creative, without simply copying trends
• Help build a proper creative testing and reporting framework, so the team knows exactly what's working and why

• Proven experience in a performance creative, creative strategy or similar role, ideally with a fast-growing DTC/eCommerce brand
• Experience with in beauty, wellness or FMCG is a strong plus
• A track record of managing a high volume of paid-social creative testing
• Strong understanding of direct-response creative principles and what actually drives performance, not just engagement
• Confidence analysing performance data (CAC, ROAS/MER, CTR, CVR) and translating it into creative direction
• Experience briefing creators, UGC talent, designers and/or internal content teams
• A genuine understanding of consumer psychology and what makes people buy
• Deep familiarity with Meta and Tik Tok ad formats and how they evolve
• Strong commercial instincts - able to connect creative output back to revenue and acquisition goals

This isn't about someone who can look at the numbers and report on what happened - it's about someone who can look at the numbers and know what to do next, creatively. If you're genuinely data-driven but still a creative thinker at heart, and you want to be judged on revenue and performance rather than just creative output, get in touch.