Vice President of Marketing

Vice President of Marketing

Location: Central Virginia
Employment Type: Full-Time, Exempt
Reports To: Chief Executive Officer
Industry: Multi-Location Fitness, Wellness & Consumer Services

Role Overview

We are seeking an accomplished Vice President of Marketing to lead the growth strategy for a premium, multi-location fitness and wellness organization. This executive will be accountable for turning marketing investment into measurable increases in leads, tours, memberships, retention, and ancillary revenue across multiple markets. The successful candidate will combine strategic marketing leadership with the ability to build a disciplined, metrics-driven growth engine across digital, CRM, brand, local-market, and community channels. This leader will partner closely with executive, regional, club, membership, and operating leaders to connect marketing activity directly to business performance. The role requires someone who is equally comfortable developing strategy, analyzing performance data, leading a team, and improving execution in individual markets. AI, automation, and emerging marketing technologies will be evaluated and incorporated where they can materially improve lead generation, personalization, productivity, analytics, and marketing ROI.

Employee Value Proposition

Purpose: Take ownership of the marketing engine for a growing multi-location fitness and wellness organization where marketing directly influences membership growth, member engagement, and revenue. Rather than simply managing campaigns, this executive will have the opportunity to shape how the organization competes, grows, and connects with its communities.

Growth: This role offers significant executive-level exposure and the opportunity to influence company-wide strategy, expansion, brand positioning, and the evolution of the organization's marketing capabilities. Success will provide the opportunity to build a scalable marketing infrastructure capable of supporting continued geographic and revenue growth.

Motivators: The strongest candidate will be energized by measurable results—generating more qualified leads, increasing tours and memberships, improving conversion, strengthening the brand, growing ancillary businesses, and creating a high-performing marketing organization. This is an opportunity for a leader who enjoys combining creativity, analytics, technology, and operational execution to produce visible business results.

Major Performance Objectives

1. Build a Predictable Membership Growth Engine. Within the first 6–12 months, develop and execute an integrated marketing strategy that produces measurable improvement in qualified lead volume, tour traffic, lead-to-member conversion, and membership growth across the organization’s locations. Establish market-level performance targets and a reporting cadence that allows executive and operating leaders to quickly identify opportunities and take corrective action. Evaluate how AI-driven lead scoring, predictive analytics, audience segmentation, and campaign optimization can improve acquisition performance and marketing efficiency.

2. Improve Marketing ROI and Acquisition Economics. Within the first six months, establish a disciplined performance-marketing framework across paid search, social, email, SEO, website, local marketing, and other acquisition channels. Create clear visibility into cost per lead, cost per acquisition, conversion rates, channel performance, and return on marketing investment, then continuously reallocate resources toward the highest-performing opportunities. Determine where AI and automated analytics can accelerate campaign testing, budget optimization, attribution, forecasting, and performance reporting.

3. Strengthen the Brand While Accelerating Local-Market Growth. During the first year, establish a consistent brand and messaging framework across all locations while building scalable local-market programs involving events, partnerships, community outreach, and market-specific campaigns. Give local operators the tools and flexibility necessary to generate demand without compromising overall brand positioning or standards. Evaluate AI-supported content development, localization, audience insights, and creative testing to increase marketing speed and relevance while maintaining appropriate brand governance.

4. Build a Scalable Member and Ancillary Revenue Marketing Platform. Within the first 6–12 months, improve CRM and lifecycle marketing to strengthen acquisition, onboarding, engagement, retention, and reactivation while partnering with operating leaders to increase participation and revenue in services such as personal training, aquatics, racquet programs, camps, spa services, and food and beverage. Establish measurable campaign objectives and demonstrate incremental revenue contribution from these initiatives. Assess how AI and automation can improve personalization, next-best-offer recommendations, lifecycle communications, retention-risk identification, and cross-selling opportunities.

Critical Subtasks

1. Establish the Marketing Performance Dashboard. Within the first 90 days, assess existing marketing data and establish an executive-level dashboard covering lead volume, tours, joins, conversion, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, channel performance, membership growth, and marketing ROI by market. Use the dashboard to create accountability and guide weekly and monthly marketing decisions. Evaluate AI-enabled analytics and automated reporting tools that can identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities faster.

2. Optimize Digital Lead Generation. Within the first 120 days, evaluate paid search, paid social, email, SEO, website performance, and other digital acquisition channels and implement a prioritized optimization plan designed to increase qualified lead flow while improving acquisition economics. Establish a disciplined testing process for messaging, offers, audiences, landing pages, and campaigns. Use AI-assisted audience analysis, creative testing, bidding, and campaign optimization where these tools can improve results.

3. Improve CRM and Lead Conversion. During the first six months, partner with sales and club leadership to improve the process from initial inquiry through tour and membership conversion. Strengthen CRM discipline, lead nurturing, follow-up, segmentation, and lifecycle communication while identifying the points where qualified prospects are being lost. Evaluate AI-based lead prioritization, automated nurturing, personalization, and conversion analytics to improve speed and effectiveness.

4. Build a Scalable Local Marketing Playbook. Within six months, develop a repeatable local-market framework that enables individual locations to generate demand through community events, strategic partnerships, outreach, referral programs, and other grassroots initiatives. Establish clear expectations and metrics so that successful local programs can be identified and replicated across markets. Explore AI and automation tools that can help identify partnership opportunities, local audience trends, campaign ideas, and market-specific messaging.

5. Build and Lead a High-Performance Marketing Organization. During the first 6–12 months, assess the capabilities, structure, priorities, and accountability of the marketing organization and establish clear performance expectations for digital, creative, CRM, and local marketing functions. Build productive relationships with regional and club leaders and determine where external agencies, consultants, or specialized resources are required. Evaluate how AI can eliminate low-value administrative work and increase the team's capacity for analysis, creativity, experimentation, and strategic execution.

6. Expand Ancillary Revenue Through Targeted Marketing. Working with the leaders responsible for personal training, aquatics, racquet programs, camps, spa services, food and beverage, and other ancillary businesses, develop campaigns that generate measurable increases in awareness, participation, leads, and revenue. Establish clear performance measures so marketing investment can be connected to incremental business results. Use AI-supported segmentation, personalization, propensity modeling, and campaign automation where appropriate to improve cross-selling and member engagement.

7. Continuously Evaluate and Integrate AI to Improve Performance. Within the first 90–180 days, take ownership of identifying how AI and automation tools can support or enhance the core responsibilities of this role. Develop a practical roadmap for applying these technologies to lead generation, content development, campaign optimization, CRM, member lifecycle marketing, analytics, forecasting, personalization, and team productivity while maintaining appropriate human oversight, data quality, brand standards, and business judgment.

Experience and Background

The ideal candidate will bring significant marketing leadership experience within a multi-location consumer business, with fitness, wellness, hospitality, retail, membership, or comparable consumer-services experience particularly relevant. The candidate should have demonstrated success generating leads and revenue, managing digital and performance marketing, using CRM and marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, leading internal teams and external partners, and managing marketing budgets against measurable business outcomes. Strong technical aptitude, content and brand experience, and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, results-oriented environment are important. A college degree is preferred, with an advanced degree considered an additional asset.

Culture and Situation Fit

This opportunity is best suited for an energetic, positive, strategic, creative, analytical, and highly accountable marketing leader who enjoys operating close to the business rather than managing marketing from a distance. The environment requires balancing enterprise-wide strategy and brand consistency with the realities of individual markets and local operators. The successful executive will build strong relationships with the CEO, executive leadership, regional leaders, club operators, membership teams, and marketing professionals while remaining comfortable challenging assumptions and using data to drive decisions. This is a visible leadership position where success will ultimately be measured not by marketing activity, but by sustained improvements in leads, conversion, membership growth, member engagement, ancillary revenue, and return on marketing investment.