Growth & Performance Marketing Manager

Location: Adelaide (on-site preferred, adaptable arrangements considered for the right candidate)

Salary: $140,000–$160,000 AUD super depending on experience

Reporting to: Director of Digital Marketing

Established in 1984, GKR Karate has grown to become one of the world's largest martial arts organisations, with more than 40,000 active members across 600 locations in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

We're looking for an experienced Growth & Performance Marketing Manager to help shape the next stage of that growth.

We're looking for someone who can combine strong performance marketing knowledge with commercial thinking, data and experimentation to help us answer some important questions:

Where are our biggest opportunities for growth? Where are we losing prospective or existing members? Where should we invest? What should we test? And how do we know what's actually working?

This is a hands-on senior role with real responsibility, real budgets and the opportunity to meaningfully influence growth across multiple international markets.

The opportunity GKR already operates at significant scale.

We currently invest significantly across paid media and associated agency support, with organic search also representing a significant source of new member acquisition.

Our marketing budget isn't rigid. Where additional investment can demonstrably generate members at a commercially sustainable acquisition cost, there is an appetite to scale.

At the same time, we're investing heavily in our wider digital ecosystem, including Salesforce, lead management and Sales Enablement, online registration, a new Student App, member engagement initiatives and a future website redevelopment.

Our aim is to increasingly connect marketing investment to actual membership outcomes rather than simply measuring clicks and leads.

For the right person, this creates an opportunity to influence not only how we market today, but how our future growth capability is built.

What you'll be responsible for Your initial focus will be understanding and improving our acquisition and conversion performance, before increasingly contributing across the wider prospective and existing member journey.

Key areas will include

- Paid media strategy, optimisation and geographic segmentation
- SEO, CRO and organic acquisition
- Lead generation, funnel performance and lead-to-member conversion
- Lifecycle marketing, member activation and re-engagement
- Growth analytics, attribution, reporting and structured experimentation




- New acquisition channels and opportunities
- Identifying opportunities to improve efficiency across our wider digital environment, including AI, automation and emerging technology

You'll assess our current activity, establish priorities and develop a growth roadmap based on where you believe the greatest opportunities exist.

You'll also be encouraged to challenge how we currently do things and proactively bring forward new ideas, technologies and opportunities that aren't already on our radar.

You won't be expected to do everything yourself You'll be supported by an established internal digital function with development and systems resources, a dedicated SEO specialist, digital support staff in Australia and the Philippines, an in-house design team and dedicated content capability.

We also work with external agencies and technology partners.

Where additional specialist capability is required, whether internally, offshore or through external partners, we're open to further investment where there is a sound commercial case.

Part of your role will be helping us determine what the right future growth and performance capability should look like.

What success looks like We want this role to progressively build a clearer, more data-driven approach to growth.

You'll be given time to understand our business, systems and current performance before establishing priorities and moving into structured testing and optimisation.

Over time, we'd expect to see:

- Greater visibility and understanding of performance across the acquisition and member journey
- Structured testing and optimisation becoming part of how we operate
- Improvements across acquisition, conversion and engagement
- New growth opportunities being proactively identified and tested
- Marketing investment increasingly connected to actual membership outcomes
- Clear, commercially focused reporting that helps determine what we should do next

You'll have autonomy to test, optimise and make tactical improvements within agreed parameters, while larger investments and strategic changes will be developed alongside key decision makers.





What we're looking for You'll likely have significant experience across performance, digital or growth marketing and be comfortable moving between strategy, data and execution.

We're particularly interested in someone who:

- Has strong hands-on knowledge of paid acquisition and understands what excellent Google and Meta campaigns look like
- Understands CRO, funnels and structured experimentation
- Can turn data into commercial recommendations rather than simply reporting what happened
- Understands the relationship between CPL, CAC, conversion, retention and lifetime value
- Can coordinate and lead specialist internal and external resources
- Is comfortable working across marketing, technology and operations
- Can prioritise competing opportunities based on likely commercial impact
- Is comfortable entering an evolving environment and helping shape what comes next

Experience with Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, multi-location businesses, membership or subscription models, and high-volume lead generation would be highly regarded but isn't essential.

This role will particularly suit someone who enjoys ownership and accountability, is comfortable working in an evolving environment and would rather proactively identify an opportunity than wait to be given a task.

Why GKR Karate? The timing of this role is important.

Our active membership has approximately doubled since 2021 and we're now working towards the next stage of growth across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom as well as our recently launched Online Academy.

At the same time, we're making significant investments in our technology, data and digital capability that will substantially increase what we're able to measure, automate, personalise and optimise.

We already have plenty of ideas. What we're looking for is someone with the experience and curiosity to help us determine which opportunities matter most, turn those opportunities into action and measure whether they're actually making a difference.

For the right person, there is considerable scope to shape the role, influence the resources around it and play an important part in GKR's future growth.

How to Apply

If you are a performance-focused marketer who thrives on optimisation, ownership and measurable growth, we would love to hear from you.

Please submit your CV along with a cover note outlining your experience managing paid media budgets and improving conversion performance.

If you have any questions, please direct them to [email protected].

📌 Growth & Performance Marketing Manager (Port Adelaide)
🏢 GKR Karate International
📍 Port Adelaide