Senior Digital Paid Ad Manager

Get to Know Us Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find and fix and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. Our flagship product, the NodeZeroTM platform, delivers production-safe autonomous pentests and other key assessment operations that scale across the largest internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. NodeZero has been adopted by organizations of all sizes, from small educational institutions to government agencies and Global 100 enterprises. It is used by ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.  We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools, false positives resulting in alert fatigue, blind spots, "checkbox” security culture, cybersecurity skills shortage, and the long lead time and expense of hiring outside consultants. Collectively, we are a team of learn it alls, committed to a culture of respect, collaboration, ownership, and results.   What You’ll Do We are seeking a Senior Digital Paid Ads Manager to own the strategy, execution, and optimization of Horizon3.ai http://Horizon3.ai’s paid digital advertising programs. This is a senior individual-contributor role responsible for turning audience intelligence, account priorities, campaign strategy, and creative direction into measurable pipeline and revenue impact. You will lead paid media across channels such as LinkedIn, search, display, retargeting, programmatic, and account-based advertising platforms. You will build campaigns that reach the right accounts and buying groups with the right message at the right stage of the journey, while creating the measurement discipline required to understand what is working and where to invest next. You will report to the Director, Digital Marketing and work closely with Demand Generation, ABM, Field Marketing, Product Marketing, Content, Marketing Operations, Sales, SDRs, and regional teams. You will serve as the senior operator for paid advertising—bringing strategic judgment, hands-on execution, rigorous testing, and clear performance reporting to a fast-growing marketing organization. This is not a campaign trafficking role. It is a strategic and analytical role that combines paid media expertise, audience and account planning, creative experimentation, marketing technology fluency, and pipeline accountability. WHAT YOU’LL DO PAID MEDIA STRATEGY AND PLANNING - Own the paid digital advertising strategy across assigned segments, audiences, regions, products, and funnel stages. - Translate business, pipeline, and go-to-market priorities into paid media plans with clear audiences, investment levels, channel mix, messaging, offers, timing, and success metrics. - Build integrated paid media strategies across awareness, demand creation, account engagement, opportunity acceleration, and customer or expansion motions. - Recommend channel and budget allocation based on account opportunity, audience quality, intent, conversion, pipeline contribution, and efficiency. - Partner with the Director, Digital Marketing to establish paid media priorities, planning cadences, forecasts, and performance expectations. - Create scalable campaign frameworks that can be adapted across industries, segments, regions, and buying groups. ACCOUNT-BASED AND AUDIENCE STRATEGY - Partner with ABM, Sales, SDR, and Demand Generation leaders to define and prioritize target accounts and buying groups for paid activation. - Build one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many paid plays based on account tier, segment, intent signal, buying stage, engagement, and pipeline status. - Translate account and persona insights into audience definitions, targeting strategies, exclusions, sequencing, and next-best actions. - Coordinate account-based advertising across LinkedIn, Influ2 or equivalent platforms, display, retargeting, and other paid channels. - Partner with ABM and Field Marketing to extend paid programs into events, executive experiences, CISO programs, and other high-value account plays. - Maintain strong alignment between paid audiences, CRM data, account lists, campaign membership, and lifecycle stages. - Monitor audience quality, reach, frequency, saturation, intent, and engagement to improve targeting over time. CAMPAIGN EXECUTION AND OPTIMIZATION - Own end-to-end execution of paid campaigns, including briefs, audience setup, creative requirements, build, QA, launch, monitoring, optimization, and reporting. - Build and manage campaigns across paid social, search, display, retargeting, programmatic, partner, and account-based channels. - Partner with Content, Product Marketing, ABM, and Creative teams to develop and test ads, landing pages, offers, proof points, and calls to action. - Establish a structured testing roadmap across audience, creative, message, offer, placement, bid strategy, landing page, cadence, and conversion experience. - Monitor in-flight performance and make timely adjustments to bids, budgets, targeting, placements, frequency, creative rotation, and campaign sequencing. - Identify underperforming campaigns and root causes, then implement corrective actions with clear follow-through. - Maintain accurate campaign documentation, launch checklists, budgets, status, risks, dependencies, and optimization decisions. CREATIVE AND MESSAGING PARTNERSHIP - Translate technical cybersecurity concepts, buyer pain points, product value, and account intelligence into paid advertising briefs and messaging recommendations. - Partner with Product Marketing and Content to develop persona-relevant creative for CISOs, security architects, IT, SecOps, and other technical buying-group members. - Guide creative testing across formats, messages, offers, proof points, customer stories, benchmarks, and calls to action. - Ensure paid creative is aligned to brand standards, campaign strategy, funnel stage, audience context, and the intended next action. - Use performance insights to inform creative iteration and improve relevance, engagement, and conversion. MEASUREMENT, ATTRIBUTION, AND PIPELINE REPORTING - Define and own paid media KPIs, including reach, frequency, engagement, click-through rate, cost per click, conversion rate, cost per qualified response, meetings, pipeline generated, pipeline influenced, stage progression, and return on investment. - Build and maintain reporting that gives leadership visibility into performance by channel, campaign, audience, account tier, segment, region, funnel stage, and program. - Partner with Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations to ensure accurate campaign setup, campaign membership, UTM standards, Salesforce attribution, account matching, and lifecycle tracking. - Analyze paid media, account engagement, funnel, and pipeline data to identify trends, gaps, anomalies, and opportunities. - Distinguish activity and efficiency metrics from meaningful business outcomes. - Establish measurement approaches for both direct-response and account-based programs, recognizing different buying cycles and conversion paths. - Communicate performance insights and investment recommendations clearly to marketing and business stakeholders. MARKETING TECHNOLOGY AND OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE - Own day-to-day paid media platform operations and governance in partnership with Marketing Operations and the Director, Digital Marketing. - Maintain accurate audience, account, contact, campaign, conversion, and suppression logic across paid platforms and connected GTM systems. - Partner with Marketing Operations to troubleshoot data, integration, tracking, consent, and attribution issues. - Build repeatable processes for campaign intake, audience creation, creative QA, launch readiness, budget approval, monitoring, optimization, and closeout. - Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone processes and replace them with scalable workflows, automation, or agent-based solutions. - Use AI and emerging tools to improve audience research, creative iteration, troubleshooting, reporting, and team productivity. - Maintain clear documentation for platform standards, campaign conventions, tracking requirements, QA procedures, and optimization practices. CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION AND LEADERSHIP - Work closely with Digital Marketing, Demand Generation, ABM, Field Marketing, Product Marketing, Content, Marketing Operations, Sales, SDR/BDR leadership, and regional teams. - Lead cross-functional paid media programs with multiple stakeholders, dependencies, deadlines, and competing priorities. - Create clarity around roles, decision rights, handoffs, timelines, campaign requirements, and success measures. - Serve as a trusted partner to Sales and SDR teams by connecting paid engagement signals to practical account and outreach actions. - Communicate plans, status, risks, results, and recommendations to both working teams and senior stakeholders. - Influence without direct authority by bringing structure, data, clear recommendations, and reliable follow-through. - Mentor peers and help establish stronger paid media, testing, measurement, and operating practices across Marketing. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - 5+ years of experience in paid media, digital marketing, demand generation, performance marketing, ABM, or a related B2B marketing function. - Proven track record owning paid digital strategy and execution across multiple channels, with measurable pipeline or revenue impact. - Strong hands-on experience with platforms such as LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Google Ads or equivalent search platforms, display or programmatic platforms, and account-based advertising tools. - Experience developing paid media plans across funnel stages, target segments, buying groups, regions, and account tiers. - Demonstrated ability to manage budgets, forecast spend, allocate investment, and make data-driven tradeoffs. - Strong understanding of audience development, account targeting, segmentation, suppression, retargeting, frequency management, and lifecycle activation. - Experience designing and executing structured tests across audience, creative, messaging, offers, landing pages, and channel mix. - Strong command of campaign tracking, UTM standards, Salesforce or CRM campaign structures, attribution, and performance reporting. - Experience partnering with Marketing Operations, Demand Generation, ABM, Sales, SDRs, Product Marketing, Content, and Creative teams. - Strong analytical judgment and comfort using paid media, funnel, account engagement, conversion, and pipeline data to guide decisions. - Ability to translate complex or technical subject matter into relevant paid advertising concepts and audience-specific messaging. - Highly organized, with the ability to manage multiple campaigns, audiences, budgets, stakeholders, and timelines without losing detail or momentum. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to summarize performance and make clear investment recommendations. - Ability to operate independently, create structure in an evolving environment, and influence without direct authority. - Strong attention to detail and a bias for action, balanced with sound judgment about brand, compliance, data quality, and efficiency. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, cloud security, or another highly technical B2B SaaS environment. - Experience running account-based advertising programs using Influ2, 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus, Bombora, ZoomInfo, or equivalent platforms. - Experience with LinkedIn Campaign Manager and paid social programs targeting enterprise buying groups. - Familiarity w…