Digital Marketing Director (Remote, Pittsburgh)

About the role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Digital Marketing Director you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open. This is a management seat, not a senior individual contributor one. You will not be building campaigns, and on technical SEO your strategist will know more than you do. That is the arrangement, not a gap. You carry channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale. The strategists carry the execution of it, and you carry whether the department delivers.

Responsibilities

• Own the quality bar, development, and reviews of the PPC strategist and SEO strategist; decide when someone is not going to meet expectations.
• Set the standard for work: define what a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, and how an account is reported; hold two specialists to it.
• Own client results across the whole function, including honesty of reporting; ensure attribution and GA4 accuracy.
• Handle escalations when an account is at risk: diagnose, direct the strategist who fixes it, and join the client call.
• Determine channel strategy and budget allocation as accounts scale.
• Define what sales can credibly deliver before it is sold.
• Create the hiring plan for the department and conduct first‑round interviews for your own team within about a quarter.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience across paid media and SEO (owning one channel while sitting beside the other does not count).
• Enough depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta and Microsoft Ads to distinguish good work from work that merely looks good.
• Ability to discuss a specific account turnaround: cite the metric, the figure before, the figure after, and why the change worked; the diagnosis must be yours, even if you weren’t at the keyboard.
• Comfortable being the client‑facing owner when an account is underperforming; the escalation call comes to you, not to the strategist.
• Agency experience managing many accounts at once.
• Prior experience managing people: you have had direct reports, conducted their reviews, and made performance‑management decisions.
• Do not apply if you have never had direct reports, never owned someone's review, or never had to performance‑manage anyone.
• Do not apply if you have only ever run one channel.
• Do not apply if all of your experience is in‑house on a single brand.
• Do not apply if you want to keep building campaigns yourself (this role is managerial).