Marketing Lead - TasteAgent

Marketing Lead — Restaurant-Influencer Partnerships

Rate: $75–$85/hour

Hours: Full-time, 40 hours/week

Duration: 6 months

Location: Chicago (required) — Hybrid role with some collaboration in-person at Loop-based office and at Chicago restaurants shadowing Sales

About Taste Agent

Taste Agent is a creator-powered marketplace connecting social media influencers with restaurant operators. We help independent restaurants spark buzz, grow their digital presence, and build community through creator partnerships.

We’re hiring a Marketing Lead who will spend equal time owning influencer campaign execution and running field-based sales experiments to identify scalable customer acquisition channels. This role is perfect for someone who is passionate about the restaurant industry, enjoys talking to small business owners, and wants to shape the growth engine of an early-stage startup.

What You’ll Own

Influencer Campaign Management & Restaurant Advising (50%)

• Serve as a trusted advisor to restaurant operators on how to run effective influencer campaigns—helping them understand best practices, improve content outcomes, and maximize campaign value.
• Design and execute influencer marketing campaigns end-to-end, including campaign design, engagement with restaurants, and impact reporting.
• Provide operators with hands-on guidance around posting expectations, content quality, and how to repurpose creator content.
• Maintain strong, consistent communication with restaurant partners to ensure smooth campaigns and high satisfaction.
• Create simple, repeatable internal workflows and templates that can scale across multiple operators.
• Advocate for restaurants internally by sharing insights on what they need to succeed.

Field Sales Experiments & Customer Acquisition (50%)

Partner with Sales to conduct on-the-ground field tests across Chicago to discover scalable ways to acquire new restaurant customers.

Pilot grassroots growth approaches such as:

• Restaurant referral programs
• Creator referral loops
• Local partnerships (hospitality groups, neighborhood chambers, small business orgs)
• Community events, food pop-ups, and in-person activations
• Cross-promotions with complementary small businesses

Build test plans with clear hypotheses, metrics, and expected outcomes, and run them quickly and scrappily.

Capture insights in structured experiment logs, summarizing what worked, what didn’t, and where to scale.

Develop early-stage acquisition playbooks the team can operationalize after the contract period.

Represent Taste Agent in restaurants, meeting owners / managers face-to-face and building trust in the community.

What This Role Is Not

To set expectations clearly, this is not a digital performance or search marketing role. It does not involve:

• SEO strategy or keyword optimization
• SEM or digital ad buying
• Paid media campaigns
• Growth via paid acquisition channels

Who You Are

• 5–7+ years in marketing, growth, partnerships, community marketing, or hospitality marketing.
• Comfortable being out in the field visiting restaurants, talking to operators, and gathering real-world insights.
• Deeply empathetic to the needs of small local businesses; skilled at translating marketing concepts into simple, actionable tactics.
• A hands-on builder who loves experimenting, iterating, and moving quickly with imperfect information.
• Strong communicator who thrives in customer-facing, creator-facing, and partner-facing conversations.
• Analytical enough to design experiments, track metrics, and interpret results.
• Excited about restaurant culture, Chicago’s food scene, social media creators, and community-driven marketing.

What Success Looks Like

• Restaurant partners consistently receive high-quality influencer campaigns with noticeable improvements in outcomes.
• You establish reliable, scalable workflows for managing and advising on campaigns.
• You run multiple field experiments and validate at least 2–3 promising customer acquisition pathways.
• Taste Agent grows its footprint in Chicago through stronger community presence and operator relationships.
• Clear documentation, playbooks, and learnings are created to support future team scaling.