Marketing Manager

Kava Culture Kava Bar • Full-time • Fort Myers, FL, US • 2d ago

Company Description

Kava Culture Kava Bar is the nation’s leading sober bar franchise, creating social experiences centered around natural, non-alcoholic kava and botanical beverages. With locations across Florida, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, and South Carolina—and additional franchises in development—Kava Culture is helping shape the rapidly growing sober-curious movement.

Our bars are built around connection, community, relaxation, and celebration without alcohol. As the brand expands, we are investing in the systems, strategies, and local marketing support needed to drive sustainable growth across both corporate and franchised locations.

Role Overview

Kava Culture is seeking a strategic, hands-on Marketing Manager to lead local-store, franchise, digital, and brand marketing initiatives.

This is a full-time, on-site role based in Fort Myers, Florida. The Marketing Manager will be responsible for developing scalable marketing programs that increase customer traffic, strengthen brand awareness, support franchisees, and improve performance across the system.

This role extends beyond social media and content creation. The Marketing Manager will build the campaigns, tools, playbooks, calendars, and performance-tracking systems needed to support a growing multi-location franchise brand. The ideal candidate can develop strategy while also managing execution across multiple digital platforms, markets, vendors, and stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Local-Store and Franchise Marketing

Develop scalable local-store marketing strategies that help corporate locations and franchisees increase traffic, customer frequency, and community awareness.
Create practical local marketing playbooks, campaign guides, promotional calendars, templates, and toolkits that locations can execute consistently.
Establish recommended marketing activities for new, developing, mature, and underperforming locations.
Work directly with franchisees and bar leadership to identify local opportunities and develop market-specific action plans.
Provide guidance on community outreach, partnerships, events, grassroots marketing, local advertising, and customer-retention initiatives.
Create systems for sharing successful campaigns, events, and best practices across the franchise network.
Balance brand consistency with the flexibility needed for individual locations to connect authentically with their communities.
Track local marketing participation and results, identify performance gaps, and recommend improvements.

Campaign Strategy and Execution

Build and manage an integrated marketing calendar covering national campaigns, local promotions, seasonal initiatives, events, product launches, and franchise development.
Plan and execute campaigns across social media, email, SMS, web, paid media, in-store channels, and community partnerships.
Develop campaigns designed to generate measurable customer visits, sales, leads, engagement, and repeat business.
Coordinate campaign execution across corporate leadership, bar teams, franchisees, vendors, and other internal stakeholders.
Translate company priorities into organized campaign briefs, timelines, deliverables, and measurable objectives.
Maintain consistent messaging and creative direction across markets and platforms.

New Location and Grand-Opening Marketing

Develop a repeatable pre-opening and grand-opening marketing program for new corporate and franchised locations.
Create launch timelines, checklists, campaign assets, community outreach plans, digital setup requirements, and opening-event strategies.
Support new locations in building local awareness, followers, email and SMS lists, partnerships, and early customer traffic before opening.
Monitor launch performance and continuously improve the opening playbook based on results.

Digital Platform Management

Oversee and maintain the company’s website, location pages, social media accounts, email and SMS platforms, app content, online listings, and other customer-facing digital channels.
Ensure location information, promotions, events, menus, hours, and brand content remain current and accurate.
Improve local search visibility, online reputation, review generation, and consistency across business listings.
Develop audience segmentation and customer-retention campaigns through email, SMS, loyalty, and app-based marketing.
Coordinate with external vendors or technical partners when platform updates, integrations, or development work are required.

Social Media and Content

Develop a cohesive content strategy that supports national brand awareness while providing usable content and guidance for individual locations.
Manage social media calendars, content development, publishing, engagement, and performance reporting.
Create or coordinate the production of photography, video, graphics, written content, and promotional materials.
Establish brand standards, approval processes, and content guidelines for corporate and franchise social media accounts.
Identify opportunities for user-generated content, influencer partnerships, community storytelling, and location-level amplification.
Ensure content supports broader business objectives rather than relying solely on engagement or follower growth as measures of success.

Franchise Development and Brand Growth

Support franchise-development marketing through targeted campaigns, landing pages, email nurturing, content, events, and lead-generation initiatives.
Collaborate with the franchise-development team to improve messaging, campaign performance, and the candidate journey.
Develop materials and content that communicate the Kava Culture opportunity, brand story, franchisee experience, and growth potential.
Track franchise marketing leads and campaign effectiveness in coordination with the sales process.

Analytics and Performance Management

Establish meaningful marketing KPIs tied to customer traffic, sales, customer acquisition, retention, engagement, lead generation, and return on marketing investment.
Build clear, recurring performance reports for company leadership and participating locations.
Analyze campaign, platform, and location-level performance to determine what is working and where changes are needed.
Use data and customer insights to improve targeting, messaging, promotional strategies, and marketing spend.
Test new campaigns and channels, document results, and convert successful initiatives into repeatable programs.

Budget and Vendor Management

Develop and manage marketing budgets across corporate, local-store, digital, and franchise-support initiatives.
Evaluate and manage agencies, freelancers, photographers, printers, advertising partners, and technology vendors.
Define scopes of work, monitor deliverables, manage timelines, and hold outside partners accountable for performance.
Prioritize marketing investments based on expected business impact and measurable return.

Qualifications

Demonstrated experience developing and executing multi-channel marketing strategies and campaigns.
Experience supporting a multi-location, franchise, hospitality, retail, food and beverage, or consumer lifestyle brand is strongly preferred.
Strong understanding of local-store marketing, community engagement, customer acquisition, and retention.
Experience creating repeatable marketing playbooks, toolkits, templates, processes, or field-support programs.
Proficiency in social media management, email and SMS marketing, digital advertising, website content management, and performance analytics.
Ability to connect marketing activity to business outcomes such as customer traffic, sales, leads, retention, and return on investment.
Strong project-management skills with the ability to organize multiple campaigns, locations, platforms, and deadlines simultaneously.
Experience managing agencies, freelancers, vendors, budgets, and cross-functional projects.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to guide franchisees and location operators with varying levels of marketing experience.
Ability to work strategically while remaining willing and able to execute directly when needed.
Working knowledge of common marketing, CRM, analytics, social media, email, design, project-management, and website platforms.
Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Communications, Business, or a related field—or equivalent practical experience.
Ability to work on-site in Fort Myers, Florida, and occasionally visit Kava Culture locations or attend company events as needed.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is equal parts strategist, builder, and executor. They understand that successful franchise marketing requires more than national brand awareness—it requires giving individual locations clear, practical, and measurable tools to win in their local markets.

They are comfortable creating structure where it does not yet exist, coordinating across multiple stakeholders, and taking ownership of marketing outcomes from planning through execution and reporting.

Compensation & Benefits