Director of Media Strategy & Performance

About the Role

Spring Education Group is seeking a highly strategic, analytical, and forward-thinking Director of Media Strategy & Performance to lead paid media strategy, investment, innovation, and performance across our portfolio of preschool, K–12, and online education brands. Reporting to the VP of Marketing, this leader will have significant autonomy, the ability to make fast decisions with minimal red tape, and a direct opportunity to elevate the quality of education and drive enrollment across more than 200 schools and multiple markets nationwide.

As Spring’s senior internal owner of paid media strategy and investment, this leader will oversee a multi-million-dollar media portfolio; provide strategic leadership to internal paid media resources; and serve as the primary liaison among our external paid media agency and internal marketing, analytics, enrollment, web, CRM, and finance teams. This is not a day-to-day media buying or overall brand-strategy role. The Director will set strategy, develop and advocate for investment recommendations, guide and challenge agency partners, evaluate performance across the full enrollment funnel, and translate data into clear action.

Responsibilities

Media Strategy, Investment & Performance

• Own Spring Education Group’s enterprise paid media strategy and accountability for media investment and performance.
• Translate enrollment priorities, school capacity, market demand, lead quality, conversion performance, lifetime value, seasonality, competitive dynamics, and brand priorities into differentiated strategies by brand, campus, market, audience, channel, and funnel stage.
• Oversee a multi-million-dollar media portfolio and identify opportunities to responsibly scale investment where incremental spend can generate attractive returns, while building clear recommendations on where to increase, maintain, test, or reduce investment.
• Partner with Finance, Analytics, Enrollment, Regional Directors, and marketing leadership to strengthen forecasting and set clear expectations for enrollment and financial outcomes.
• Evaluate performance across the full enrollment funnel, from demand and inquiry through tours, applications, enrollment, retention signals, and lifetime value, rather than optimizing primarily to platform metrics or cost per inquiry.
• Diagnose whether underperformance stems from media, market demand, creative, website experience, lead quality, admissions conversion, capacity, competition, or another factor.

Agency, Team & Operating Model Leadership

• Serve as the primary liaison with Spring’s paid media agency, setting strategic direction, business objectives, performance expectations, testing priorities, investment guardrails, operating standards, service levels, governance, quality assurance, reporting expectations, and escalation protocols.
• Challenge and validate agency recommendations, communicate with clarity and directness, give and receive direction, push back when warranted, and recognize when performance or learning curves have plateaued.
• Maintain sufficient technical and platform fluency to test assumptions and decide quickly whether recommendations should be accepted, modified, or rejected.
• Provide strategic leadership to internal paid media resources, establishing clear roles, ownership, expectations, and performance standards.
• Partner with the VP of Marketing to ensure effective coordination across internal paid media resources, agency partners, technology, automation, and platform resources as business needs evolve.
• Create efficient workflows across paid media, brand, web, creative, analytics, CRM, enrollment, and finance; and foster accountability, collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

Innovation, AI & Testing

• Stay ahead of changes across Google, Meta, other major advertising platforms, and the broader digital ecosystem, with particular emphasis on AI-driven advertising, automation, audience development, measurement, privacy, emerging channels, and the implications of AI search behavior for paid media strategy.
• Proactively recommend testing, adoption, scaling, or rejection based on business value and expected enrollment impact.
• Ensure Spring is an early but disciplined adopter of relevant AI and advertising innovations.
• Build a rigorous test-and-learn discipline with clear hypotheses, success criteria, timelines, learnings, and next actions, and recognize when tests or performance have plateaued.
• Use experimentation to improve investment strategy, media mix, audiences, bidding, creative, messaging, landing experiences, and conversion. Scale successful tests and learnings across brands, markets, and campuses.

Marketing Ecosystem, Creative & Conversion

• Partner with brand and demand-generation leaders so paid media reflects broader marketing priorities, brand positioning and storytelling, market conditions, school-level needs, audience needs, and enrollment goals.
• Incorporate signals from SEO, organic and AI search, direct traffic, local listings, content, social media, PR, events, website behavior, lifecycle and CRM performance, competitive activity, enrollment trends, and school capacity.
• Build feedback loops so these insights inform messaging, content, creative, website, local marketing, and enrollment decisions.
• Partner with brand, creative, web, conversion, CRM, analytics, and enrollment teams to remove non-media barriers to performance.
• Use media insights to identify the messages, proof points, audiences, and stories that resonate with prospective families and test messaging, imagery, video, calls to action, formats, audiences, and landing experiences.

Measurement, Forecasting & Business Impact

• Establish a performance framework connecting media investment to qualified inquiries, tours, applications, enrollments, cost per enrollment, lifetime value, and ROI.
• Partner with Analytics, CRM, Enrollment, Finance, and agency partners to strengthen attribution, lead-quality measurement, forecasting, incrementality, and investment decisions.
• Analyze performance by brand, campus, geography, audience, creative, campaign, channel, device, and funnel stage to identify actionable trends and opportunities.
• Build scalable reporting and performance-management processes that provide timely visibility without unnecessary manual burden.
• Deliver concise, decision-oriented reporting to marketing and executive leadership that explains what happened, why it happened, what it means for the business, and what should happen next.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in paid media, performance marketing, growth marketing, digital acquisition, or a related discipline, including Director-level leadership.
• Meaningful agency-side experience is strongly preferred, along with demonstrated success managing and challenging external media agencies; experience managing diverse client portfolios across multiple industries is also preferred.
• Experience in education, healthcare, multi-location services, hospitality, franchising, or another locally driven, multi-market business model is also strongly preferred.
• Significant experience developing strategy for and overseeing multi-million-dollar media investments across multiple brands, locations, markets, or business units.
• Deep expertise in paid search and paid social, particularly Google and Meta, plus video, display and programmatic media, retargeting, local acquisition, and emerging performance channels.
• Strong knowledge of AI-driven advertising, automation, bidding, audience development, attribution, privacy, platform evolution, and the implications of AI search visibility for paid media and demand strategy is essential.
• Proven ability to connect marketing spend to enrollment, acquisition cost, lifetime value, revenue, profitability, and ROI; diagnose complex performance issues; and build sophisticated testing and optimization programs across media, audiences, creative, conversion, and landing experiences.
• Full-funnel measurement and analytics fluency, including CRM data, lead management, conversion tracking, GA4, reporting platforms, and dashboards; experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, DOMO, or comparable CRM and analytics technologies is beneficial.
• Demonstrated success managing and challenging paid media agencies, vendors, publishers, and platform partners; leading and developing teams; and building effective operating structures.
• Must be a clear, direct, high-signal communicator who can translate complex performance information into concise, actionable recommendations and collaborate effectively with brand, analytics, creative, content, SEO, CRM and lifecycle, web, enrollment or sales, finance, Regional Directors, and executive leadership.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision insurance
• FSA/HSA options
• 401(k) with company match
• Student tuition remission
• Continued education savings through our university partners
• Paid holidays and sick days

Measures of Success

• Incremental enrollment at attractive ROI
• Improved cost per enrollment and lead quality
• Better investment allocation across brands and markets
• Stronger agency accountability and execution
• Improved attribution, forecasting, and full-funnel visibility