Strategy Lead

About the role

The Strategy Lead is the strategic backbone of the OLIVER studio. Approximately 60% of your focus sits on CRM and email — owning the strategy, audience architecture, and optimization roadmap for institution enrollment marketing programs. The remaining 40% spans the broader channel mix: paid social, organic social, owned content, web, and performance marketing — providing strategic input, testing frameworks, and optimization direction that ensures the studio is always creating the right content for the right audience in the right channel.

Responsibilities

• CRM & Email Strategy (approx. 60%):
  • Lead the end-to-end CRM and email marketing strategy for enrollment programs across all institutions — including lead nurture, application, enrolment, and retention journeys
  • Define and maintain audience segmentation frameworks, personalization strategies, and lifecycle contact architectures across five healthcare education institutions.
  • Build and own the testing and optimization roadmap for email — A/B frameworks, send cadence strategies, content personalization logic, and subject line performance analysis
  • Partner with the Data Analyst and CRM Campaign Managers to translate performance data into clear strategic recommendations, and feed those recommendations back into the next campaign cycle
  • Maintain deep platform fluency across CRM and email technology stack; advise on platform utilization, automation opportunities, and data quality requirements
• Cross-Channel Strategy & Optimization (approx. 40%):
  • Provide strategic input and optimization direction across broader channel mix — paid social, organic social, owned content, web, and performance marketing — ensuring channel strategies are coherent, audience-relevant, and aligned with institutional goals
  • Use Share of Model to understand brand visibility in AI-generated answers, optimize AI search visibility, identify share of voice across models, and surface brand strengths and weaknesses — translating these real-time insights into strategy and content creation priorities
  • Develop content and channel testing frameworks that allow the studio to learn faster, optimize more efficiently, and prove creative effectiveness across all formats
  • Partner with the Associate Creative Director to translate strategic insight into creative direction — ensuring campaigns are rooted in audience understanding and channel intelligence
  • Lead brand and audience insight work for the institutions: analyze conversations, sentiments, audience behavior, and content resonance; identify barriers (such as cost), motivators (such as career outcomes), and engagement triggers (such as authentic narratives) to prioritize messaging and approach opportunities
  • Monitor competitor positioning, category trends, and audience signals across higher education to inform ongoing strategic recommendations
  • Contribute to QBR preparation alongside the Business Director, bringing strategic performance narrative and forward-looking channel recommendations to senior client stakeholders
• Account-Wide Strategic Leadership:
  • Serve as the studio's primary strategic voice — connecting client ambitions to studio capability, and ensuring every workstream has a clear, insight-driven strategic foundation
  • Work across the studio's full team to ensure strategy is embedded in briefing, production, and review — not just in planning documents
  • Develop optimization frameworks that the whole studio can use from creative testing protocols to content scoring via Pencil's performance intelligence

Qualifications

• Proven experience in a senior strategy, planning, or integrated marketing role — with a track record of leading strategy across multiple channels, not just one
• Deep expertise in CRM, email marketing strategy, and lifecycle planning in a complex, multi-program environment; experience with enterprise CRM platforms (Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Marketo, or equivalent) is essential
• Strong working knowledge of paid social, organic social, owned content, and/or performance marketing channels — with the ability to develop testing and optimization frameworks across the mix
• An understanding of the higher education landscape is a meaningful differentiator: students are increasingly ROI-conscious, looking for clear career pathways; adult learners and working professionals are now central growth strategies; persistent healthcare workforce shortages drive demand for specialized programs
• Strong analytical capability: comfortable with performance data, attribution modelling, A/B testing analysis, and translating insight into clear strategic direction
• Experience working with data and analytics teams to build measurement frameworks and performance dashboards
• Confident communicator and presenter; able to articulate strategic thinking clearly to senior marketing stakeholders
• A proactive, insider mindset: you don't wait for briefs — you anticipate needs, surface opportunities, and bring the studio's strategic thinking to the table before it's asked for
• Collaborative working style with the ability to coordinate effectively across creative, CRM, delivery, and client teams in a distributed, multi-location studio
• Gen AI & Agentic Thinking:
  • Strategic command of the studio's three core platforms: OMG (where the work is organized and orchestrated), Pencil (where the work is created and optimized), and Share of Model (how our client stays one step ahead in AI-driven discovery)
  • Experience using AI tools to accelerate research, audience insight, content strategy, and campaign planning — with rigorous human judgment applied to all outputs
  • Ability to leverage Pencil's direct connection to live ad accounts — pulling creative performance data back into the production workflow in real time — with every asset scored, tracked, and fed back into the next brief; this is the intelligence layer most agencies don't have
  • Agentic leadership: systematic, hypothesis-led thinking applied to complex, multi-channel strategic challenges
  • Ability to set AI-informed quality standards and testing frameworks that the broader studio can adopt