Head of Marketing
About The Position
AwardSpring is seeking a founding full-time marketing leader to own the marketing function. Currently, marketing is managed by a fractional lead and a paid media agency. This role requires an individual who can establish and run an AI-native marketing function, leveraging AI tools and agencies to achieve the output of a traditional multi-person team. The initial focus will be on supporting a major platform launch this quarter, including product marketing efforts like positioning, sales enablement, and demand generation. The role also involves expanding into customer marketing, brand building, thought leadership, demand generation, sales enablement, and event management.
Requirements
- 4-8 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience, ideally including product marketing.
- Already operating AI-native in personal craft (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Clay, Gong AI, content and image tooling, agent workflows).
- Product marketing fluency: experience writing positioning, leading launches, and building messaging frameworks.
- Writer-operator skills: ability to draft case studies, website headlines, launch emails, and internal communications.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building function from scratch.
- Chicago-based and willing to be in the office 2-3 days a week.
- AI-native operating environment: comfortable working in a company where AI tooling is already integrated.
Nice To Haves
- Vertical SaaS, EdTech, or higher-education-adjacent background.
- Leadership experience (though strong individual contributors looking to step up are also considered).
- Prior founding-marketer experience.
- Higher education or non-profit tech background.
- Demonstrated results running paid media against measurable pipeline outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Own product marketing for major product and platform launches, including positioning, messaging framework, launch campaigns, webinar and press activation, and sales enablement.
- Manage ongoing product marketing for the growing product portfolio.
- Conduct competitive intelligence across the category.
- Build a case study and reference engine with sustained volume.
- Own and grow the Customer Advisory Board.
- Manage lifecycle communications, including onboarding, release awareness, feature adoption, expansion, and renewal.
- Establish AwardSpring's point-of-view on higher education, AI, and the fund lifecycle.
- Drive CEO thought leadership cadence (LinkedIn, podcast, speaking).
- Oversee the completion of the in-flight rebrand.
- Direct the retained CPC agency and paid media budget.
- Partner with RevOps on source attribution, funnel metrics, and pipeline contribution reporting.
- Build an organic search and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) capability for AI search surfaces.
- Develop sales enablement materials such as battlecards, demo scripts, discovery kits, ROI calculators, and one-pagers.
- Manage a significant annual events budget with an ROI discipline.
- Establish a private dinner program at priority events.
Benefits
- Compensation commensurate with experience including Equity
- Hybrid work: Chicago-based, 2-3 days in office
- Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k)
- Direct CEO relationship
- Direct access to product, engineering, sales, and customer leadership
- AI-native operating environment with support for AI tooling
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
1-10 employees
