Media Manager

StrataTech Education Group•Phoenix, AZ

3d•Onsite

About The Position

StrataTech Education Group focuses on the acquisition, growth and development of specialized career education schools, particularly skilled-trade programs designed to address the nation’s growing infrastructure needs. The company’s Tulsa Welding School subsidiary was founded in 1949 with campuses in Tulsa, Okla., Jacksonville, Fla., Houston, and Dallas (Irving) Texas. The Refrigeration School, Inc (RSI) was founded in Phoenix, Arizona in 1965. At StrataTech, we are zealous advocates of positive and sustainable life change through skilled trades education. We are laser focused on student success by focusing on organizational and operational improvements, a dedication to excellence in training programs, innovation and technology aligning industry transformations, and a culture built on human compassion, care, and service. We're looking for a Media Manager to own the performance of our media investment and be the internal expert who keeps it accountable to goal. Our media is planned and bought through an agency partner, your job is to help manage that partnership, pressure-test the strategy, and make sure every dollar is working toward our enrollment objectives. You'll be the person who turns media data into clarity: what's working, what isn't, and what we do about it. This is a full-funnel role for someone who's equally comfortable talking upper-funnel awareness and lower-funnel conversion, and who can hold an agency to a high standard while partnering with them productively. You'll report directly to the VP of Marketing Operations and serve as the connective tissue between our goals, our agency's execution, and the numbers that tell us how we're doing. If you're energized by owning performance, driving accountability, and bringing rigor and clarity to media, this is your role.

Requirements

5–7 years of experience in media planning, buying, or performance/media management, agency- or client-side.
Confident full-funnel fluency. You understand how upper-, mid-, and lower-funnel media work together and can manage across awareness through conversion. You deeply understand audience straegy and segmentation context to build strong media strategy.
Hands-on experience across major paid channels (paid search, paid social, programmatic/display, video) and the platforms and metrics behind them.
Demonstrated experience managing or holding an agency or vendor accountable to performance goals.
Strong analytical skills: comfort synthesizing cross-channel data, evaluating performance against goals, and translating numbers into clear recommendations.
Fluency with media reporting, analytics, and attribution concepts; comfort working in analytics and reporting tools (e.g., GA4, platform dashboards, data visualization). Deep knowledge of conversion tracking and tag/pixel implementation to keep measurement clean.
Excellent communication skills. You’re able to make complex media performance legible to non-media stakeholders and leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience in education, admissions, or another high-consideration, lead-driven funnel.
Familiarity with incrementality testing, media mix modeling, or advanced measurement approaches.
Experience managing media across multiple markets, locations, or brands.
Understanding of how paid media connects to CRM, lead nurture, and downstream conversion metrics (e.g., lead-to-enrollment).

Responsibilities

Own media performance to goal
Own the performance of our media investment against enrollment and efficiency goals across the full funnel — awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Monitor pacing, delivery, and performance continuously; identify risks and opportunities early and drive action before targets slip.
Translate business objectives into media KPIs and hold the program accountable to them.
Support media strategy
Partner with the VP of Marketing Operations and the agency to shape media strategy across channels: paid search, paid social, video, display, LLM, and emerging channels.
Bring an informed point of view to channel mix, budget allocation, targeting, and testing, challenging and refining agency recommendations rather than simply approving them.
Connect media strategy to the broader marketing and enrollment funnel, ensuring media works in concert with creative, nurture, and admissions.
Drive agency accountability
Support management of the media agency relationship: setting expectations, reviewing performance, and holding the partner accountable to goals, timelines, and deliverables.
Support performance reviews and QBRs; ensure the agency is optimizing proactively and transparently, not just reporting after the fact.
Validate agency recommendations and results with your own analysis, so we're always an informed, active client rather than a passive one.
Deliver data clarity
Own media reporting and turn complex, cross-channel data into clear, decision-ready insight for leadership.
Establish and maintain reporting that gives a trustworthy, consistent view of performance, reconciling agency reporting with our own data where needed.
Surface the "so what": not just what the numbers say, but what we should do differently as a result.
Ensure proper lead flow, tagging and tracking management, and data passback through our LMS and CRM.