Strategy Lead

OLIVER Agency - North America•Chicago, IL

2d•$127,500 - $142,500•Remote

About The Position

OLIVER is seeking a Strategy Lead to join their in-house studio, embedded with a leading healthcare education institution. This role serves as the strategic intelligence function for a fully integrated creative production studio supporting over 100,000 students across a diverse portfolio. The primary focus is to ensure the studio operates from a strong strategic foundation, translating audience insights, channel performance, and market intelligence into clear direction for creative and CRM execution. The role will lead the end-to-end strategy for email and CRM programs, which are the studio's most commercially critical workstreams, and will also provide strategic input and optimization direction across paid, social, owned, and emerging channels. The position utilizes platforms like OMG for organization, Pencil for creation and optimization, and Share of Model for AI-driven discovery.

Requirements

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.
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.
Experience using AI tools to accelerate research, audience insight, content strategy, and campaign planning — with rigorous human judgment applied to all outputs.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.