Strategy Lead

OLIVER Agency - North America•Baltimore, MD

4h•$127,500 - $142,500•Onsite

About The Position

The Strategy Lead is the strategic backbone of the OLIVER × Covista studio. Approximately 60% of your focus sits on CRM and email — owning the strategy, audience architecture, and optimization roadmap for Covista's enrollment marketing program. 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. You are the person who connects insight to execution. You work closely with the Business Director on client strategy, with CRM Campaign Managers on email performance, with the Associate Creative Director on content strategy, and with the Data Analyst on measurement. Three lead SLAs anchor the partnership — cost per asset, speed to delivery, and creative effectiveness in market — and your strategic direction should be visibly improving the third.

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 optimisation frameworks across the mix
An understanding of the higher education landscape is a meaningful differentiator: students are increasingly ROI-conscious, seeking clear career pathways; adult learners and working professionals are central to growth strategies; persistent healthcare workforce shortages drive demand for specialised programmes
Strong analytical capability: comfortable working 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
A 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 forward before it’s asked for
A collaborative working style, with the ability to coordinate effectively across creative, CRM, delivery, and client teams in a distributed, multi-location studio
Strategic command of the studio’s three core platforms: OMG (where work is organised and orchestrated), Pencil (where work is created and optimised), 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 — applying rigorous human judgment to all outputs
Ability to leverage Pencil’s direct connection to our client’s live ad accounts — feeding creative performance data back into the production workflow in real time, with every asset scored, tracked, and informing the next brief
Demonstrates agentic leadership through systematic, hypothesis-led thinking applied to complex, multi-channel strategic challenges
Ability to define AI-informed quality standards and testing frameworks that the broader studio can adopt

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end CRM and email marketing strategy for our client’s enrolment programme across all institutions — including lead nurture, application, enrolment, and retention journeys
Define and maintain audience segmentation frameworks, personalisation strategies, and lifecycle contact architectures across Walden, Chamberlain, and AUC
Build and own the testing and optimisation roadmap for email — A/B frameworks, send cadence strategies, content personalisation 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 insights back into the next campaign cycle
Maintain deep platform fluency across our client’s CRM and email technology stack; advise on platform utilisation, automation opportunities, and data quality requirements
Provide strategic input and optimisation direction across our client’s 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, optimise 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 enable the studio to learn faster, optimise more efficiently, and demonstrate 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 across our client’s institutions: analyse conversations, sentiment, audience behaviour, and content resonance; identify barriers (such as cost), motivators (such as career outcomes), and engagement triggers (such as authentic narratives) to prioritise 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 narratives 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 foundation
Work across the studio team to ensure strategy is embedded throughout briefing, production, and review — not just in planning documents
Develop optimisation frameworks the entire studio can adopt, from creative testing protocols to content scoring via Pencil’s performance intelligence