Responsibilities

• Develop and execute an integrated annual marketing plan that advances enrollment, brand awareness, advancement, and student success goals.
• Lead full-funnel marketing strategy across traditional campus, online (Columbia College Global), and military-affiliated student populations.
• Translate the College’s strategic vision into compelling, audience-specific marketing campaigns for prospective students, families, alumni, donors, employers, and partners.
• Steward the Columbia College brand in partnership with the VP and the Senior Director of Strategic Communications, ensuring consistency in voice, visual identity, and message architecture across all channels.
• Oversee creative direction for advertising, digital content, video, web, and print, working with internal team members and external agencies as needed.
• Champion the responsible, strategic integration of artificial intelligence across the marketing function, including generative AI for content, predictive models for audience targeting, and AI-assisted workflows for personalization, copy, design iteration, and campaign optimization.
• Build and maintain the team’s AI playbook, including tool selection, prompt standards, brand guardrails, quality review, and ethical use guidelines aligned with institutional policy.
• Identify and pilot emerging marketing technologies that improve speed, personalization, cost efficiency, and creative quality.
• Develop the AI fluency of the marketing team through training, hands-on experimentation, and structured learning.
• Own the marketing measurement framework, including KPIs across awareness, engagement, lead generation, application, yield, and retention.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, business, or related field.
• Minimum of 8–10 years of progressive marketing experience, including at least 3 years leading a team.
• Demonstrated success building and executing integrated marketing strategies that drove measurable business outcomes.
• Strong working knowledge of digital marketing platforms, marketing automation, CRM, web analytics, and paid media.
• Hands-on experience applying AI tools to marketing work, with clear examples of measurable impact.
• Strong analytical skills, including comfort interpreting data, building dashboards, and presenting insights to senior leaders.
• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills.
• Proven ability to manage agencies, vendors, and complex projects on time and on budget.
• Track record of leading, developing, and retaining strong teams.
• Student-centered and mission-driven, with genuine care for the people Columbia College serves.

Preferred

• Graduate degree.
• Experience in higher education, nonprofit, or another mission-driven sector.
• Experience marketing to adult learners, online students, and military-affiliated populations.
• Familiarity with Slate, Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Meta Ads platform, and modern marketing AI tools.
• Experience supporting brand work during a moment of institutional growth, repositioning, or transformation.

Benefits