Growth Strategy Lead
Established in 2004, OLIVER is the world’s first and only specialist in designing, building, and running bespoke in-house agencies and marketing ecosystems for brands. We partner with over 300 clients in 40+ countries and counting. Our unique model drives creativity and efficiency, allowing us to deliver tailored solutions that resonate deeply with audiences.
As a part of The Brandtech Group , we're at the forefront of leveraging cutting-edge AI technology to revolutionise how we create and deliver work. Our AI solutions enhance efficiency, spark creativity, and drive insightful decision-making, empowering our teams to produce innovative and impactful results.
Role: Growth Strategy Lead
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
The Opportunity:
This is an opportunity to join OLIVER's dedicated in-house studio, embedded with a leading healthcare education institution, as Growth Strategy Lead — the growth intelligence function for a fully integrated creative production studio serving a large enrolled population across a broad, multi-brand portfolio of students, professionals, and enterprise audiences in the healthcare education sector.
The constraint on the next phase of growth is not a lack of strategy — it is content velocity, content relevance, and the ability to test and personalize at scale. Your role is to make sure the studio is always working from the sharpest possible growth foundation, turning audience insight, funnel performance, and market intelligence into clear direction for creative and CRM execution.
Based in Baltimore, you will own the end-to-end growth strategy for the email and CRM program — the studio’s most commercially critical workstream — while providing growth direction and optimization across paid, social, owned, and emerging channels. This is supported by a platform architecture where OMG organizes and orchestrates the work, Pencil is where the work gets created and optimized, and Share of Model is how our client stays one step ahead in AI-driven discovery. You will be one of the primary users of all three.
We support flexible working and are open to different arrangements. We offer reasonable adjustments throughout the process.
About the role:
The Growth Strategy Lead is the growth backbone of the OLIVER studio. Approximately 60% of your focus sits on lifecycle, CRM, and email — owning the strategy, audience architecture, and optimization roadmap for enrollment growth programs. The remaining 40% spans the broader funnel: paid social, organic social, owned content, web, and performance marketing — providing growth direction, experimentation frameworks, and optimization 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 growth. You work closely with the Business Director on client strategy, with CRM Campaign Managers on lifecycle performance, with the Associate Creative Director on content strategy, and with the Data Analyst on measurement. The studio is measured on outcomes such as cost per asset, speed to delivery, and creative effectiveness in market — and your growth direction should be visibly improving the last of these.
What you will be doing:
Lifecycle & CRM Growth
Own the end-to-end CRM and email growth strategy for enrollment programs across the portfolio — lead nurture, application, enrollment, and early-retention journeys
Define and maintain audience segmentation frameworks, personalization strategies, and lifecycle contact architectures across a multi-brand portfolio of institutions, tailored to each brand’s maturity
Drive the shift from reactive, one-off sends toward planned, reusable growth programs — targeting a majority-planned mix, refreshed evergreen nurtures, and a reusable, modular content library
Build and own the experimentation and optimization roadmap — A/B and multivariate frameworks, cadence strategies, personalization logic, and subject-line and conversion analysis
Partner with the Data Analyst and CRM Campaign Managers to build closed-loop measurement and attribution, translating performance into clear growth recommendations that feed the next cycle
Maintain deep fluency across the CRM, marketing automation, and CDP stack; advise on platform utilization, automation and decisioning opportunities, and data quality requirements
Full-Funnel Growth & Optimization
Provide growth direction and optimization across the broader funnel — paid social, organic social, owned content, web, and performance marketing — ensuring channel strategies are coherent, audience-relevant, and aligned with institutional enrollment goals
Design growth loops and cross-channel experiments that connect acquisition, activation, and retention into a measurable, compounding system
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 growth and content priorities
Develop content and channel testing frameworks that let the studio learn faster, optimize more efficiently, and prove creative effectiveness across formats
Partner with the Associate Creative Director to translate growth insight into creative direction — ensuring campaigns are rooted in audience understanding and funnel intelligence
Lead brand and audience insight work: analyze conversations, sentiment, 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 growth opportunities
Monitor competitor positioning, category trends, and audience signals across higher education to inform ongoing growth recommendations
Contribute to QBR preparation alongside the Business Director, bringing a growth performance narrative and forward-looking, full-funnel recommendations to senior client stakeholders
Account-Wide Growth Leadership
Serve as the studio’s primary growth voice — connecting client ambitions to studio capability, and ensuring every workstream has a clear, insight-driven growth foundation
Work across the studio’s full team to embed growth thinking in briefing, production, and review — not just in planning documents
Develop optimization frameworks the whole studio can use, from creative testing protocols to content scoring via Pencil’s performance intelligence
What you need to be great in this role:
Proven experience in a senior growth, strategy, planning, or integrated marketing role — with a track record of driving measurable results across multiple channels, not just one
Deep expertise in CRM, email, and lifecycle growth in a complex, multi-program environment; experience with enterprise marketing automation platforms (Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Eloqua, or equivalent) is essential
Strong working knowledge of paid social, organic social, owned content, and/or performance marketing — with the ability to build testing and optimization frameworks across the funnel
A growth operator’s mindset: fluent in funnel metrics, experimentation, cohort/retention analysis, and CAC/LTV thinking
An understanding of the higher education landscape is a meaningful differentiator: students are increasingly ROI-conscious and looking for clear career pathways; adult learners and working professionals are now central growth audiences; persistent healthcare workforce shortages drive demand for specialized programs
Strong analytical capability: comfortable with performance data, attribution modelling, A/B testing analysis, and translating insight into clear growth direction
Experience working with data and analytics teams to build measurement frameworks and performance dashboards
Confident communicator and presenter; able to articulate growth thinking clearly to senior marketing stakeholders
A proactive, insider mindset: you don’t wait for briefs — you anticipate needs, surface growth opportunities, and bring the studio’s thinking to the table before it’s asked for
Collaborative working style with the ability to coordinate across creative, CRM, delivery, and client teams in a distributed, multi-location studio
Gen AI & Agentic Thinking
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 growth 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 growth challenges
Ability to set AI-informed quality standards and testing frameworks the broader studio can adopt
Req ID: 17803
LI- director
At the time of this posting, the base salary for this position may range according to what's stated below. Individual compensation varies based on job related factors, including location, business needs, level of responsibility, experience, and qualifications. The range listed is just one component of OLIVER’s total compensation package.
Salary Range $127,500 — $142,500 USD
Our values shape everything we do:
Be Ambitious to succeed
Be Imaginative to push the boundaries of what’s possible
Be Inspirational to do groundbreaking work
Be always learning and listening to understand
Be Results-focused to exceed expectations
Be actively pro-inclusive and anti-racist across our community, clients and creations
OLIVER, a part of the Brandtech Group, is an equal opportunity employer committed to creating an inclusive working environment where all employees are encouraged to reach their full potential, and individual differences are valued and respected. All applicants shall be considered for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, neurodivergence, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by local laws.
OLIVER has set ambitious environmental goals around sustainability, with science-based emissions reduction targets. Collectively, we work towards our mission, embedding sustainability into every department and through every stage of the project lifecycle.