Senior Director of Paid Media

What is VisionPoint?

VisionPoint is a full-service higher education marketing agency specializing in brand, enrollment marketing, and CRM support. We partner with colleges and universities nationwide to help them achieve their brand, marketing, and enrollment goals. Our portfolio features a range of award-winning campaigns and projects we showcase at national conferences annually. While we’re headquartered in Raleigh, NC, VisionPoint operates on a remote policy with full-time VisionPointers in all US time zones. Additionally, employees near our Raleigh, NC headquarters can leverage in-person, hybrid, and/or remote work options at their convenience.

The Position

We are seeking an experienced Director of Media to join our talented team. As the Director of Media, you will play a hands-on, pivotal role in driving our clients’ integrated advertising strategies and optimizing campaign performance. This position will directly oversee our Media Supervisors and Digital Marketing Specialists, ensuring that we are delivering quality media plans, execution, and reporting for our client partners. We are looking for a leader who has significant paid media experience within an agency setting and has worked with both digital and traditional media and stays on top of evolving trends in those spaces. The ideal candidate will have a passion for paid media and a proven track record of delivering exceptional results both personally at the campaign level but also through the leadership of a high-performing team. This role can be in-person, hybrid, or fully remote.

What You’ll Do

Media Operations & Excellence

• Optimize VisionPoint’s campaign management approaches and processes, including launching, optimizations, reporting, and reconciliation.
• Oversee the planning, execution, and optimization of paid media campaigns across various channels, including search, social, and display.
• Monitor campaign performance, analyze data, and make recommendations for optimization. Partner with Analytics team for data set ups and AI enabled insights.
• Ensure campaigns are aligned with client objectives and deliver measurable results.
• Stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices to ensure the team is using the latest tools and techniques.
• Oversee integrated (digital and traditional) media planning and placement for select clients including,
  • conducting research,
  • developing effective paid media strategies,
  • creating custom, high-performing media plans (digital and traditional),
  • ensuring execution of effective plans and tactics, and
  • delivering on measurement/reporting to prove ROI.
• Provide active campaign management on an occasional/as-needed basis to provide overflow project coverage and maintain up-to-date knowledge of online advertising platforms.
• Meet regularly with Media team members to identify and forecast both issues and opportunities across accounts that may require additional support.

Team Management

• Lead weekly team meetings to identify, discuss, and solve team issues.
• Lead the recruiting, hiring, and training content and delivery for all media team members. This includes onboarding new team members.
• Manage the resourcing allocation, individual growth, professional development, and performance of each direct report and ensure that people managers who report to you are effectively managing direct reports (measuring and managing performance, active coaching, fostering employee growth, providing and documenting feedback, etc.).
• Actively support direct reports by mentoring, problem-solving, overcoming obstacles, and serving as a final escalation point for particularly complex project and practice area-related issues.
• Actively participate in identifying, raising, and solving company-wide opportunities in pursuit of our vision and goals.

Client Relationship Support

• Serve as a media subject matter expert point of contact for clients, providing support for significant client reports, escalations, and incidents related to media services.
• Build strong relationships with clients and partners to ensure long-term satisfaction.
• Act as a subject matter expert for our Business Development and Marketing teams, contributing media subject matter expertise to help propose, pitch, and close new business as well as supporting key client partner renewals.

Experience and Education

The ideal candidate would possess the following skills, interests, and experience:

• Minimum Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, communication, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Minimum of 8-10 years related experience in digital media.
• Deep experience with digital media planning, including programmatic, SEM, and PPC advertising (your experience must be direct and in an agency setting not that you have hired an agency to do this work).
• Experience in planning and buying traditional media, including radio, television, direct mail, and print
• Must have current Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications.
• Outstanding verbal, written, and interpersonal skills as a critical, strategic thinker.
• Minimum 4 years experience managing a digital media team.
• Demonstrate solid leadership, confidence and teamwork, with expert-level decision-making skills.
• Ability to motivate and manage others to achieve measurable goals.
• Process-oriented leader with ability to recognize and solve not just individual challenges but systemic issues through systems and process improvement.
• Highest standard of quality and efficiency.
• Ability to effectively plan, anticipate, and take appropriate action in a proactive manner.
• Actively contribute to VisionPoint’s culture.

Don’t quite meet all of our requirements? Apply anyway. Research shows that people from underrepresented identities are less likely to apply to a job if they don’t match the posted requirements to a T. We at VisionPoint value diversity and want to continue creating a diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment. If this role and the prospect of serving the higher education sector excite you, but you are missing a few bullet points, we would still love to see your application. Even if this role isn’t the right fit, there’s a chance another role or a future opportunity could align with your experience.

What We Are Like Here at VisionPoint

At VisionPoint, we believe that a strong culture is as much a benefit as health insurance, PTO, and 401k. That’s why it’s important to us that future team members connect with — and contribute to — our culture. Our communication, collaboration, satisfaction and growth are largely dependent upon how we all, as individuals, embrace and live out our values. We have a laser focus on knowing, providing solutions for, and advancing higher education because of its transformative power in the world. We believe in the work we do, we support each other, we work hard, and we like to have a bit of fun, too. When it comes right down to it, happy and fulfilled team members produce better work, and better work is what drives us every day.