Marketing Director
Highlights Early Childhood Education

Highlights for Children, a global brand dedicated to publishing content that fosters joyful learning, is expanding its offerings to early childhood education (ECE). Our solution will meet the needs of early childhood educators by centering the play-based learning, cognitive development, and social emotional skills that are hallmarks of the Highlights approach.

We are eager to welcome an entrepreneurial and energetic marketing leader to get in on the ground floor of this exciting initiative. You will be the champion for establishing and growing our early childhood education footprint. The ideal candidate will love dreaming about possibilities and potential for expansion while activating a team on focused execution, will move seamlessly between product marketing and campaign marketing mindsets, and will get energy from contributing to a new initiative from inside an established business.

In this new role, the Marketing Director will lead the development and refinement of unique value propositions, product positioning and messaging, and campaign strategy and build a deep understanding of the competitive landscape and our differentiators. You will build a small team of internal and external resources focused on ECE and partner with shared services to leverage existing functional capabilities. You will be responsible for bringing our early childhood offerings to market and driving ongoing growth by expanding our audience, acquiring new customers, nurturing existing clients, activating renewals, and optimizing the customer journey at every touchpoint. You will identify opportunities to elevate the impact of ECE across the enterprise and continually expand our reach.

You will thrive in this position, if:

• You enjoy listening to customers, sharing insights, and nurturing user communities to inform positioning, messaging, and audience development.
• You set clear priorities, strive for simplicity, and manage expectations. You use the right communication style, format, and forums to communicate risks and celebrate progress.
• You drive for results by making smart tradeoffs and supporting decisions that balance the customer needs with our business objectives. When faced with challenges or changes, you consider downstream impacts, negotiate alternatives, and ensure timely follow-through.
• You embrace the fact that some expertise resides beyond our immediate team – you lead through influence, make connections, and ask for help.
• You have experience working successfully with a network of internal and external stakeholders that could include authors, academics, peers, leaders, and executives.

On your first day, you’ll:

• Demonstrate your comfort working remotely and contributing via Zoom/video
• Display your openness to learning our approach, bring your fresh perspective, lean in to accelerate our go-to-market planning
• Demonstrate your knowledge of the early childhood market and exhibit a sense of curiosity as you learn and embrace our brand, mission, market segment, and business imperatives.

Within the first month, you’ll:

• Build relationships across the enterprise to understand the landscape, how ECE fits into the broader company, and where you can have the greatest impact.
• Establish yourself as a champion for the ECE initiative by developing a genuine empathy for ECE directors and teachers and creating a point of view around our messaging, positioning, and how we’ll reach more kids with our offerings
• Focus on business priorities and making appropriate trade-offs – identifying the most impactful marketing initiatives to meet the stated goals, drive impact, and contribute to the brand.
• Drive development of our eCommerce website, unique value proposition, and initial planning for a winning product launch.
• Manage internal and external resources and influence cross-functional teams to execute marketing tactics
• Articulate plans, approaches, and best practices to stakeholders with confidence, flexibility, and continuous improvement mindset. Communicate decisions, plans, and progress in ways that support the work across teams and shows how the team’s work aligns to the enterprise strategy

Within your first year, you’ll:

• Assess the most urgent needs on the team and develop a talent strategy and job description(s) for hiring, tapping into external resources, and leveraging shared services
• Develop and manage project budgets, schedules, and resource allocations; continuously seek process/resource efficiencies and speed to market; ensure all projects adhere to budget, schedule, and quality expectations
• Drive for continuous improvement, ongoing growth, and customer happiness by facilitating objective reflection of each completed project and adapt approaches for efficiency and focus
• Expand our initiatives beyond product launch to the entire customer journey, including activating new customers, retention of existing customers, and delighting our user community.
• Guide the team in developing consistency, process improvement, and intuitive approaches to managing multiple projects simultaneously

Supervisory Responsibilities

The individual in this role will build a small marketing team. In the near term, this will include one direct report and external partners, with potential to grow.

Education and Experience

• Degree in marketing, business, education, or related field with 7+previous years direct work experience.
• Preferred experience leading marketing for an ECE product or service
• Successful experience leading a high-performing team.
• Experience with managing external partners and working with external stakeholders and clients.
• Experience managing budgets and financial forecasts, writing business rationales and advising leadership.

What Highlights Can Offer You:

• Free Fridays and Meeting-Free Zone
• Parental Leave of Absence
• Growing Family Benefits
• Care & Compassion Benefit
• Highlight Helps
• 401K Match Program, 100% Vested Immediately
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Employee Assistance Program
• Humana EAP Program
• Calm – Mental Health Fitness
• Volunteer Time Off