Spring Education Group | Director of Media Strategy & Performance

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Bring your expertise in digital media strategy to the premier private preschool through Grade 12 school network in America.

Spring Education Group is seeking a highly strategic, analytical, and forward-thinking Director of Media Strategy & Performance to lead paid media strategy, investment, innovation, and performance across our portfolio of preschool, K-12, and online education brands. Reporting to the VP of Marketing, this leader will have significant autonomy, the ability to make fast decisions with minimal red tape, and a direct opportunity to elevate the quality of education and drive enrollment across more than 200 schools and multiple markets nationwide.

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Why Spring

Spring Education Group is one of the largest operators of private schools in the United States. Spanning 19 states and and educating over 40,000 students, our 28 school brands are committed to our mission to develop the best schools and educators in America. In the past two years alone we have opened nearly 10 new campuses and some of our flagship brands, such as BASIS Independent Schools and Stratford Schools, are planning to open several new campuses over the next two years.

About the Role

Media Strategy, Investment & Performance

Agency, Team, & Operating Model Leadership

Innovation, AI & Testing

Marketing Ecosystem, Creative & Conversion

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Measurement, Forecasting, & Business Impact

Qualifications, Leadership Attributes & Measures of Success

Media Strategy, Investment, & Performance

Own Spring Education Group's enterprise paid media strategy and accountability for media investment and performance. Translate enrollment priorities, school capacity, market demand, lead quality, conversion performance, lifetime value, seasonality, competitive dynamics, and brand priorities into differentiated strategies by brand, campus, market, audience, channel, and funnel stage rather than applying a single enterprise approach.
Oversee a multi-million-dollar media portfolio and identify opportunities to responsibly scale investment where incremental spend can generate attractive returns, while building clear recommendations on where to increase, maintain, test, or reduce investment. Partner with Finance, Analytics, Enrollment, Regional Directors, and marketing leadership to strengthen forecasting and set clear expectations for enrollment and financial outcomes.
Evaluate performance across the full enrollment funnel, from demand and inquiry through tours, applications, enrollment, retention signals, and lifetime value, rather than optimizing primarily to platform metrics or cost per inquiry. Rapidly diagnose whether underperformance stems from media, market demand, creative, website experience, lead quality, admissions conversion, capacity, competition, or another factor, and identify responsible opportunities to scale when additional spend can generate attractive returns.

Agency, Team, & Operating Model Leadership

Serve as the primary liaison with Spring's paid media agency, setting strategic direction, business objectives, performance expectations, testing priorities, investment guardrails, operating standards, service levels, governance, quality assurance, reporting expectations, and escalation protocols. Hold the agency accountable for execution, optimization, innovation, reporting, quality, responsiveness, and results.
Challenge and validate agency recommendations, communicate with clarity and directness, give and receive direction, push back when warranted, and recognize when performance or learning curves have plateaued. Maintain sufficient technical and platform fluency to recognize issues, test assumptions, and decide quickly whether recommendations should be accepted, modified, or rejected; recommend changes to agency scope, staffing, technology, or partner structure when needed.
Provide strategic leadership to internal paid media resources, establishing clear roles, ownership, expectations, and performance standards. Partner with the VP of Marketing to ensure effective coordination across internal paid media resources, agency partners, technology, automation, and platform resources as business needs evolve; create transparent, efficient workflows across paid media, brand, web, creative, analytics, CRM, enrollment, and finance; and foster curiosity, urgency, accountability, collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

Innovation, AI & Testing

Stay ahead of changes across Google, Meta, other major advertising platforms, and the broader digital ecosystem, with particular emphasis on AI-driven advertising, automation, audience development, measurement, privacy, emerging channels, and the implications of AI search behavior for paid media strategy. Proactively recommend testing, adoption, scaling, or rejection based on business value and expected enrollment impact.
Ensure Spring is an early but disciplined adopter of relevant AI and advertising innovations, not an adopter simply because a capability is new. Build a rigorous test-and-learn discipline with clear hypotheses, success criteria, timelines, learnings, and next actions, and recognize when tests or performance have plateaued.
Use experimentation to improve investment strategy, media mix, audiences, bidding, creative, messaging, landing experiences, and conversion. Create mechanisms to scale successful tests and learnings efficiently across brands, markets, and campuses, and bring forward examples of past tests that improved conversion performance.

Marketing Ecosystem, Creative & Conversion

Partner closely with brand and demand-generation leaders so paid media reflects broader marketing priorities, brand positioning and storytelling, market conditions, school-level needs, audience needs, and enrollment goals. Paid media should amplify and complement organic demand, content, events, PR, lifecycle marketing, and local initiatives rather than operate in isolation.
Incorporate signals from SEO, organic and AI search, direct traffic, local listings, content, social media, PR, events, website behavior, lifecycle and CRM performance, competitive activity, enrollment trends, and school capacity. Build feedback loops so search behavior, audience response, creative performance, competitive activity, and demand trends inform messaging, content, creative, website, local marketing, and enrollment decisions.
Partner with brand, creative, web, conversion, CRM, analytics, and enrollment teams to remove non-media barriers to performance. Use media insights to identify the messages, proof points, audiences, and stories that resonate with prospective families; ensure structured testing across messaging, imagery, video, calls to action, formats, audiences, and landing experiences; and balance efficient demand capture with responsible opportunities to influence new prospective families.

Measurement, Forecasting & Business Impact

Establish a clear performance framework connecting media investment to qualified inquiries, tours, applications, enrollments, cost per enrollment, lifetime value, and ROI. Partner with Analytics, CRM, Enrollment, Finance, and agency partners to strengthen attribution, lead-quality measurement, forecasting, incrementality, and investment decisions.
Analyze performance by brand, campus, geography, audience, creative, campaign, channel, device, and funnel stage to identify actionable trends and opportunities. Although this role will not handle day-to-day media buying, it must analyze performance data fluently and advocate for informed budgetary tradeoffs.
Build scalable reporting and performance-management processes that provide timely visibility without unnecessary manual burden. Deliver concise, decision-oriented reporting to marketing and executive leadership that explains what happened, why it happened, what it means for the business, and what should happy next, using practical frameworks that support timely decisions without waiting for perfect data.

Qualifications:

10+ years of progressive experience in paid media, performance marketing, growth marketing, digital acquisition, or a related discipline, including Director-level leadership. Meaningful agency-side experience is strongly preferred, along with demonstrated success managing and challenging external media agencies; experience managing diverse client portfolios across multiple industries is also preferred. Experience in education, healthcare, multi-location services, hospitality, franchising, or another locally driven, multi-market business model is also strongly preferred.
Significant experience developing strategy for and overseeing multi-million-dollar media investments across multiple brands, locations, markets, or business units. Deep expertise in paid search and paid social, particularly Google and Meta, plus video, display and programmatic media, retargeting, local acquisition, and emerging performance channels. Strong knowledge of AI-driven advertising, automation, bidding, audience development, attribution, privacy, platform evolution, and the implications of AI search visibility for paid media and demand strategy is essential.
Proven ability to connect marketing spend to enrollment, acquisition cost, lifetime value, revenue, profitability, and ROI; diagnose complex performance issues; and build sophisticated testing and optimization programs across media, audiences, creative, conversion, and landing experiences. Requires full-funnel measurement and analytics fluency, including CRM data, lead management, conversion tracking, GA4, reporting platforms, and dashboards; experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, DOMO, or comparable CRM and analytics technologies is beneficial.
Demonstrated success managing and challenging paid media agencies, vendors, publishers, and platform partners; leading and developing teams; and building effective operating structures. Must be a clear, direct, high-signal communicator who can translate complex performance information into concise, actionable recommendations and collaborate effectively with brand, analytics, creative, content, SEO, CRM and lifecycle, web, enrollment or sales, finance, Regional Directors, and executive leadership.

Leadership Attributes

Strategic, commercially minded, and ecosystem-oriented: Connects investment decisions to enrollment, business economics, brand priorities, and market opportunity while understanding that paid media is one component of a broader marketing and enrollment system.
Proactive, forward-looking, analytically curious, decisive, and agile: Identifies opportunities and problems before being asked; stays ahead of AI, automation, platform evolution, privacy, consumer behavior, and emerging media opportunities; investigates why results occurred; moves quickly from insight to action; and changes course when data and business conditions support it.
Accountable, collaborative, and comfortable with complexity: Sets high standards for internal teams and external partners, challenges assumptions constructively, builds strong cross-functional relationships, and operates effectively across a decentralized, multi-brand, multi-market organization. Works at a senior strategic level while remaining close enough to platforms, campaigns, data, and the prospective family experience to recognize issues and opportunities.

Measures of Success

Incremental enrollment at attractive ROI; improved cost per enrollment and lead quality; better investment allocation across brands and markets; stronger agency accountability and execution; and improved attribution, forecasting, and full-funnel visibility.