The Role:
The VP, Solution Marketing and Brand Experience is a key member of the marketing leadership team and directly responsible for the development, maintenance, and execution of the company’s brand, GTM strategy, messaging, product marketing, user engagement, social media and community marketing. Through bold experimentation, rapid scaling, and incorporation of product-led growth strategies, you will turn user engagement, brand, and the product experience into key marketing assets that will chart the next stage of Newsela’s growth. Your own team of 15+ marketers will be supported by peers that lead demand generation, marketing operations, and public affairs, and reinforced by strong existing relationships with sales, customer success, and product leaders across the organization. This is a new role that brings together multiple, pre-existing marketing disciplines with strong foundations under a single leader that will also serve as the primary liaison between Marketing and Product. Your top priority will be to take stock of our strengths and assets available to us, build what’s missing, scale what’s working, and experiment aggressively with new ideas to drive break-through growth in a highly fragmented market.
Why You’ll Love This Role:
You are positioned for success in a highly visible role that can drive transformative growth for the company and make a dramatic impact on our mission of meaningful learning for every student. Most of the foundational pieces are already in place. Over 3.3M teachers and 40M students are registered on Newsela. We have a strong brand that’s loved by teachers and trusted by administrators to solve an increasing number of instructional use cases. Our self-hosted Newsela Community boasts over 90K teachers, our public social media engagement rates are best-in-class, and our social share of voice has more than doubled YoY. Our GTM strategy and execution muscle has propelled us to 115% new bookings growth and 81% ARR growth in 2020. But despite this strong foundation, there are meaningful and energizing challenges ahead of us that must be overcome if we are to achieve our mission. There is broad acknowledgment and support across the executive leadership team that what got us to where we are won’t get us to the next level of break-through growth. With this solid foundation in hand, it will be your job to help chart this course.
Why We’ll Love You:
You are a senior marketing leader with at least 15 years experience in a SaaS environment. You have scaled teams and driven marketing programs that have helped brands establish themselves as leaders in highly fragmented markets. You understand the intersection of marketing-led and product-led growth, and have demonstrated success turning product engagement and advocacy among users and buyers into company growth. You have led or played a key role in GTM strategy development, and have successfully created break-through company messaging and product value propositions that inspire buyers to say, “I MUST have that…”. You have a bias for taking risks, experimenting with big ideas, failing fast and scaling fast. At the same time, you are an exceptional consensus builder who is equally adept at “selling” ideas internally and rallying the necessary support to see them prioritized and implemented, especially with product teams. You’ve always dreamed of working for a mission-driven company, but are equally passionate about building businesses in a rapid-paced, high-growth environment.
About Newsela:
One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels — from +100 of the best sources — that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.