Assistant Director, Marketing (Front-End Website) #605587

Job Description

Position Summary

Reporting to the Director of Digital Marketing and collaborating with IT Services personnel, this position will lead the university’s website management program, ensuring that nau.edu is a viable destination for paid and organic lead generation, CRM integration, and other digital marketing initiatives.

Incumbents must be fluent in digital marketing appropriate for complex organizations and have a strong technical background to manage website strategy that crosses marketing and IT functions.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

This role is responsible for successfully planning, analyzing, recommending, and implementing website strategies to meet NAU’s marketing goals.

Website strategy and leadership (25%)

• Serves as primary strategist for NAU’s public facing website, with prioritization on organic lead generation through user-centered design.
• Substantially contributes to design, architecture, content strategy, and user experience direction for websites and microsites.
• Ensure that strategy, optimization initiatives, and support needs are closely coordinated with ITS colleagues, vendors, and other stakeholders.
• Contributes to the development of website governance policies and processes and serves on the website steering committee.
• Directs large-scale website development projects, in collaboration with primary internal and external stakeholders and staff.
• With marketing project manager(s), co-leads requirements gathering and assessment with stakeholders, to establish and communicate feature/development roadmaps.
• Ensures web properties accurately represent the NAU brand, meet quality expectations, and reflect user-centric design.
• Monitors competitor and industry-leading websites to drive effective strategy. Maintains current knowledge of leading website trends, norms, best practices, and innovation.
• Provides input into and identifies opportunities to improve organic lead generation outcomes.
• Leverages internal digital analyst to recommend and track progress toward quarterly KPIs and meet website optimization benchmarks.
• Supports conversion rate optimization-related initiatives through hypothesis testing and validation (A/B Testing).

Website management (35%)

• Supports and leads website troubleshooting efforts, in close coordination with marketing project manager and IT teams responsible for enterprise-level infrastructure, development, and publishing.
• Collaborates with marketing teams (client services, designers, writers, project managers, and photographers) to develop and publish content.
• Directs outside vendors supporting University website initiatives.
• Ensures supported sites are compatible across multiple platforms and browsers to provide a functional and convenient user experience.
• Ensures content meets accessibility requirements and complies with industry and institutional standards (e.g., WC3 web standards, WCAG standards). Collaborates with university accessibility department.
• Works within the context of the CMS administration console to direct their team to make configuration level changes to site layout and menu structure within established guidelines.
• Works within established NAU brand guidelines and standards, technical protocols, and departmental specific procedures.
• Supports the definition and development of custom landing pages to support lead generation and university initiatives.
• Works within the context of established code repositories, deployment methodologies, website governance, project management, and change management practices.
• May provide input, support, and/or quality assurance verification for ITS- and vendor-managed enterprise-wide WordPress projects.
• May provide ad hoc, lightweight development support by contributing bug fixes and introducing code revisions within the context of established enterprise themes.

Supervision/Mentoring (20%)

• Coaches, mentors, and motivates a team of full time digital/website coordinators.
• Evaluates team performance and identifies and prioritizes needs for development; reviews completed work to verify technical soundness; works within existing standards to promote team/organization effectiveness.
• Monitors employee interactions and promotes a productive, inclusive work environment; identifies potential performance and employee relations issues; and applies institutional HR and talent policies and practices.
• Applies intermediate knowledge of employee regulations, policies, and procedures, including delivering formal feedback, planning setting priorities, motivating employees, resolving conflicts, and addressing performance issues.
• Provides input to employment decisions and has significant influence over performance and rewards decisions.
• Develops and supports employee development plans and performance goals.

Leadership (20%)

• Maintains currency in leadership trends and best practices, applying to all facets of leadership, from team supervision and culture to business innovation and impact.
• Demonstrates alignment with NAU’s values and commitment to the marketing department’s guiding principles.
• Establishes and maintains ongoing proactive engagement with departments across the campus to meet institutional priorities.
• Applies team- and solution-oriented approaches to problem-solving; proactively identifies opportunities for tighter cross-team alignment on priorities, resources, process improvements, etc.
• Proactively reports/presents program and team outcomes to leadership and colleagues.
• Represents Marketing on assigned university committees.
• Serves as point of escalation for assigned functional areas.
• Understands and applies knowledge of appropriate handling of university marketing information and various marketing requests from all university units.
• Performs other duties necessary for the effective operation of the department.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in relevant field.
• 3-5 years of relevant functional experience (combination of website strategy and management experience).
• 2-4 years of management/supervisory experience.
• Any equivalent combination of related education, experience, and/or training.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in relevant field.
• 5-7 years of relevant functional experience.
• 3+ years of functional experience within a higher education setting (or a similarly complex environment).

Please see nau.jobs for full job descriptions and details on how to apply online!  NAU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution. Women, minorities, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply