Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Professional Services

Vendors to provide active strategic executive marketing leadership, with particular emphasis on public higher education, commercial go-to-market expertise, analytics, and enrollment marketing.
- Marketing executive with relevant public higher education experience and deep knowledge of commercial go-to-market strategy to provide executive leadership, assessment of marketing opeations, strategy development, hands-on execution, implementation management, and performance accountability.
- Enterprise Marketing Strategy, Leadership, and Execution
• Serve as ECU's senior enterprise marketing leader for the duration of the engagement.
• Lead the assessment of marketing operations, capabilities, resource allocation, staffing, agency relationships, technologies, campaign effectiveness, and decision-making processes.
• Apply public higher education expertise and commercial go-to-market practices to segmentation, value proposition development, channel strategy, campaign planning, and performance optimization.
• Develop, maintain, and actively manage an enterprise marketing and campaign calendar aligned with institutional priorities.
• Establish enterprise marketing objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs), reporting expectations, and accountability measures.
• Lead prioritization of marketing initiatives and advise designated University officials regarding resource allocation and investment decisions.
• Manage assigned marketing budgets within written University approvals, document allocation recommendations an decisions, and recommend performance-based reallocations.
• Lead execution of priority marketing initiatives, including sequencing, stakeholder coordination, issue resolution, and optimization.
• Develop and manage paid media plans for approved market segments; evaluate advertising opportunities, support rate negotiations and placements, and optimize approved spend.
• Serve as ECU's designated marketing lead for assigned media vendors, agencies, and partners by setting expectations, reviewing performance, directing corrective action, and monitoring billing.
- Enrollment marketing is ECU's highest-priority area for this engagement. The Fractional CMO shall:
• Assume leadership responsibility for the assessment, planning, coordination, implementation, and optimization of enrollment marketing activities.
• Establish baseline measures for awareness, lead generation, inquiries, applications, admissions, yield, enrollment, and retention-supporting marketing activities, subject to data availability.
• Evaluate current recruitment marketing investments, audience segmentation, channel utilization, technology, messaging, and campaign effectiveness.
• Develop and implement demand generation strategies for priority audiences and academic programs identified by ECU.
• Lead the design, launch, management, testing, and optimization of enrollment campaigns across approved digital, email, social, search, print, and other channels.
• Coordinate work with Learner Operations (i.e., Enrollment Management), University Communications, academic units, institutional research, information technology, and other stakeholders designated by ECU.
• Establish attribution methodologies, funnel analytics, campaign reporting, and executive dashboards sufficient to support data-informed decisions.
• Develop documented nurture, conversion, and yield strategies for priority audiences
- Digital Marketing, Data, Analytics, and Technology Leadership
• Use and evaluate ECU's existing marketing technology environment in the course of campaign work.
• Assess CRM, marketing automation, advertising technologies, analytics solutions, artificial intelligence applications, and reporting capabilities relevant to the scope.
• Establish KPI definitions, data sources, calculation methods, reporting cadence, ownership, and limitations.
• Implement or configure practical dashboards and reporting processes using available University systems and approved tools.
• Identify opportunities to improve segmentation, personalization, targeting, automation, attribution, and conversion performance.
• Recommend technology investments and operational changes tied to clearly defined business needs, implementation requirements, and expected value.