Director of Marketing Strategy

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce. We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Job Summary:

As the Director of Marketing Strategy, you will be responsible for building end-to-end marketing strategies for Toptal, including both brand (awareness campaigns, creative ideas, and image-building) and growth (SEM initiatives, landing page optimizations, product creation, traffic/user acquisition, and other growth-related initiatives) strategy. You will accomplish this by collaborating with the relevant Executive and Marketing team members. Your primary focus will be to work with the relevant experts within your own team, the Creative, Performance Marketing, and Market Insights teams, to formulate which initiatives to focus on. By understanding the market data, leveraging the best ideas from the team, and the capabilities that exist within Toptal, you will be expected to build a comprehensive marketing strategy for Toptal and oversee each initiative within the strategy to completion. You will be reporting directly to our Senior Vice President of Marketing Strategy.

Major areas that you will oversee include SEM, growth hacking, viral mechanics, CTR/CRO optimizations, A/B testing, creative testing (across all channels - paid and organic), including sales collateral, social media posts, and copy testing for websites and ads. Major areas that you will work on improving, along with stakeholders across other functions such as Customer, include sales conversion rates and mapping/integrating marketing and sales funnels to better understand and optimize the entire lifecycle of revenue-generating efforts for the company.

You will be expected to be both a facilitator and generator of world-class marketing ideas that are put into action at Toptal. You will work on functional initiatives to help build strategic direction, execution frameworks, process automation, workflow enhancements, KPIs, and team structures necessary to drive Toptal’s growth. You will be trusted to tackle challenging and impactful problems at Toptal, working directly with our executives to achieve success.

This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities:

The following information is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or required skills.

• Work with our Executive, Marketing, Customer, Talent Operations, and other key teams across the company to set and execute the roadmap for Toptal’s short- and long-term marketing plans.
• Act as a high-level project manager for all of the marketing-related initiatives that your team is responsible for, ensuring that all initiatives are on time and adequately resourced. The life cycle of your projects, at a high level, will be: Dive into a Marketing initiative with a consultant’s mindset, ask questions to learn everything you can about the subject. Remove constraints and use non-incremental thinking to determine how to frame the initiative such that the related projects and components can deliver an order of magnitude greater impact. Execute on your plans, frequently doing things yourself as an individual contributor, and laying a solid foundation that can be built upon and owned or significantly supported by you upon completion. Ensure that the project can be sustainable within the function or company into the future by implementing processes that allow for its success into the future.
• Partner with executives and other senior leaders to achieve successful outcomes through major Marketing initiatives that result in new offerings, enhanced infrastructure, and processes. Your ability to learn the business, partner with executives, develop recommendations, and act swiftly to drive to completion will be key to your success. Upon completion, you will ‘own’ or significantly support the initiative on an ongoing basis and work for continual improvement to support Toptal’s growth strategies.
• Build forecasts and projections that relate to the expected ROI on marketing campaigns, traffic, and user acquisition, and other areas of marketing that require robust and rigorous financial analysis.
• Help craft and sustain KPIs that each functional area of the Marketing team needs to execute effectively within the context of the larger functional goals.
• Work with the Business Analytics and Market Insights teams, extrapolating insights and turning those insights into actionable strategies that other teams can leverage to create marketing initiatives around.
• Leverage data-driven decision-making to continuously test, measure, and optimize marketing campaigns, including A/B testing, conversion rate optimization, and ROI analysis, with a focus on creative testing.
• Guide the prioritization of key initiatives across Performance Marketing, Content Marketing, Creative, and Growth Product as Toptal scales.
• Ensure the team is maximizing the impact of all creative and growth experiments by maintaining organized playbooks, automated systems, and dashboards that track the states and thresholds related to each experiment.
• Facilitate effective brainstorming sessions, which contribute to the generation of new ideas that push the boundaries of what’s possible for Performance Marketing and SEM.

In the first week, expect to:

• Onboard and integrate into Toptal.
• Rapidly begin learning about Toptal’s history, culture, and vision.
• Shadow team members across the company to learn the core of Toptal’s operations, goals, and measurable outcomes.
• Work to get up to speed with how the organization runs, including how our OKRs, RACIs, and other operational frameworks work.

In the first month, expect to:

• Understand the inner workings of the Marketing team and how they work effectively with other teams. You will also be expected to identify many optimizations and opportunities that you see relating to furthering the growth tactics, organizational dynamics, and talent capabilities of the Marketing team.
• Begin initial scoping of assigned initiatives.

In the first three months, expect to:

• Have a very strong understanding of how the Marketing function and all related external functions work together with Marketing.
• Have charted a path for ensuring collaboration is strong, and work output remains at an extremely high quality level for all Marketing-related initiatives.
• Have garnered the trust of your peers and the individuals with whom you’re most closely working with.
• Work alongside team leaders to determine outcomes, make recommendations, and scope project plans, while exercising discretion and independent judgment.
• Partner with Senior Leadership to build and execute a comprehensive Marketing plan.

In the first six months, expect to:

• Make significant progress on the Marketing initiative execution plans, as evidenced by the achievement of initiative milestones and KPIs.
• Have exemplified the ability to inspire and mentor the teams you’re working with.
• Have upleveled the team’s ability to brainstorm, collaborate, and execute materially.
• Have introduced several growth-related tactics that are innovative, sustainable, and a direct result of your personal efforts.
• Have chartered a clear path for scaling the team, as well as the work output that Marketing can produce.

In the first year, expect to:

• Have scaled the work output of Marketing significantly.
• Have demonstrated the successful implementation and execution of several new growth strategies and tactics.

Qualifications and Job Requirements:

• A bachelor’s degree is required.
• You must have at least ten years of experience in consulting, strategy, Growth Marketing, OR a similar type of role where you leveraged extensive amounts of data to draw insights about potential customers and marketing strategies, and thus make decisions on the best path forward based on those insights.
• Leadership experience with responsibility for business results in a fast-paced, multi-function environment.
• You must be able to easily classify and understand customer personas to create effective marketing strategies that resonate with that precise customer type.
• Demonstrated experience growing revenue at scale via performance marketing within a B2B technology or services company.
• You must be able to quickly research, analyze, and create marketing strategies around which channel to market to and what type of creative is most likely effective for each type of customer.
• You must have the ability and willingness to review, with meticulous attention to detail, all of the final work product that your team creates. This needs to hold true for both analytical and creative work.
• You must have a best-in-class, analytical and data-driven background.
• You must be an extremely quick, strategic thinker with exceptional experience leading highly analytical teams.
• Ability to leverage data to perform root cause analysis and address the source of issues.
• Proven ability to develop creative solutions that result in measurable, transformative outcomes that reach beyond incremental improvements.
• Strong collaboration skills and demonstrated ability to influence and execute effectively in a cross-functional environment.
• You must be able to determine if the brand and creative execution for any given marketing initiative is of extremely high quality, or not.
• Experience leading and scaling cross-functional, dynamic teams.
• A strong ability to build highly effective training sequences for diverse skill sets.
• Experience guiding and executing functional specialization within teams, including setting and monitoring KPIs that both reflect a clear division of responsibilities and larger team goals.
• Demonstrated analytical rigor. You must know how to quantitatively analyze and optimize marketing programs and growth initiatives.
• A lean, data-driven, process, and KPI-oriented mentality is critical.
• You must have a strong bias for action and the ability to foster a competitive, results-driven mentality in your team. You must be extremely persistent by nature and unwilling to let your team lose or leave problems unsolved.

We’re looking for someone who will meticulously analyze and provide insightful feedback on all of the creative, copy, images, growth tactics, and other types of work output related to Marketing initiatives, not simply a high-level strategist. We expect such reviews to be meaningful and to provide insightful feedback to all team members working on a given initiative.

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