Senior Marketing Manager, Universities

What This Role Is Explore's revenue depends on one thing: students engaging with partner universities on our platform — searching, connecting, applying, and enrolling. The marketing function that drives that engagement at scale doesn't fully exist yet. On any given week, the work might include launching a multi-channel student nurture sequence in HubSpot, setting up and analysing an A/B test on WhatsApp vs email for post-connection follow-ups, producing a webinar featuring a university partner's faculty, creating short-form video content that reaches students on the platforms they actually use, briefing the content writer on the next batch of lifecycle templates, reviewing calling agency performance, or running a B2B email campaign to university prospects ahead of a sector event. The audiences are different. The channels are different. The commercial objectives are different. But the majority of your time — roughly 80% — will be spent on the student side: building and operating the lifecycle engine that moves students toward our partner universities. The remaining 20% covers B2B university-facing marketing that supports pipeline growth, partner engagement, and sector positioning. The person who succeeds here is comfortable operating across both, but understands that student engagement is the commercial engine and prioritises accordingly. As Senior Marketing Manager, you'll be the primary marketing partner to the Explore leadership and product squad, working closely with the Product Manager on system design and metrics, directing a Content Writer on production, and coordinating with the Manifest Global central marketing function on brand and B2B initiatives. What Makes This Role Different Most senior marketing manager roles sit inside a single discipline: demand generation, content, product marketing, events, or lifecycle. This one spans several of them, but with a clear centre of gravity: student lifecycle marketing and conversion. On the B2C side — which is the core of this role — you're building and operating the systems that turn student interest into university enrolments. Automated nurture sequences across email, WhatsApp, push, and in-app. Webinars and masterclasses that give students a reason to engage with partner universities. Creative content — shorts, reels, social — that meets students where they are. A/B testing, funnel analysis, and channel optimisation that make every touchpoint more effective. This is not campaign coordination. It's building and running a conversion engine. On the B2B side, you're supporting university pipeline growth — partner email campaigns, event marketing for NAFSA, BUILA, and IHST, and sales enablement materials that help the commercial team close and retain university partners. Explore also sits inside the Manifest ecosystem. The counsellor network across Cialfo and BridgeU, Kaaiser's placement infrastructure, the combined data layer across the group — these are real differentiators. The marketing that makes them visible to both students and university partners is one of the most important things Explore can build right now. What You Own Student Lifecycle Marketing & Conversion Build and operate automated lifecycle sequences in HubSpot across email, WhatsApp, push, and in-app — from workflow architecture to trigger configuration to deliverability management Manage the template matrix across student journey stages — rotation schedules, localisation by region, and performance-based retirement of underperforming templates Direct the Content Writer on what to produce: which templates, for which audience, in what tone, with what CTA Execute A/B tests across messaging, channels, creative formats, send timing, and audience segments — set up variants, monitor results, iterate based on data Monitor campaign performance daily: open rates, CTR, opt-outs, delivery failures, conversion to next funnel stage Manage channel operations: email deliverability, WhatsApp Business API, push notification infr…