Senior Marketing Manager, Universities

What This Role Is

Universities across the world are trying to reach the right international students. They invest in fairs, digital campaigns, agent networks, and outreach programmes. Most of them have a reasonable sense of where their students come from. Very few have a clear picture of why a student chose them over a peer institution, which counsellor recommended them, or what moment in the journey actually drove the decision to apply.

Explore exists to give universities that clarity, and to connect them directly to the global counsellor and student network built across Cialfo and BridgeU's 1,750+ K-12 schools. Universities use Explore to run targeted outreach campaigns, engage students earlier in their decision journey, and build the kind of data-informed recruitment strategy that most institutions don't yet have.

The platform is growing. The university partner base is expanding. And the marketing function that drives that growth, builds Explore's reputation in the sector, and delivers the campaigns that make the platform genuinely valuable to university partners needs someone who can hold the full picture simultaneously.

On any given week, that might mean launching a university-facing demand generation campaign, supporting a major sector event like NAFSA or BUILA, developing thought leadership for senior enrolment leaders, running lifecycle communications for existing partners, or building positioning for a new product offering. The audiences are different, the channels are different, and the commercial objectives are different. The person who does this well doesn't lose quality or focus across any of it.

As Senior Marketing Manager, you'll be the primary marketing partner to the Explore leadership team, working closely with the Manifest Global central marketing function to bring campaigns and initiatives to life across the full marketing mix.

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 all of them, across both B2B and B2C audiences simultaneously.

On the B2B side, you're marketing to university international offices, enrolment leaders, and senior recruitment stakeholders who are evaluating Explore against other platforms and partnerships. On the B2C side, you're involved in student engagement programmes that make Explore's university campaigns actually perform. These require different instincts, different channels, and different success metrics. The person who holds both, and understands how they connect across the funnel, is doing genuinely high-value work.

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 that well-built marketing can make visible to university partners who are thinking seriously about their international recruitment strategy. No standalone university outreach platform can offer this. The marketing that communicates it clearly is one of the most important things Explore can build right now.

What You Own

Demand generation and university pipeline growth

• Plan and execute integrated campaigns that drive university pipeline growth, partner engagement, and market penetration across key regions for Explore
• Run demand generation across paid media, email, webinars, partnerships, events, and organic channels, with clear accountability for pipeline contribution, conversion rates, and cost efficiency
• Partner closely with the commercial team to ensure marketing is generating the right university leads, not just the most, and that the handoff to sales is clean and well-timed
• Use AI tools actively to improve campaign speed, targeting, testing, and performance. Bring these tools into how you work as a standard capability, not an experiment

Product marketing and positioning

• Support positioning, messaging, and go-to-market execution for Explore's products and services, translating platform capabilities into value propositions that land with university enrolment leaders and recruitment stakeholders
• Develop sales enablement materials, customer stories, presentations, and launch communications that the commercial team actually uses in partner conversations
• Conduct market research to stay close to what universities are asking for and what peers are offering, and feed that back into how Explore positions itself

Customer lifecycle marketing

• Design and run lifecycle programmes across university onboarding, engagement, retention, and advocacy, with the goal of turning new partners into long-term committed ones
• Build nurture journeys and communication programmes that strengthen university engagement between renewal cycles, not just at contract time
• Work with commercial and customer-facing teams to identify where partner engagement drops and build the marketing programmes that address it

Brand, content, and thought leadership

• Build Explore's reputation as a trusted partner within the global international education sector, producing thought leadership content that earns attention from senior enrolment leaders rather than just occupying their inboxes
• Execute content initiatives across webinars, reports, podcasts, customer stories, and sector-focused content that positions Explore as the platform that understands international student recruitment better than anyone else
• Ensure brand consistency across all campaigns, events, communications, and collateral, maintaining a clear and coherent voice across everything Explore puts into the market

Events and sector marketing

• Own marketing support for major industry events including NAFSA, BUILA, ICEF, and regional conferences, with campaigns, collateral, and post-event nurture programmes that make each event generate real pipeline rather than just presence
• Align marketing activity with key sector moments and commercial priorities throughout the year so the team is always showing up at the right time with the right message

Campaign management and cross-functional coordination

• Translate Explore's business objectives into clear campaign plans and briefs for the central marketing team, managing timelines, workflows, approvals, and stakeholder communication with enough rigour that things don't slip
• Build reporting that gives the Explore leadership team genuine visibility into what is working, what isn't, and what needs to change
• Continuously improve marketing processes and bring AI-assisted tools into that improvement where they create genuine efficiency

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Explore's marketing function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

You'll start by building a clear picture of the current marketing programmes, what's generating pipeline, where the positioning gaps are, which channels are underinvested, and where the highest-leverage improvements are. You'll have a view on where to contribute first.

From there, university pipeline sourced from marketing will be growing and better tracked. Explore's positioning in the sector will be sharper. Partner engagement and retention metrics will be improving. Events will be generating real commercial momentum. The central marketing team will have a clear, reliable brief-to-execution process for everything Explore needs.

Over time, Explore will have greater visibility and credibility in the international education sector, and the marketing function will have played a material role in making that true.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You have seven to nine years across B2B growth marketing, or integrated marketing, with enough range to have genuine competence across more than one discipline. You've worked across demand generation, product marketing, lifecycle, events, and content in some combination, and you understand how they connect rather than treating them as separate jobs.

You're commercially driven. You track pipeline contribution, conversion rates, and cost efficiency because those numbers are useful to you, not just required of you. You know the difference between marketing activity that looks impressive and marketing activity that moves a business, and you build towards the latter.

You understand the higher education and international student recruitment sector well enough to speak its language credibly. You know how university international offices make decisions, what they value in a platform partner, and what makes a thought leadership piece worth reading versus one that gets filed away. Experience in international education, higher education, or student recruitment is a real advantage here.

You're comfortable operating in a lean environment with significant autonomy. Explore is a growing business unit within a larger group. You won't have a large team around you or a fully defined playbook. You'll be expected to manage your own priorities, create your own leverage, and produce high-quality output without constant direction.

You're genuinely open about AI as a working tool. You use it to produce faster, test more, and do more with a lean team, and you have a practical view of where it helps and where it doesn't.

You're familiar with HubSpot, Salesforce, or a comparable CRM and marketing automation platform, and you understand these tools well enough to build the programmes rather than just brief someone else to.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Explore is building and thought: I understand exactly what universities need from this platform and I know how to build the marketing function that makes them see it. That's who this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counselling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counselling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach platform). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, Explore sits at the point where the Manifest ecosystem meets the university market. The counsellor network, the student data, the K12 platform reach: all of it becomes commercially valuable to universities through Explore. The marketing function that makes that value visible and credible to the right university buyers is one of the most important things Explore can build right now. This is the seat where that work gets done.

Explore is part of Manifest Global, a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.