Digital Marketing Manager

Type of Employment:  Full-time, Exempt

Incumbent:  New Role

Reports to:  Marketing & Communications Director

Location:  Wisconsin Historical Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin

Madison-area candidates preferred. Position eligible for hybrid work option, with weekly in-person collaboration required at least twice a week.

Introduction

The Wisconsin Historical Foundation exists to advance the mission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

• Mission: The Society connects people to the past by collecting, preserving and sharing stories.
• Vision: Enriching and transforming lives through unparalleled access to history.
• Values: We believe that increasing the public’s knowledge of history has profound societal, cultural and economic benefit.

As a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, the Foundation receives grants and private contributions benefiting the Society and administers the membership program.

Position Description

The Digital Marketing Manager is part of a fast-paced, in-house Wisconsin Historical Foundation marcom team that includes creative, digital, social media, public relations and strategic communications professionals who work to grow awareness of and revenue for the Wisconsin Historical Society brand, resources, events and portfolio of historic sites.

This role blends strategy and hands-on execution across digital channels, playing an instrumental role in driving revenue growth, elevating brand awareness, and growing the Wisconsin Historical Society’s thought leadership position locally, regionally and nationally. The ideal candidate brings a strong strategic mindset to develop, guide and analyze cohesive digital marketing initiatives across channels while directly managing our day-to-day email marketing program. This role collaborates across the marcom team to ensure digital and offline activities are aligned, and partners closely with creative, web and social media colleagues to ensure campaigns are seamlessly applied across digital channels. This role supervises the social media manager and is responsible for ensuring that the overarching digital strategy across online channels aligns with and supports core organizational priorities and the Society’s content strategy.  

The ideal candidate establishes organized, informed and inspired cross-functional collaboration processes to plan, prioritize and deliver impactful digital marketing campaigns for a highly matrixed organization.

Core Duties

Digital Strategy Leadership (35%)

Owns the organization’s integrated digital campaign strategy, working in close partnership with the Marketing & Communications Director, Lead User Experience Developer, and Social Media Manager.

Integrated Digital Strategy & Planning

• Develop, manage and execute comprehensive digital marketing strategies that align with organizational goals for revenue growth, brand awareness, and thought leadership positioning.
• Serve as the team’s digital marketing subject matter expert, translating the organization’s strategic priorities into integrated digital campaigns spanning social media, email, web, paid media and content, ensuring each channel reinforces and amplifies the others.
• Establish and maintain an annual digital campaign calendar, ensuring strategic alignment, cross-functional coordination and visibility into campaign activity and prioritization.
• Identify emerging digital marketing trends, technologies and audience behaviors to continually evolve the Wisconsin Historical Society’s digital presence.

Social Media Strategic Leadership

• Supervise the Social Media Manager, providing strategic direction, day-to-day support, and ongoing professional development.
• Partner with the Social Media Manager to ensure social media initiatives ladder up to and amplify the overall digital marketing strategy; develop integrated campaigns that maximize social channels for thought leadership positioning, brand building, audience engagement and revenue generation.
• Work with the Social Media Manager to leverage Sprout Social’s reporting, competitive analysis and social listening capabilities to inform social strategy decisions and establish effective executive reports.  
• Support the Social Media Manager in monitoring platform trends, identifying innovation opportunities, and staying ahead of algorithm and audience behavior changes.

Budget & Resource Management

• Oversee digital marketing budgets across channels; track spend and ensure cost-effective, strategic deployment of resources aligned with organizational priorities.

Digital Campaign Management (35%)

Leads the design, implementation and analysis of multiple concurrent integrated digital marketing campaigns in support of the Society’s strategic priorities.

Campaign Management

• Owns the design and execution of digital marketing campaigns from concept to planning and completion, ensuring quality, consistency and brand adherence across channels.
• Manage timelines, deliverables and expectations across a high volume of concurrent digital campaigns.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate with creative, user experience, and social colleagues to produce high-quality digital assets that serve clear digital campaign objectives across channels.
• Partner with web colleagues to optimize landing pages and integrate SEO best practices into digital marketing campaigns, boosting organic traffic to priority web pages and boosting conversions, where applicable.
• Periodically collaborate with external agency partner to augment organic digital campaigns with paid advertising for high priority initiatives.

Campaign Analytics & Optimization

• Define KPIs and establish measurement frameworks across digital channels; track, analyze and report on campaign performance with actionable recommendations for optimization. Collaborate with web and social colleagues to pull in relevant metrics across digital channels.
• Conduct A/B testing on campaigns and landing pages to refine messaging, targeting and conversion strategies.

Email Marketing Planning & Execution (30%)

Owns the email marketing program from strategy and segmentation to execution, optimization and governance.

Email Strategy & Program Ownership

• Own the planning, execution and optimization of the marcom team’s email marketing program, including targeted campaigns for priority Society initiatives as well as a broad-reach eNewsletter.
• Develop segmentation and automation strategies that continually improve user experience, engagement and affinity for the Wisconsin Historical Society.
• Collaborate across the marcom and Society team to ensure email efforts integrate with and amplify broader campaign efforts and organizational priorities.
• Establish and maintain a cross-divisional email marketing calendar to increase organizational visibility into email sends, improve strategic deployment, and identify cross-promotion and collaboration opportunities.

Campaign Execution & Optimization

• Manage email builds, deployments and ongoing refinements, ensuring all sends are polished, on-brand, aligned with key priorities, and consistent with the organization’s voice and positioning.
• Monitor and report on campaign performance metrics and run tests to optimize open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and overall engagement.

Platform Governance & Best Practices

• Manage the email marketing platform, developing usage guidelines and best practices, monitor deliverability and compliance, and conduct an annual platform clean up and effectiveness assessment.
• Maintain expertise in email marketing regulations (e.g. CAN-SPAM) and deliverability standards.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, or related discipline.
• 7+ years of progressive experience in digital marketing, with demonstrated success in strategic planning, execution, and cross-functional collaboration.
• 3+ years of people management experience, with ability to lead, coach, and collaborate with experienced professionals.

Skills & Expertise

• Proven ability to develop and execute cohesive multi-channel digital campaigns that drive measurable results, working within an organization’s broader strategic framework.
• Demonstrated expertise translating business objectives into actionable digital marketing strategies across social, email, web, and paid channels.
• Strong strategic thinking paired with disciplined tactical execution; able to operate at both the campaign level and the channel detail level.
• Experience with content strategy development and campaign planning across digital channels.
• Proven experience in email marketing campaign development, audience segmentation, automation and end-to-end email execution.
• Working knowledge of SEO strategy and its integration with content, web, and paid media programs.
• Ability to build and interpret analytics reporting across channels, surfacing insights that drive optimization decisions.
• Familiarity with paid digital advertising strategy, audience targeting, and performance metrics.
• Excellent project management capabilities with ability to manage multiple priorities, campaigns and deadlines simultaneously.
• Experience with budget management and financial tracking.
• Effective verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills; able to influence and collaborate across internal teams and external partners.
• Self-motivated and detail-oriented with strong follow-through and accountability.

Platform Proficiencies

• Strong understanding of digital marketing platforms and analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Hotjar, Sprout Social), with the ability to deliver meaningful insights and actionable recommendations from data. Google Analytics certification is a plus.
• Experience with managing and effectively using email marketing platforms. Active Campaign experience is a plus.
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite and project management platforms such as Asana.

 Physical Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee should have the ability to:

• Receive detailed information through oral communication and have close visual acuity to review digital content, data analytics and marketing materials on computer screens.

Compensation and Benefits

This is a full-time exempt position eligible for the Wisconsin Historical Foundation’s benefits package including health, dental and vision insurance; competitive retirement plan including employer match and generous PTO and paid holiday policy. This position offers a starting salary of $75,000 – $80,000 dependent upon qualifications and experience and is eligible for the Wisconsin Historical Foundation’s annual incentive compensation plan (a board-approved annual bonus program based on team performance and metrics).