Marketing Strategist (NPR App Growth)

We are seeking a data-driven and highly creative marketing strategist to grow our audience for NPR’s owned platforms, with a focus on The NPR app. You will act as a guiding force behind NPR’s mobile growth, leveraging data and insights to inform strategies and tactics that migrate audiences to the core digital experience that will define NPR for years to come.

You will manage a dedicated advertising budget, and will also be expected to make the most of NPR’s own channels like our podcasts, broadcast, website, and of course the NPR app’s messaging and UX. You will work closely with the app and web product teams, the audience insights and analytics teams, the content teams, and the Network growth teams, and many others while you seek to find loyal users, keep them engaged, and transform this platform into an indispensable daily habit that sustains our journalism and mission.

You will lead test-and-learn campaigns, making data-informed decisions on where we should invest our resources next. Your goal is to understand our audience’s needs, deepen their engagement with our content, and identify exactly where NPR’s app stands out in a crowded landscape, ultimately shaping how public media thrives in a mobile-first world.

Responsibilities

• Execute Marketing Campaigns: Plan the strategy and messaging for campaigns that give people a clear, compelling reason to download and use the NPR app, translating our trusted journalism into a dynamic, modern mobile experience.
• Manage Paid and Free/Owned Media: Run ads across social media, search, and video platforms, while also creating promotions for NPR’s own radio broadcasts, podcasts, and newsletters to ensure our public service journalism reaches audiences wherever they are.
• Manage the Budget: Decide how to spend our advertising money effectively to get the best return on investment and the lowest cost per download, helping build a sustainable, digital-first growth engine for the network.
• Lead Across Teams: Bring together people from the product, analytics, content, and broadcast teams in order to execute campaigns that feel cohesive and true to NPR.
• Keep Users Coming Back: Build plans (using tools like push notifications, in-app-messages, and emails) to turn first-time downloaders into dedicated returning users, elevating our listeners’ daily routines by making the app an indispensable companion.
• Understand Our Audience: Research the app landscape to see trends, what others are doing right, figure out where NPR stands out, and make sure our marketing speaks directly to what our audience needs.
• Test and Improve: Always approach projects with a testing mindset and determine what strategies drive new installs and deeper engagement.
• Track Success: Track conversions in actionable ways that can help drive near and long-term marketing decisions. You will work closely with our Audience Insights and Product teams to track all your promotional strategies, but especially digital ads and even terrestrial radio promo.

The above duties and responsibilities are not an exhaustive list of required responsibilities, duties, and skills. Other duties may be assigned, and this job description can be modified at any time.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a data-driven marketing role, preferably at a media or tech company.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to thoughtfully establish new cross-team processes, strategies, and tools for collaboration if/when a marketing plan requires something we have never executed before.
• An execution-focused collaborator who thoughtfully balances team input while maintaining a strong bias for action. You know when to align, but also when to roll up your sleeves and keep things moving.
• Ability to turn complex numbers into clear, simple stories that inform leadership decisions.
• A talent for competitive analysis and a deep curiosity about audience behavior.

Required Skills/Competencies

• A proven track record in both creative marketing campaign management and data-driven performance analysis.
• Proven ability to manage paid advertising budgets efficiently, especially for mobile app growth.
• Experience using tracking software, pixels, UTMs, etc. to identify which specific promotions lead to new app users.
• Substantial experience and comfort building campaigns for a wide variety of marketing messaging channels including but not limited to: email, social media, in-app messaging, display, audio, push notifications, SMS, web notification/pop-ups, in-product UX, etc. (experience with enterprise-level cross-channel messaging tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Iterable, or Adobe Campaign/Marketo is a plus).

Education Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree.