Now hiring: Head of Audience Strategy & Development

When people write on Medium, a big part of the reason is because the Medium platform delivers interested and engaged readers. While the act of writing can often be lonely, the payoff is a kind of communion with one’s readers, often embodied in the active dialog that a thoughtful piece sparks. There’s a dizzying array of remarkable writing across a vast range of topics on Medium every day. To do right by those who write on Medium, we want to build for them large and engaged audiences of readers using all the tools and capabilities at our disposal, both on Medium and off. It’s a big Internet out there, rowdy with social networks, media platforms, online publishers, recommendation engines, and aggregators, and we aim to make smart (and ethical) use of all those points of concentration and channels of attention to connect Medium writing with those who’ll love to read and discuss it, and to convert occasional drive-by readers into loyal Medium users.

To make that happen, we’re looking for someone to lead Medium’s audience strategy & development function.

This role is different from a lot of media company audience development jobs in at least two ways: (1) the objective is not pageviews or clicks, but driving the conversion of casual readers to loyal Medium users, all the way down the funnel; and (2) alongside the rigors of planning and executing daily operations, the role entails partnering closely with Medium’s product team to help build groundbreaking audience development tools for our growing cohort of publisher partners. Internally, we’ve been using the fabricated term “audience science” for this function, to capture our ambition to put data, analytics, and rigorous experimentation at the heart of our efforts.

The ideal candidate is someone who is familiar with social networks, media platforms, and content marketing; curious about what’s happening on the Internet; knowledgable about designing experiments and applying derived insights from data; interested to help writers and publishers find the widest and most engaged audiences possible; and motivated to build Medium’s loyal user base.

Mission:

• Develop and implement strategies to grow user acquisition, drive conversion, and increase active, loyal users of Medium and its publications.
• Help Medium’s product teams build fantastic audience development and content marketing tools for Medium’s publishers.
• Establish, nurture and deepen direct relationships with audiences across ever-more-fragmented social networks and content platforms.
• Actively market and promote Medium content across the Internet, including social networks, media sites, news aggregators, and emerging platforms.
• Imagine, test, iterate, and embrace new conversion tactics as our audiences and the broader online environments change.

Tactics:

• Manage a daily war-room-type operation to find, establish, and feed audiences’ engagement with Medium content, toward the goal of acquiring and converting users to a daily Medium habit.
• Identify the best stories for user acquisition, and execute the off-platform marketing and promotion of them using an ever-evolving array of techniques ranging from Medium’s social media accounts to online aggregators to direct outreach to editors, journalists, curators, video producers, newsletter writers, etc.
• Partner with and advise the various Medium functional teams to improve Medium’s performance in user acquisition and conversion. For example: Advise Medium’s product team on ways to experiment, iterate, and improve user onboarding flows across the full range of inbound paths. Work with Medium’s product science and product teams to develop the right logic and UI variations to improve the conversion of logged-out users. Advise Medium’s outreach and marketing teams on their activities’ contributions to user conversion.
• Relentlessly monitor the performance of Medium content and translate those data into insight and action, particularly to help (a) improve our acquisition and conversion of users to daily habit, (b) surface non-obvious insights about user behavior and Medium’s products and features, (c) create and test hypotheses about strategies to drive sustained engagement and active participation in our platform.
• Expand Medium’s reach into new platforms as they emerge.
• Measure and analyze engagement with, and conversions from, Medium stories in order to surface non-obvious insights; create and testing hypotheses based on those insights.

Who will do well in this role?

Here are the essential skills and qualifications of a Medium audience science teammate:

• State-of-the-art understanding of how to drive audience growth and user conversion via social networks and other online platforms.
• Quantitative expertise; fearless command of web and social analytical and reporting tools.
• Previous experience in a similar role at an Internet publisher or content platform.
• Ability to work well with multiple functions in a tech environment.
• Excellent writing, communication, and leadership skills.
• Passion for interesting stories and ideas.
• Team-iness.

And of course, this person should love Medium and its mission.

We’re excited to hire this role. To apply, please follow this link. We’d love to meet you!

Medium celebrates diversity in people, backgrounds, and life experiences. For instance, our founder co-created two of the most transformative tools for sharing ideas online, Blogger and Twitter. Our head of user services was once the lead singer of a popular band (and brought the drummer to work at Medium, too).