Executive Director of Digital Marketing, External Affairs

Executive Director of Digital Marketing, External Affairs Tracking Code

9/21/2026

Grade 51

$

$

The salary of the finalist selected for this role will be set based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to departmental budgets, qualifications, experience, education, licenses, specialty, training and internal pay comparison. The above hiring range represents the University's good faith and reasonable estimate of the range of possible compensation at the time of posting.

Full-Time/Regular

The Executive Director of Digital Marketing is a strategic and hands‑on leader within Boston University's External Affairs division, charged with building the university's digital marketing infrastructure and its analytics and insights capability from the ground up. Reporting to the Assistant Vice President of Digital Marketing and Brand Management, this leader will serve as BU's central point of strategy for the digital marketing work happening across BU's colleges, schools, and administrative units, including the external vendors and agencies those units engage, ensuring that decentralized investment is coordinated, strategic, and clearly tied to institutional return on investment.

This role will also stand up BU's analytics and reporting backbone, beginning with an internal performance dashboard for External Affairs and growing into a comprehensive, university‑wide data, reporting, and insights structure that lets BU's marketing community learn and improve together.

The ideal candidate is an experienced digital marketing pro and people leader, an industry expert who is fluent in current and emerging trends (including AI), a confident builder of infrastructure and process, a strategist with a keen eye toward performance metrics, and, above all, a trusted relationship‑builder who can bring together a large, decentralized institution around shared standards of excellence. Boston University is a leading private research and teaching institution with more than 38,000 students, 11,000 faculty and staff, 300 programs of study, and 130 research centers and institutes.

Our scholars are at the forefront of innovation, successfully competing for more than $574 million in sponsored research awards last year. Our students come from all 50 states and more than 140 countries, and nearly 20 percent of our undergraduates are first‑generation college students.

What You'll Own:

• Design, build, and maintain BU's digital marketing infrastructure: the platforms, tools, workflows, and governance the University runs on.
• Define and champion best practices in SEO, digital advertising, marketing technology, and channel strategy across BU.
• Tie digital marketing investment, at both the University and the unit level, to institutional goals such as enrollment, persistence, and fundraising, and to demonstrable return on investment.
• Analytics, Reporting & Insights Build an internal analytics dashboard for External Affairs that gives leadership real‑time visibility into digital marketing performance.
• Design and lead a university‑wide data, reporting, and insights structure so BU's colleges, schools, and units learn and improve together rather than in silos.
• Partner with Institutional Research, IS&T, and unit stakeholders to define shared metrics, data governance, and reporting schedules tied to institutional priorities.
• Translate complex data into clear, actionable insight for senior leadership, unit partners, and the External Affairs team.
• Serve as the day‑to‑day strategic partner to BU's colleges, schools, and administrative units on digital marketing, building trusted advisory relationships with unit marketing leaders and the agencies and…