Digital Paid Media & Performance Marketing Specialist

Description

At Illinois Mutual, our culture is built around our four core values. These values shape how we operate and define our expectations of each team member’s contributions:

• Be honest, reliable and respectful
• Think of other first
• Work together to create results
• Stand out with personal, caring service

The Digital Paid Media & Performance Marketing Specialist is a mid-level, hands-on individual contributor responsible for planning, launching, managing, testing and optimizing multi-channel paid media and lead-generation campaigns for Illinois Mutual. This role combines deep paid-media platform expertise with strong analytical judgment to acquire high-value prospects, improve campaign efficiency and connect marketing activity to downstream lead conversion and business outcomes.

The ideal candidate has strong, practical experience in Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager and understands paid search, paid social, display/retargeting, demand generation and emerging channels. This individual will make day-to-day optimization decisions across budgets, bids, audiences, objectives, creative, copy and landing pages, while translating campaign performance into clear recommendations for Marketing, Sales and executive stakeholders.

• Independently plan, build, launch and manage paid-media campaigns across Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager, with additional channel responsibility as appropriate.
• Develop channel and audience strategies that support B2B and B2C lead generation, agent recruitment, demand generation and broader marketing objectives.
• Manage paid search, paid social, display, video, retargeting and other performance-driven tactics across the prospect journey.
• Translate campaign goals into effective targeting, bidding, budget, conversion and optimization strategies.
• Evaluate opportunities to test new platforms, vendors, audience sources and emerging channels based on business fit, performance potential and scalability.

• Monitor in-market campaigns closely and make data-driven optimization decisions to improve lead volume, lead quality, conversion performance and media efficiency.
• Actively manage budget allocation, bid strategy, audience targeting, campaign objectives and pacing based on performance.
• Identify and reduce media waste by analyzing underperforming keywords, placements, audiences, creative and tactics and reallocating spend toward stronger opportunities.
• Develop and execute structured A/B tests across creative, copy, audiences, campaign objectives, offers and landing pages.
• Use testing results to establish actionable learnings and continuously improve future campaign strategy and execution.

• Build paid-media programs designed not simply to generate traffic, but to acquire qualified prospects and support sustainable lead growth.
• Understand and evaluate the full path from media exposure and click through lead capture, marketing qualification, Sales follow-up and downstream conversion.
• Establish ongoing feedback with Sales to understand lead quality, identify conversion opportunities and continuously improve audience targeting, messaging and lead-generation performance.
• Measure and demonstrate the ROI of paid-media investments by connecting marketing spend to lead quality, conversions and downstream business results, and use those insights to optimize future campaigns and budget allocation.
• Apply a performance-marketing mindset to both lead generation and demand generation, balancing short-term conversion goals with efforts that build awareness and consideration among high-value audiences.
• Support retargeting, lookalike and advanced audience strategies that help Illinois Mutual reach, re-engage and convert priority audiences.

• Measure and analyze campaign performance using metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, conversions, conversion rate, cost per lead, lead quality and other business-relevant KPIs.
• Maintain a strong working knowledge of conversion tracking, pixels/tags, UTM parameters and web analytics needed to evaluate campaign…