Marketer & Customer Development

Overview

Immersed Games is harnessing the power of video games to empower students to learn and love STEM through authentic problem solving.

Our flagship product, Tyto Online, is a video game where students actively DO science. The student experience includes experiences like examining coral bleaching as an anchoring phenomena for learning about climate change, collecting evidence to determine if a planet is an invasive species, and breeding dragons to learn about genetics.

We are a small, multidisciplinary team that is excited to help build a generation of scientifically passionate and literate students, and our work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Department of Education. We’re looking for team members enthusiastic about this mission to work alongside us.

What will you do?

Your role can be summed up as: helping us create leads and engagement to lead potential customers through the buyer’s journey. You’ll work closely with our Founder and our first Sales rep as we work together to establish repeatable, regular leads and revenue.

In this role, you’ll participate in the full pipeline of marketing, lead generation, and sales enablement, with broad and creative work opportunities. As we grow, you can specialize into the area that you love the most, or even end up leading the team of specialists we’ll bring on over time. This is the joy of working with an early stage startup! This role is hard to fully define as you’ll be our first full time marketing and customer development team member, which means we’ll be doing a lot of experimenting to see what strategies work best to generate the leads and traction we need. That could mean that you spend 80% of your time doing content marketing and email list nurturing, or 80% of your time doing a more traditional “SDR” role with research and cold calling. We need someone high energy and excited to help figure it out with us, and willing to do whatever ideas we have to see what is most successful in generating us regular leads and revenues!

That said, here’s what we have in mind for what you will spend your time doing, but it is definitely not an exhaustive list:

• Work collaboratively with our Founder & CEO and experienced Sales Lead to design the marketing strategy and execution, with a focus on results for revenue, pipeline conversion, and engagement. This includes managing and reporting on a marketing budget.
• Provide value with content marketing to drive engagement, nurture our leads, and support our SEO. This will be a mix of making original assets, and working with our content expert team members to create meaningful pieces. For example: landing pages, case studies, white papers, blog posts, social media content, and other sales collateral materials.
• Creating and managing our email marketing, from onboarding automation and conversion campaigns to nurturing of lead lists, or cold outreach email sequences. This will involve designing the campaigns, tracking the analytics, and iterating/testing for improvements.
• You’ll design and manage an event strategy (virtual, in-person, and trade shows) to drive brand awareness, lead generation and thought leadership. We expect regular virtual webinars and some in-person lunch & learns to be successful avenues, for example.
• Setting up and managing sales enablement systems, such as lead scoring based on engagement with our marketing materials.
• Cold calling (similar to an “SDR” role) for direct lead creation into select markets, including researching and identifying the best targeted schools and districts by, for example, reviewing science test scores across a state.
• Collaborate with our leadership to generate earned media that reaches our target partners and builds our brand.

Location. We do want this person to join our team here in Buffalo, NY (even if we hire with a relocation plan within ~3 months in mind). There will be a lot of content marketing opportunities being local with us, media with the team/office, play testing with students, etc. and the benefit of being able to directly collaborate easily with the entire team nearby for the content you need.

What are we looking for?

First, we don’t expect to hire someone who has done everything above, and we are open to the right entry-level person for this role. We are all learning together, and we have consultants who specialize in marketing and going to market in K-12, and even have a startup Sales Accelerator program starting in September for an entire course of learning available as you enter this role. So, who would be the right person to join us?

• You are empathetic to the challenges educators experience in serving their communities and improving their teaching practices.
• You care deeply about empowering students’ learning, and are passionate about the role game-based learning can play in supporting this goal.
• You are technically inclined! You’ll working with many different systems from Mailchimp, WordPress, CRM, Zapier to connect data/automations, sales enablement tools, etc. so you’ll need to be able to pick up and interface with these readily.
• You approach problems with both analytical rigor and socio-emotional nuance. You can rely on quantitative data from Hubspot, Mailchimp, or Google Analytics and qualitative data from sources such as sales calls to inform decisions about marketing.
• You have good design sense. We know you’re not a graphic designer, but you know what “looks good” in various formats and feel comfortable developing shareable visual content through whatever tools work for you (Canva, Figma, Adobe, etc.).
• You’re an excellent communicator and relationship builder, able to communicate via email, live chat, phone, and video calls.
• You’re biased towards action and can work independently to break down ambiguous problems and find and execute effective solutions.
• You are willing to travel, as needed, to go to conferences once we are doing more in-person again, or similar activities.

It would be a Plus if you have a background or experience in K-12 education.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

What’s it like working with us?

We’re a small team, so we focus on making our collaboration as productive as possible, with minimal meetings disrupting your flow. We have weekly meetings for each team to collaborate and set goals and ~monthly full team meetings to go over larger business objectives.

We’re flexible to the needs of our staff with an open, communicative environment where everyone has access to everyone else on the team. If you have ideas to change processes, policies, or anything else, you just grab Ryan (one of our co-founders) to chat, and we’ve changed things because of this in the past.

We value inclusivity and diversity, and know our product has benefited from LGBTQ team members impacting the design of character creation (no gender choices, just body styles), or members with ADHD giving feedback on UX designs. Also, being more diverse simply makes a company stronger as research shows you’re less likely to have group think. Our Founder/CEO says that nothing is sacred or beyond questioning, and we love when people are willing to just work alongside everyone, including our CEO, as equals.

We’re still small, so there is ample room for growth as our company grows. We always promote from within first if the person is up to the task — which means you could end up creating an entire team around you, if that’s the type of role you’re interested in.

Salary & Benefits

Salary: $43,000 + equity stock options

We’re an early stage startup, so we’re not making the big bucks yet. But everyone on our team currently makes the same amount (yes, you’ll make the same as the CEO); we’re in this together as we hit achievements and grow the company and our own potential. We won’t be only growing this salary at a small rate, we’ll do significant raises as the business finances can support it until we get to market rates and pay everyone what they are really worth. We’re working towards multiple raise goals within the next 12 months… directly dependent on fundraising and revenue, actually, so you’ll be able to help there. And of course, you’ll have ownership in the company to benefit on that end, too.

Perks:

• You’ll pay no NY State Income tax, due to our participation in the Startup NY program (when working from our office). This makes your effective pay higher.
• Flex scheduling: make your own schedule and work when it’s best for you; exception for Implementation Manager that it also has to work for our customers!
• Flexible paid vacation.
• Paid parental leave.
• Retirement savings plan (401k).

We know this list is currently missing some important benefits, mainly health insurance, that we plan to add for 2022 as the company grows. Right now, we help our employees with the process of using the ACA Marketplace, and are looking forward to growing our sales so that we can afford to give our employees everything they deserve.

How to Apply

Email lindsey@immersedgames.com an introduction email with your resume or LinkedIn. If you have a portfolio website or other materials to share, that would be fantastic. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can!