What This Role Is
Every student who discovers Cialfo, BridgeU, Kaaiser, or Explore does so through a piece of content at some point. A social post that stopped them scrolling. An article that answered the question they were too nervous to ask a counsellor. A video that made studying in Australia feel real rather than abstract. A parent who forwarded something to their child because it finally explained the process in terms they understood.
Content is how Manifest's brands earn trust with the two audiences that matter most before any platform is ever opened: students making one of the most consequential decisions of their lives, and the parents who are often the real decision-makers behind it. Getting that content right, across four brands, multiple markets, and audiences with genuinely different motivations and fears, is one of the highest-leverage things the group can do right now.
Right now, the consumer content function is fragmented. Each brand produces content independently, with no shared infrastructure, no consistent audience strategy, and no central capability for building the kind of long-term brand affinity that turns a student who discovered the platform into one who recommends it to every classmate and sibling who comes after them.
This role builds that function.
The Head of Consumer Content and Audience Strategy will design and run a centralised content organisation serving all four brands, operating as an internal agency for student and parent-facing content globally. You'll own audience strategy, content across every channel and format, community building, brand voice, and the systems that make consistent quality possible at scale. You'll report directly to the VP of Marketing.
What Makes This Role Different
Most content leadership roles sit inside a single brand with a single audience. This one spans four brands with meaningfully different audiences, different market contexts, and different stages of brand maturity.
Cialfo's audience is primarily students at international schools and their families, thinking about global university options. Kaaiser's audience is students and parents in India and Southeast Asia navigating a high-stakes, high-anxiety process with significant financial weight. BridgeU's student audience comes through the counsellor layer rather than direct-to-consumer. Explore engages students through the university network. Each of these requires a different content approach, a different tone, and a different understanding of what the audience is actually trying to figure out.
The person who holds all of that, without collapsing the brands into a generic EdTech voice, and who builds the systems to produce high-quality content across all of them consistently, is doing something genuinely rare.
Manifest is also at the stage where the content function can become a compounding growth asset rather than a production operation. Students who trust the brand refer others. Parents who feel informed and respected become advocates. Communities that form around shared experiences create organic reach that no paid channel replicates. Building toward that is the ambition of this role.
What You Own
Audience strategy across students and parents globally
- Develop a deep, research-grounded understanding of student motivations, aspirations, fears, and decision-making behaviour across Manifest's key markets: India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond
- Understand parent concerns, trust drivers, and the emotional weight behind study abroad decisions, particularly in markets where family consensus is as important as the student's own preference
- Translate audience insight into scalable content and engagement strategies that speak to what students and parents are actually experiencing, not what the brand wants them to hear
Multi-brand content strategy and execution
- Define and execute distinct content strategies for each brand, ensuring each maintains its own voice, audience relevance, and emotional connection while benefiting from the shared infrastructure and quality standards you build
- Balance short-term campaign needs with long-term brand building across all four businesses, and hold the line between the two when pressure pushes everything toward immediate conversion
- Own content across every channel and format: social media, video, editorial, email, community platforms, events, and emerging channels, with a clear view of what each is for and what it needs to produce
Building and running the central content organisation
- Design and operate a centralised content function structured as an internal agency: content strategists, writers and editors, video and social specialists, community and audience engagement resources, freelancers, and external agencies
- Build the systems that make quality consistent and production scalable: planning frameworks, editorial calendars, quality control processes, resource allocation across brands, and performance measurement that connects content activity to business outcomes
- Use AI actively across the content production and distribution workflow, building the team's fluency with these tools as a standard capability rather than an afterthought
Brand love and community building
- Build strategies that move students and parents from awareness to genuine advocacy: user-generated content programmes, student and parent ambassador initiatives, community participation, and the kind of consistent brand experience that makes people recommend Manifest's platforms to people they care about
- Create content that builds emotional connection, not just information delivery. The student who trusts the brand before they've ever opened the platform is worth far more than the one who arrives from a paid ad with no prior relationship
- Champion audience-first thinking across the organisation, and be the person who brings the student and parent perspective into decisions that affect how the brand shows up
Consumer journey and lifecycle content
- Own content strategy across the full audience lifecycle: awareness, consideration, evaluation, conversion, retention, and advocacy, with systems that support students and parents through the critical decision-making moments that actually drive behaviour
- Ensure content is designed not only to be created, but discovered, shared, and remembered, with a distribution strategy that matches the ambition of what's being produced
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where the consumer content function is today across Manifest's brands. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
You'll start by building a complete picture of the current state across all four brands: what content is being produced, for which audiences, through which channels, and what it's actually producing in terms of engagement, trust, and commercial contribution. You'll have a clear view on where the highest-leverage improvements are and where to build first.
From there, the content function will be more coherent and more impactful. Each brand will have a clearer audience strategy and a more distinct voice. The quality standard will be rising consistently. Student and parent engagement will be growing in ways that are tracked and understood rather than just observed. AI will be embedded in how the team works, making production faster without reducing quality.
Over time, Manifest's brands will be recognised as genuinely trusted voices in international education, the kind of brands that students and parents recommend to each other without being asked. The content function will have played a direct role in building that reputation, and the commercial outcomes will reflect it.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You have ten or more years in content, consumer marketing, editorial, community, or audience growth leadership, with a track record of building consumer-facing brands that people actively trust rather than simply recognise. You've led content teams at scale, managed multi-channel content ecosystems, and built the systems that make quality consistent without requiring you to personally approve everything.
You understand audience psychology in the specific way this role demands. You know what motivates a seventeen-year-old in Mumbai who is thinking about studying in Melbourne, and you know that her parents' concerns are different from hers and require a different conversation. You've built content strategies grounded in real audience insight rather than assumed demographics, and you have examples of that work changing how an audience engaged with a brand.
You're a genuine storyteller with the operational discipline to run a function at scale. You can write a brief that makes a junior writer produce something excellent, you can present a content strategy to a COO in commercial terms, and you can hold the quality bar while managing competing priorities across multiple brands simultaneously.
You're openly enthusiastic about AI as a content and distribution tool. You've used it seriously, you know where it accelerates good work and where it produces mediocre output at speed, and you can build a team that uses it with judgment rather than just enthusiasm.
You have a genuine interest in or experience with the education sector, youth-facing brands, parenting content, or community-led businesses. The emotional weight of the decisions Manifest's audiences are making is real, and the right person for this role finds that weight meaningful rather than incidental.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building across four brands and thought: I know how to build the content function that earns these audiences' trust. That's who this role is for.
Why Manifest
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counselling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counselling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach platform). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, the students and parents that Manifest's brands serve are making decisions that shape entire futures. The content function that earns their trust, educates them honestly, and supports them through the process is doing work that compounds: students who trust the brand become advocates, advocates bring others, and communities built on genuine value create the kind of organic growth that no paid channel replicates. Building that function from this seat is the opportunity.
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.
