Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (Startup NWA)

About Startup NWA Where a founder sits still shapes whether they get funded. Capital in venture moves through warm introductions and pattern recognition, so a founder’s odds depend as much on who they already know as on what they have built. For founders in the middle of the country, that network gap is the binding constraint. The companies are fundable. They are just harder to find from a desk in Menlo Park. Startup NWA exists to close that gap. It is a program of the Northwest Arkansas Council, the regional organization founded in 1990 by Sam Walton, J.B. Hunt, Don Tyson, and other business leaders to take on the region's hardest problems together. For thirty-five years the Council has backed the work behind the region's growth, across jobs, talent, infrastructure, and quality of life. Startup NWA applies that same instinct to founders, and works across a few fronts:

• Onward FX (about 85% of this role): our statewide founder-funder exchange, built with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. Twice a year we bring national investors to Bentonville and sit them across from founders for curated, pre-briefed one-on-one meetings. Every meeting is a focused, one-on-one conversation between a decision-maker and a team that fits their thesis.
• Ecosystem storytelling: profiling and elevating the founders building here, so the people who should know about them do. The work is already real. A lot of the job is making sure it travels.

The Role Reporting to the Executive Director, the Fractional Chief Marketing Officer will own marketing and brand for Startup NWA, with one primary mandate: recruit the right founders, nationally, to Onward FX, and move them through a funnel whose ultimate output is term sheets. This is a hands-on, senior engagement spanning brand strategy, full-funnel demand generation, creative direction, and performance marketing, with real budget and the autonomy to set the plan. This is a fractional, contract engagement based in Northwest Arkansas, with travel to Bentonville and Little Rock around key program moments. We are open to a remote-first arrangement for the right person. The Track Record We are five cycles in. The metrics we hold ourselves to are the ones downstream of the meetings: capital raised, term sheets signed, and companies that kept building.

• $118M: raised by 90 companies that came through the program.
• 1 in 4: founders from past cycles signed a term sheet within six months of attending.
• 990: curated, pre-briefed one-on-one meetings between founders and investors across five events.
• 330: startups selected from thousands of applicants and matched to investors who lead at their stage.
• 200+: VC firms in the network, from seed funds writing first checks to multistage platforms.
• 3x: the venture deal volume in Arkansas since the program began.

Key Responsibilities

• Founder Recruitment: Own the national engine that brings founders to Onward FX: creative strategy, integrated campaigns, and a content-first program that drives demand, conversion, and retention across cycles that now run close to year-round. Recruitment is mandate-driven: you source against the specific theses of the participating investors and corporate strategic partners.
• Full-Funnel Ownership: Own the funnel and the data behind it, from cold awareness through application, acceptance, and re-engagement. Optimize for qualified applications, measured against what they produce downstream. The top of this funnel is judged at the bottom of it, in term sheets.
• Omnichannel Marketing: Direct execution across email, paid social, paid search, SEO and GEO, organic social, and earned media, with a clear point of view on the right channel mix for each phase of a cycle.
• Brand & Messaging: Harden a brand that is already developed: customer profiles, brand pillars, look and feel, and a messaging system that holds up across a primary audience of founders and investors.
• Channel Partnerships: Build the partner motion (entrepreneur support organizations, VC portfolio referrals, partner events, roadshows) so pipeline gets rebuilt deliberately each cycle.
• Creative & Production Oversight: Direct all creative work and production: direct the design agency and photo and video partners, oversee the digital, print, packaging, signage, and experiential assets that campaigns and events require, to an elevated standard.
• Team & Vendor Leadership: Give direction to a PR professional, an outside design agency, and a junior social-media resource, and raise the bar on everything they produce.
• Budget & Performance: Own budget development and campaign performance, with a measurement framework that ties spend to outcomes. Run the weekly cadence and the project and asset-management systems that let a small team move fast without rebuilding every deliverable.
• Tooling & AI: Bring current tools and AI into the funnel, from audience building and personalization to content production, attribution, and reporting.

Early Deliverables Your first priority is the go-to-market campaign for our next cycle, a deep tech edition of Onward FX. Alongside it, you will lay the foundation the rest of the function is built on.

• Deep tech GTM campaign: Design and run the campaign to recruit the strongest deep tech startups in the country across dual-use, industrials, aerospace, and energy. Source and target against the specific mandates of the participating VCs and corporate strategic partners, so the founders in the room are the ones those investors actually came to meet.
• Brand platform: Customer profiles, brand pillars, look and feel, and a messaging system that holds up across founders, investors, and corporate partners.
• Marketing strategy: A content plan, a channel playbook, and a campaign calendar built around the recruitment window
• Data and analytics: Funnel instrumentation and the reporting behind it: the metrics that matter, from qualified applications through to term sheets, in a form the team can actually run.

Qualifications

• A decade or more in marketing helps, though we weigh hustle over tenure. What we look for is a record of figuring things out fast, shipping, and owning the result. Time inside a startup or scale-up, or as a founder yourself, is what we are really after.
• A track record building and running full-funnel growth, with results you can point to: the qualified pipeline you generated and, downstream, what it produced.
• Fluency across email, paid social, paid search, SEO and GEO, lifecycle, channel partnerships, and attribution, and a clear view of how to sequence them across a recruitment window.
• Experience directing creative (design, copy, agencies) to a high bar, and translating a complex offer into something a sharp audience actually wants to read.
• Budget ownership and performance discipline, including comfort tying spend to outcomes and reallocating across channels.
• Marketing to a sophisticated, skeptical audience (founders, investors, or a comparable high-trust audience) is a strong plus.
• Genuinely current on modern tools and AI in the marketing stack, already working this way.

Who You Are

• Comfortable with a blank canvas. You make the plan, execute it, and decide with confidence inside a small, fast-moving organization.
• Creative and data-driven in equal measure. You can write the campaign that lands and read the dashboard that tells you whether it did.
• A storyteller who can make access to capital, and the outcomes behind it, legible without flattening them.
• Founder-fluent. You know this audience gets pitched for a living, and you know what earns a reply: specificity, and proof you did your homework before you asked for anything.
• Low-ego and collaborative. You can move a PR professional, an agency, and a junior teammate in the same direction.
• Pulled in by the mission of getting capital to founders the market overlooks.

Why You’ll Want This Role

• You can change where capital goes. Every founder you bring in is a real shot at a check that would not have happened otherwise, and you can watch it land.
• A lot is still being figured out. How to recruit founders nationally from a place most have never visited. How to tell this story so it carries. There is room here to shape the model itself.
• You build on real traction. The owned channels already work (LinkedIn engagement ran about four times the company-page benchmark last cycle), the paid tracking infrastructure is built, and there is a deep library of founder and investor testimonials to draw on.
• You sit close to the work, near the founders raising real rounds and the investors writing the checks, reporting to an Executive Director who will give you room to run.

How to Apply

Send a short note on why this work matters to you, along with your résumé or LinkedIn and two or three examples of full-lifecycle campaigns or programs you have built and what they produced. Reach us at [email protected]. Apply To This Job