Senior Strategist – London

Senior Strategist – Hybrid – London

Day rate: £450 – £650 (inside IR35)

Duration: 12 months

Start: ASAP

My new client is looking for a freelance Strategist Consultant. This role is as much about client wrangling, traffic control, stakeholder management, etc as it is about content strategy.

Total experience: 5+ years

Relevant Experience on Mandatory Skills:

* Create strong content strategies for key clients

* Lead the creation of individual content strategy deliverables and projects

* Focus, influence and help more junior strategists to grow their strengths and overcome their weaknesses

* Help build the content strategy discipline by creating a library of content strategy case studies. Over time this library of case studies will be converted into a Content Strategy credentials and capabilities presentation. (but the latter is not an immediate expectation for the role)

What you’ll need:

* The person in this role will have a passion for turning a brand positioning into a compelling editorial lens that differentiates the brand from competitors and actively engages target consumers.

* Content Strategists and Strategists share many of the same core skills.

To succeed in either role the individual must:

* Be able to present in a manner that inspires confidence and sells ideas

* Self-starter with the ability to work without supervision

* Ability to manage and prioritise a complex and varied workload

* Able to work in flexible team configurations

* Must be able to work closely with senior members of both the strategy team and the wider agency

* An open minded approach, able to readily accept the ideas of others

* Deliver Creative Briefs which inspire and inform our Creative teams with proven ability to deliver briefs which result in outstanding creative work

Mandatory Skills:

However, Content Strategists are expected to have deeper expertise in the following areas:

* Audience content motivations / behaviours

* Analysis of search volumes and extraction of insights to reveal the content themes and topics with the greatest interest

* Analysis of social media conversations to determine the most talked about content themes and topics

* Gap analysis to define where content whitespaces are within a given category

* Great qualitative research skills, and an ability to interview subject matter experts, and client stakeholders

* Ability to predict future content needs / emerging audience interests

* Content planning

* Competitive content analysis

* Broad understanding of cultural issues / opportunities to inform content decisions

* Content pillar and theme definition

* Definition of strategic rationale and principles to guide content decision making

* Facilitation of client workshops to enable decision making and focus the brand’s role in content

* Deep understanding of the role of content within ‘always on’ communications versus shorter-term campaigns SEO keyword strategy

* Digital media plans

* Definition of the optimum balance between paid versus organic content distribution in social, search, and other digital media channels

* SEM keyword strategy

* Digital media plan creation (collaborating with media agency)

* Content ecosystems, channels, and calendars

* Content calendar creation and scheduling monthly (and longer term) programs of content

* Definition of the role each content channel plays, and relationships between them

* Mapping of content types / formats to each channel

* Creative writing

* Crafting a branded “editorial lens” and articulating how that brand comes to life through creatively written stimulus

* Definition of brand tone of voice & personality (where required)

* Writing example content to express the content strategy (e.g. example social posts or articles)

* Objective definition and KPI setting

* Auditing owned channels and setting performance benchmarks

* Technical understanding of content tagging and performance tracking

* Ability to work collaboratively with Data Analysts to set up measurement / test & learn plans and track content performance

* Detail oriented, able to complete granular analysis

* Ability to assess content impact against objectives / KPIs

* PR / influencers

* Understanding of the influencer landscape and rules of engagement

* Ability to rapidly generate a POV on the most relevant influencers to engage

* Up to speed with the latest cultural and newsworthy goings-on, with an ability to draw on the most relevant for a given client

* Ability to collaborate with PR agencies and client-side PR teams