Job Descriptions / Marketing Strategist
Marketing Strategist Job Description Template
A ready-to-customize job description for hiring a marketing strategist at an agency. Built from real hiring loops. Copy, adapt to your service mix, and publish.
What does a marketing strategist do at an agency?
An agency marketing strategist sets the direction for client work. They run discovery, synthesize research into a point of view, define the measurement framework, and turn that into briefs the creative and media teams can execute against. The best strategists translate messy business context into clear, defensible recommendations.
Unlike in-house strategists who go deep on one brand for years, agency strategists work across verticals, audiences, and channel mixes every quarter. They need to learn fast, distill complexity, and hold their own in rooms with CMOs and founders. Weak strategists hide behind frameworks. Strong ones make specific calls.
Job Description Template
Job title
Marketing Strategist
Summary
We're hiring a Marketing Strategist to lead strategy development for our agency clients. You'll run discovery, build positioning and channel plans, define measurement frameworks, and partner with creative and media teams to turn strategy into work. If you love translating messy business context into a clear point of view, this is a strong fit.
Responsibilities
- Lead strategy development for agency clients including positioning, audience, messaging, and channel mix.
- Run discovery engagements: stakeholder interviews, market research, competitive audits, and analytics reviews.
- Write strategy documents that translate research into clear, defensible recommendations non-marketers can act on.
- Define measurement frameworks, KPIs, and reporting cadences tied to client business goals.
- Partner with creative, media, and content teams to translate strategy into executional briefs.
- Present strategy to client stakeholders including CMOs, founders, and board-level audiences.
- Own quarterly strategic reviews, surfacing what's working, what isn't, and what to change next.
- Identify growth and upsell opportunities within existing accounts and feed them to account managers.
- Contribute to new business pitches with positioning, market size, and roadmap narrative.
- Mentor junior strategists and analysts through feedback, frameworks, and shared resources.
Required qualifications
- 5+ years of marketing strategy experience, ideally a mix of agency and in-house.
- Demonstrated ability to run discovery and synthesize messy input into clear recommendations.
- Strong analytical skills: comfortable with attribution, funnel economics, and cohort analysis.
- Experience presenting to senior stakeholders (CMO, founder, VP Marketing) with credibility.
- Written communication strong enough to produce strategy decks and documents that stand on their own.
- Broad channel literacy: paid, organic, content, lifecycle, brand, and creative.
- Commercial awareness: understands how strategy decisions ladder to revenue, margin, and retention.
Preferred qualifications
- MBA, management consulting background, or deep specialization in a vertical like DTC, SaaS, or healthcare.
- Experience building measurement frameworks from scratch including MMM or incrementality.
- Public thought leadership: conference talks, podcasts, or published essays in the field.
- Comfort with research tools like SparkToro, Similarweb, Ahrefs, and first-party data platforms.
- Experience leading workshops or strategy offsites with client leadership teams.
Salary range (2026)
United States
$95,000 to $185,000 base
Mid: $95k to $140k. Senior: $140k to $185k. Strategy directors and heads of strategy exceed $220k in major markets.
Global
$30,000 to $120,000 base
LATAM and Eastern Europe: $30k to $75k. Western Europe: $60k to $105k. UK and Australia: $70k to $120k.
Top skills to look for
- Discovery and research synthesis
- Positioning and messaging frameworks
- Measurement and attribution thinking
- Analytical fluency (funnel, cohort, attribution)
- Client presentation at senior levels
- Channel and ecosystem literacy
- Written strategy documents
- Commercial judgment
Red flags
- Strategy decks are full of frameworks with no specific recommendations.
- Treats strategy as separate from execution and refuses to engage with tradeoffs.
- Cannot explain how their past strategies were measured or whether they worked.
- Relies on generic market research without any first-party client data or customer voice.
- Intimidated by client pushback and collapses on their recommendations under pressure.
Interview process structure
Stage 1
Portfolio interview (60 min)
Candidate walks through two strategy engagements they led end-to-end. Probe on research, recommendations, measurement, and outcomes. Look for specificity over frameworks.
Stage 2
Case study exercise (5–8 hours, paid)
Provide a realistic client brief and anonymized data. Candidate returns a strategy doc with positioning, audience, channel mix, measurement, and a first 90-day roadmap.
Stage 3
Presentation and defense (60 min)
Candidate presents the case study to your team. Challenge assumptions, push on numbers, and ask for tradeoffs. Tests both the work and the presence.
Stage 4
Cross-functional panel (60 min)
Meet a creative director, media lead, and account manager. Tests collaboration, briefing ability, and how they translate strategy into executable work.
Frequently asked questions
What should a marketing strategist earn at an agency in 2026?
US mid-level marketing strategists earn $95,000 to $140,000 base. Seniors reach $140,000 to $185,000, with strategy directors going higher. Global ranges run $30,000–$75,000 in LATAM and Eastern Europe, and $60,000–$120,000 across Western Europe.
Should strategists be separate from account managers?
Usually yes, past a certain size. Small agencies blend the roles. Once you have 15+ clients or retainers over $20k/month, separating strategy from account management lets both disciplines go deeper.
What's the difference between a brand strategist and a marketing strategist?
Brand strategists focus on positioning, narrative, and identity. Marketing strategists cover positioning plus channels, measurement, and performance. There's overlap, and some people do both well.
Do strategists need to code or use SQL?
Not required, but a strong strategist can hold their own in a conversation with a data analyst. Comfort with GA4, attribution concepts, and pivot tables is the practical bar.
How do I evaluate strategy work during an interview?
Give a paid case study. Evaluate the quality of questions they ask during the brief, the specificity of recommendations, and how they handle challenge in the presentation. Vague strategy falls apart under pressure.
Hire with capacity in mind
Strategists are one of the highest-leverage hires an agency makes, but easy to hire too early. Capacity planning helps you see whether your engagements actually need a dedicated strategist or whether the work belongs in account management.