• Job Title: Strategy Manager
• Level & Responsibility: This role is at a Manager level or equivalent and has responsibility over a team. 
• Salary: £43,000+ per annum, depending on experience plus a 10% bonus scheme 
• Location & Hybrid Working: 2 days a week in any of our offices (Ideally London, Manchester or Leeds)
  

The role

We are looking for a Strategy Manager to join SMG! In this role, you will build full-funnel, omnichannel campaigns for one of our Retail Media Network Partners. This network attracts large scale investments from some of the UK's leading FMCG brands, looking to effectively utilise retail media to complement and elevate their broader marketing strategies. The Strategy Team is responsible for building strategies that power genuinely exciting, innovative and successful commerce marketing campaigns for brands and retailers across SMG’s three agencies. In a nutshell, we ensure our clients reach the right shoppers, with the right message, using the right media. We believe the better the strategy, the stronger the results, the bigger the budgets - a win-win for us and our clients!

Why SMG?

We are dedicated to supporting our employees to be the best version of themselves both inside and outside of work. We have an extraordinary culture built by exceptional people and it’s because of this that we’ve been recognised by Best Companies within the top 5 best Marketing & Media agencies to work for, with a World Class and Outstanding accreditation across the past 2 years. 

We are also dedicated to continuously reviewing and improving our benefits package to offer the best that we can for our people. We have a whole page dedicated to our benefits here, but here's some of our favourites...

💰 Generous discretionary bonus scheme

🧘‍♂️ £1,800 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!) towards your personal wellbeing and passions

🫶 4 additional Wellbeing Days - one to be taken each quarter, dedicated to focusing on your wellbeing

📚 £500 yearly “Uni Fu

nd” towards learning and development

🎧 Free headspace subscription

🕐 4pm Friday finishes all year round

🥳 Two fully paid conferences a year at Summer & Winter, as well as a dedicated team that put on activities and celebrations throughout the year

Why you?

In line with our company values, within your role you'll want to stay honest, stay hungry, stay foolish, and most importantly, have fun! More specifically, you'll have / be:

• Previous experience in retail media / digital media / advertising, marketing or media agency.
• Previous experience in a Planning or Strategy role
• Previous experience with conducting primary research
• Previous experience in people development; either through direct line management or coaching/mentoring

• Initiative – Able to independently move multiple projects forward, taking full ownership of the delivery of your work and workplan.
• Resourceful – Able to find solutions to obstacles and challenges (e.g. short deadlines), adapting your approach as necessary.
• Pragmatic – Can work at pace and are able to effectively manage your workload (and workload of direct reports) with clear organisation and prioritisation skills.
• Collaborative – Strong communication and group-work skills, with the ability to lead and facilitate group discussions to a clear outcome.
• Data literate – Comfortable with researching and analysing large amounts of data to uncover trends and insights to inform your strategies.
• Creative thinker – Able to flex and bring together both the ‘logical’ (crunching the numbers to find insights) and ‘creative’ (coming up with great ideas based on those insights) parts of your brain on every brief. Able to think outside the box (e.g. on repetitive briefs to ensure we continue to add value).
• Storyteller – Able to effectively sell in your strategic recommendations to clients by taking them on a journey that gets them excited to work with us, often making the complicated simple.

P.s. we try really hard to make sure that we list only essential criteria here, BUT if you think you can do an amazing job, yet don't have every single thing on this list, we'd still love to hear from you.

What you'll be doing

We pride ourselves on creating challenging and exciting opportunities, meaning that no two days are the same. However, here's an idea of what your responsibilities will look like:

Strategy Creation

• Interpreting and interrogating client briefs to define the marketing challenge opportunity, objectives, and set the correct measurement.
• Utilising the data sources available to us (e.g. TGI, Mintel, IGD) to uncover insights and turn these insights into clear, tangible and actionable recommendations.
• Articulating a target audience / prime prospect, size of prize, attitudes and behaviours, and barriers to awareness, consideration and purchase.
• Building comms strategies across the funnel & P2P that address these barriers, and where necessary, writing inspiring and compelling conceptual briefs for the Creative Team that will lead us to a unique, exciting and relevant campaign idea.
• Evaluating creative ideas (ours or supplied) to ensure fit for commerce.
• Building compelling omni and multi channel media strategies across the full retail media toolkit, leveraging the full potential of first-party data capabilities.
• Where required, creating and running workshops / group brainstorms with our colleagues and clients.
• Delivering outstanding responses to briefs in the form of proposals that are clear, concise, credible, compelling and cutting edge.
• Playing a pivotal role in pitches, helping to secure incremental investment into the retail media network throughout the year.

Building strategic capability

• of yourself, your direct reports, fellow Strategy Team colleagues, and client team members.
• Spotting skill gaps and developing and leading training sessions to address them, including frameworks and guides.

Ways of Working

• Defining and maintaining effective and efficient processes between the Strategy Team and our key partners (see below)
• Identifying and delivering optimisations in current process / ways of working.
• Making decisions that take into account SMG's profitability as a business.
• Contributing to the building and delivery of the Strategy Team vision & 3PP. 

Line Management

• Building workplans of direct reports with SMART goals aligned to total Strategy Team goals, ensuring these are driven forward
• Holding regular performance review conversations with direct reports, and writing 6 monthly appraisals that clearly identify strengths, weaknesses and goals.
• Recruiting and onboarding future stars into the Strategy Team.

Stakeholder Management

• Building relationships with our key partners so they know how to work with us.
• Collaborating with the client team to identify and engage strategic clients, immersing yourself in their brand, business, and macro marketing strategy

Thought Leadership

• Staying abreast of industry trends and innovations, sharing these with the relevant colleagues and translating into the 'what', 'so what' and 'what now' for SMG

More information and resources to support you & your application...

• To find out more about our agencies and departments, click here.
• To find out more about our application & interview process and supporting you through this, click here.
• To find out more about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at SMG, click here.
• To take a look at our FAQ's, click here.

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