Senior Comms Planner

As a specialist within the strategy department, The Senior Comms Planning Strategist is the comms planning voice, presenting deliverables to the client and agency teams with general strategist partners. You’re brought in for annual planning, project planning, and co-creating prescriptive creative briefs focused primarily on user platform and channel behaviors attitudes and beliefs. 

You forge strong internal and external partners and support many projects start to finish, as well as owning communications strategies and plans. 

You are a leader at pulling data from secondary and third-party tools that focuses on how to build ideas for audiences that will both inspire the brand and lead to accomplishing or exceeding marketing objectives. The Senior Strategist position must exhibit a distinct POV for brands’ comms planning, practicing art and science daily by delivering rigorous, collaborative, action-rich work.

You lead multiple projects. You have strong research rigor and a tight narrative. You must demonstrate strong autonomy on your deliverables and be a forceful collaborator, building strong relationships with your strategy, brand leadership, media, and creative partners. 

You must have a pulse on current culture, be naturally curious, internally driven, and have a desire to create cohesive plans, which may mean flexing your own creativity in terms of deliverables based on client needs.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Grow business by being a valuable partner to clients and internal teams, hungrily looking for new scope opportunities with current clients while fulfilling scopes as written. 
• Independently own internal and client relationships for mid-level clients with moderate oversight from management
• Strong research skills mastering data tools: Primarily supports research including learning tools and extracting third-party data. 
• Co-own audience building with strategy partners and media.
• Co-author of highly actionable Comms planning artifacts (Exp maps, Comms personas, etc)
• Co-build creative briefs with general strategists
• Develop and own channel/comms ideas 
• Confidence leading internal meetings
• Understands and uses the full Comms Planning process from how to gather data and craft insights using the full CP tool suite to building creative ideas
• Independently work with strategy managers and supervisors to collaborate on data pulls to inform the insights needed to create recommendations for our shared artifacts.
• Looks deeply at the client ask, trying to identify the ‘ask behind the ask’ and approach the challenge with optimistic alternative and solutions
• Partner with Media Planning and Biz Intelligence to ensure audience segmentation is right for business, sizable, targetable, and is part of our communications plans
• Owns Comms Planning work in pitches and Lift Offs with oversight from upper management
• Owns Comms Planning’s full-deck narratives and proactively integrates other departments into artifacts and recommendations
• Advocates for the role of comms planning in the bigger picture of Barkley processes and actively represents our team on large initiatives in place of higher roles/positions when they’re unavailable
• Owns mid-level client relationships, exceeding internal and external response expectations, building positive relationships across the organization
• Proactively builds new client relationships, finding opportunities to advance Barkley’s scope 
• Proactively solves comms problems that have previously been unidentified for clients 
• Understand the client’s key business issues at all times and proactive spotting of opportunities 
• Contribute to Barkley’s Whole Brand work