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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Digital Media Strategist

💰 $ - $

MarketingDigital MediaAdvertisingStrategyAnalytics

🎯 Role Definition

The Digital Media Strategist is a cross-functional marketing leader responsible for planning, executing, and optimizing multi-channel digital media campaigns that drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, and measurable business outcomes. This role combines media planning, paid social and programmatic execution, creative testing, data analysis, and stakeholder collaboration to build scalable media strategies that align to business goals and maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). The ideal candidate blends analytical rigor with creative insight and communicates clear, actionable recommendations to marketing, product, and creative teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Performance Marketing Specialist
  • Paid Social or Programmatic Buyer
  • Digital Marketing Coordinator

Advancement To:

  • Senior Digital Media Strategist / Lead Strategist
  • Digital Media Manager / Head of Paid Media
  • Director of Growth / Director of Performance Marketing

Lateral Moves:

  • Content Strategy Lead
  • CRM / Lifecycle Marketing Manager
  • SEO / Organic Growth Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and own cross-channel media strategies (paid social, search, programmatic display, connected TV, OTT, native, and emerging channels) that align with quarterly and annual business objectives, including acquisition, retention, and brand lift metrics.
  • Build media plans and audience strategies using first-, second-, and third-party data to precisely target priority cohorts and optimize media mix for cost-effective scale.
  • Architect full-funnel campaigns: design awareness, consideration, and conversion tactics; define KPIs for each stage; and map creative and measurement strategies accordingly.
  • Execute media buying and trafficking across platforms including Meta (Facebook & Instagram), Google Ads, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, DV360, The Trade Desk, and major DSPs, ensuring correct setup, naming conventions, budgets, and conversion tracking.
  • Define and implement measurement frameworks using GA4, server-side tagging, UTM governance, conversion APIs, and pixel deployment to ensure accurate, actionable campaign data.
  • Lead weekly optimization cadence: analyze performance, reallocate budgets to top-performing channels, audiences, and creatives, and implement bid strategy and pacing adjustments to maximize ROAS and CPA targets.
  • Create and maintain forecast models, budget scenarios, and pacing plans to inform media spend allocation and anticipate performance levers across channels.
  • Design and run A/B and multivariate creative tests—video, static, carousel, copy variants—and translate results into creative playbooks with repeatable learnings for creative partners.
  • Collaborate with brand, content, and creative teams to translate audience insights into high-performing ad concepts and landing experiences that reduce friction and increase conversions.
  • Manage tag governance and data quality with engineering and analytics partners; troubleshoot tracking discrepancies between platforms and BI tools.
  • Produce weekly and monthly performance reports with clear, visualized insights and prescriptive next steps for senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Translate business goals into channel-specific briefs, ensuring channel partners understand KPIs, creative requirements, and expected conversion events.
  • Oversee relationships with external agencies, platform reps, and vendors; negotiate media buys, secure beta access where appropriate, and manage billing/invoice reconciliation.
  • Implement audience expansion and lookalike strategies, and leverage programmatic scheduling and frequency capping to balance reach and efficiency.
  • Optimize landing pages and post-click experiences in partnership with product and UX teams to reduce friction and improve conversion rates and LTV metrics.
  • Lead privacy-aware targeting strategies and cookieless planning (e.g., server-side events, contextual targeting, first-party data ingestion) to future-proof campaigns.
  • Build and maintain data pipelines or dashboards in BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) to centralize campaign performance and support self-serve reporting across marketing teams.
  • Conduct competitive and industry trend analysis to identify new channel opportunities, creative formats, and benchmark performance against category peers.
  • Coach and mentor junior media buyers or analysts, establishing playbooks, checklists, and SOPs for campaign setup, QA, and optimizations.
  • Drive cross-functional initiatives with product, sales, CRM, and analytics teams to align channel activity with lifecycle marketing and revenue attribution models.
  • Establish experimentation roadmaps for new ad products or channels (e.g., AR, shoppable ads) and lead pilots from hypothesis to measurement and scale recommendations.
  • Ensure campaigns comply with brand safety, legal, and regulatory requirements, including industry-specific advertising rules and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Maintain and update media vendor contracts, scope of work documents, and performance SLAs.
  • Assist in quarterly media budget planning and ROI modeling for new initiatives.
  • Participate in cross-functional retrospectives to document learnings and optimize process workflows.
  • Provide internal training sessions on new ad platform features, measurement upgrades (e.g., GA4), and privacy-first targeting approaches.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Paid media strategy and execution across major platforms: Meta Ads, Google Ads (Search & YouTube), DV360, The Trade Desk, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads.
  • Programmatic media buying, PMP setup, contextual targeting, and DSP management.
  • Web and campaign analytics: Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversion modeling, event taxonomy, and attribution approaches (last-click, data-driven, incrementality).
  • Tag management and tracking: Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging, Facebook/Meta Conversions API.
  • A/B testing and experimentation frameworks for creative and landing page optimization (Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize alternatives).
  • SQL for data extraction and ad-hoc analysis; experience querying marketing and attribution data.
  • Experience with BI and reporting tools: Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or equivalent for building dashboards and visualizing performance.
  • Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills, including pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, and scenario modeling.
  • Familiarity with privacy regulations and cookieless solutions: GDPR, CCPA, consent management, and first-party data strategies.
  • Conversion rate optimization (CRO) principles, funnel analysis, and UX collaboration for landing experience improvements.
  • Creative production workflow knowledge and ad spec optimization for multiple platforms and formats (video, static, dynamic creative).
  • Experience with tag validation and QA tools (e.g., Charles Proxy, Tag Assistant, AdOps checklists).

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical thinking with the ability to interpret complex datasets and produce concise, actionable recommendations.
  • Excellent cross-functional communication — able to present performance insights to senior stakeholders and collaborate with creative and engineering teams.
  • Project management and prioritization skills to manage multiple campaigns, vendor relationships, and launch timelines.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a bias toward experimentation and iterative learning.
  • Attention to detail in campaign setup, naming conventions, and tracking integrity.
  • Adaptability to evolving ad platforms, privacy changes, and shifting performance goals.
  • Persuasive storytelling to turn data into narrative-driven business cases and budget requests.
  • Coaching and mentorship capability to develop junior talent and scale team processes.
  • Negotiation skills for vendor/agency management and media buys.
  • Customer-centric mindset with an emphasis on user experience and retention-driven thinking.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Business, Data Analytics, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience in digital media.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree or relevant graduate coursework in Marketing, Business Analytics, or Digital Media.
  • Professional certifications such as Google Ads Search/Display/Video, Meta Blueprint, DV360/Trade Desk certifications, or GA4 certification.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing
  • Communications
  • Business Administration
  • Data Analytics / Statistics
  • Media Studies
  • Computer Science (for analytics-heavy roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of progressively responsible experience in digital media, performance marketing, or paid media strategies.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of end-to-end media strategy and campaign execution across paid social and programmatic channels.
  • Demonstrated track record of scaling acquisition programs, leading cross-functional teams, and improving performance metrics (ROAS, CPA, CAC, LTV).
  • Experience working with product and engineering teams on tracking and attribution implementation.
  • Prior agency experience or experience managing external agency/partner relationships is a plus.
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