GAIN Performance - Strategy Director

Business Unit: Performance: We help globally ambitious brands turn visibility into measurable growth - appearing where it matters, when it matters, to the people who matter most.

Team: Strategy

Reporting to: CEO

Location: London / hybrid

ABOUT GAIN is a creative‑led, insight‑driven company that blends data, tech, and creativity. We believe the best ideas emerge where intelligence and creativity unite, where insight sparks imagination, and where innovation turns possibility into progress. We are explorers of new frontiers, shaping bold strategies that move people, brands, and businesses forward. Individually and together, our specialist teams provide the vision, data, and confidence brands and organisations need to make braver, more impactful decisions. Today as GAIN, we work as a united force, using data to fuel creativity, and technology to unlock new possibilities. As imagineers we don’t just embrace innovation – we engineer it, transforming information into action, and ideas into breakthroughs. This is where rebel thinking, smart technology, and data‑driven creativity shape the future. Through our five specialist teams: Creative Studio, Conversion, Customer Science, Experience, and Performance. Individually, and together, we work to fuel brand growth and deliver measurable impact.

THE ROLE As Strategy Director, you will form the strategic backbone of one of GAIN’s newest and most commercially significant client relationships, a high growth, land and expand opportunity with the potential to scale quickly into a multimillion pound portfolio. Working in lockstep with the Business Director, you will define the strategic vision for the account across owned and earned media, ensuring the client’s brand, performance, and investment decisions reinforce one another to drive business outcomes. You will be the senior strategic partner to the client, responsible for shaping holistic strategies that maximise visibility, efficiency and growth, balancing long‑term brand building with near‑term performance delivery. Internally, you will be the strategic integrator across SEO, Digital PR, PPC and Paid Media, ensuring all specialists are aligned behind one coherent direction of travel. You will play a critical role in embedding strategic clarity, elevating thinking, and ensuring all work ladders to the client’s targets, KPIs and long‑term ambitions. This role is ideal for a senior strategist with deep performance and digital experience, strong brand acumen, and the confidence to partner with senior/C‑Suite global clients and drive a newly formed account from “setup” to “scale”.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Senior strategic leadership & relationships
• Act as the senior strategic partner to the client, shaping a unified owned‑and‑earned media strategy that delivers both brand and performance impact
• Lead the strategic onboarding process, defining the client’s success metrics, maturity, reporting needs, audience dynamics and competitive landscape
• Build strong senior client relationships through clarity of thinking, proactive insight and a commitment to achieving their commercial goals
• Provide ongoing thought leadership across digital performance, brand visibility, customer behaviour and competitor intelligence
• Translate business objectives into coherent, actionable cross channel strategic plans, ensuring all recommendations are grounded in data driven insight, platform knowledge and client context
• Create and lead strategic planning sessions, identifying opportunities for optimisation, scale and strategic innovation

Holistic Strategy Development & Cross Channel Integration

• Lead the development of an integrated owned and earned media strategy, working with the team of channel specialists
• Facilitate and orchestrate collaboration between all subject matter experts, ensuring each channel strategy ladders up to one clear, joined‑up overarching plan rather than operating in silos
• Guide specialists in developing their channel specific roadmaps, ensuring they are insight driven, coherent and aligned to audience behaviour, competitive realities and client commercial goals
• Coordinate the creation of measurement frameworks and attribution approaches in partnership with Analytics and channel leads, ensuring consistency, shared KPIs and clarity of ownership
• Work with specialists to identify cross channel opportunities (e.g., SEO x PR amplification, Paid Media x Content synergy, Paid Search x Customer Journey refinement) and ensure the connections are deliberately built and maintained
• Provide direction, prioritisation frameworks and strategic questions that help specialists deepen their work, without replacing or duplicating their craft expertise
• Ensure the long‑term strategic roadmap reflects the combined thinking of all channel experts, balancing brand building and performance delivery with measurable growth

Cross Functional Integration & Internal Leadership/development

• Be the connective tissue between all specialist teams, ensuring SEO, PPC, Paid Media, Digital PR, Content and Analytics work from one unified strategic direction.
• Lead strategic alignment across teams, facilitating collaboration, clarity of roles and shared understanding of success measures
• Turn strategic vision into clear briefs, prioritisation frameworks, hypotheses and action plans for specialist teams
• Foster a culture of curiosity, customer centricity, experimentation and evidence led decision making
• Serve as a senior thought partner to the Business Director, ensuring strategy and commercial direction reinforce each other
• Mentor strategists and specialists, raising the bar on thinking quality and strategic craft across the agency

Performance, Insight & Measurement Leadership

• Lead the creation of performance frameworks, KPIs, and measurement approaches that give clients clarity and confidence
• Use data, analytics and platform insights to uncover opportunities, diagnose issues and recommend optimisations
• Drive continuous improvement through structured testing, attribution modelling, funnel analysis and audience refinement
• Produce compelling strategic evaluations, reports and recommendations that highlight what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next
• Ensure strategies and investment decisions are rooted in commercial logic, audience insight and platform expertise

Strategic Governance & Delivery Excellence

• Ensure excellent strategic governance, from briefing quality to insight development, scoping, measurement plans and sprint prioritisation
• Maintain senior oversight across all strategic outputs, raising the standard of thinking and ensuring consistency and rigour.
• Support the creation of strong case studies that demonstrate impact, maturity progression and commercial value
• Ensure strategy plays an active role in risk identification and scenario planning, supporting both the client and GAIN’s commercial stability

Agency Contribution & Thought Leadership

• Act as a leading voice for strategy within GAIN, shaping methodology, process and best practice across performance, owned and earned channels
• Share trends, innovations and platform developments across the agency to elevate strategic intelligence
• Champion strategic excellence in cross agency and sister agency collaborations, helping define GAIN’s role within a broader ecosystem
• Contribute to new business initiatives with strategic leadership, frameworks and thinking that demonstrate the value of GAIN’s integrated approach

Qualifications

• 10–12+ years’ experience in a digital, performance or integrated agency environment, with a proven track record in senior strategic roles shaping complex multi‑channel programmes
• Deep expertise across owned and earned channels (SEO, content, digital PR, PPC, paid media), with experience guiding or collaborating with subject matter experts to build unified strategies
• Demonstrable experience setting holistic digital strategies for large or complex clients, ensuring cross channel integration, clear KPIs and measurable commercial outcomes
• Highly analytical and insight driven, with the ability to translate data, audience behaviour, and market intelligence into actionable strategic frameworks and test and learn agendas
• Strong facilitation and orchestration skills, adept at aligning specialist leads behind a shared vision, ensuring cohesion rather than silos
• Exceptional communication and storytelling abilities, able to simplify complexity, inspire senior stakeholders, and articulate a clear strategic path forward
• Confident and credible with senior clients, operating as a trusted advisor invested in helping them achieve ambitious growth and maturity objectives
• Calm, solutions oriented and decisive, able to balance long‑term brand building with short‑term performance needs in fast moving environments
• Passionate about performance, brand building and integrated strategy, with a strong curiosity about emerging channels, measurement evolution and consumer behaviour
• Collaborative leadership style, committed to empowering specialists, raising the quality of strategic thinking and fostering an environment of continuous improvement

HOW YOU’LL WORK

• Constant curiosity: You can think critically and understand the data, knowing where you need to take action. You’re analytical with the ability to investigate and resolve
• Pushing boundaries: You’ll make the most efficient use of technology, suggesting process improvements
• The power of our imagination: You’re a problem solver who goes the extra mile. You’ll know the best approach to take with clients to get results.
• Making it happen: You’re proactive and you know you can make a difference. You use your sound judgement when making decisions and you take responsibility for your decisions and actions.
• Putting people first: You’ll build effective relationships with people, internally and externally, understanding both business and client needs.

BENEFITS

Our benefits for UK employees include:

• Private Medical Insurance BUPA
• Life Assurance
• Income protection
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Cycle to Work salary sacrifice scheme
• Tech & Wearables salary sacrifice scheme
• Octopus EV Scheme
• Discounts and deals on a range of items from hotels, holidays and hormone testing to cinema, gyms and will writing

GAIN is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, or pregnancy and maternity.