Director - Marketing & Brand Strategy

Best Friends Animal Society

3d•$140,000 - $170,000•Remote

About The Position

This leadership role calls for a strategic and mission-focused marketing expert with a track record of building and inspiring best-in-class marketing teams and campaigns. You’ll drive awareness, engagement, and growth while helping new audiences discover and support Best Friends. Balancing a unified national brand with local relevance, you’ll plan and execute an integrated marketing and brand strategy that advances Best Friends goal to end the killing of dogs and cats in America’s shelters. You’ll ensure an inclusive perspective that reaches and engages diverse audiences and integrates multicultural marketing into the overall strategy. You will lead, mentor, and directly oversee national, regional, community, multicultural, and brand marketing teams, while collaborating closely with digital/social, PR, creative, events, local programs, and advocacy teams. As a member of the Development, Experience & Communications (DXC) leadership team, you’ll be a highly collaborative, people-oriented leader who thrives on mentoring, partnership, and building strong relationships across functions to drive impact and results.

Requirements

Demonstrated leadership experience overseeing teams of 10 or more employees.
Proven leadership in marketing and brand strategy, including building and evolving brand and messaging architectures, with a strong understanding of audience segments—their motivations, behaviors, and digital habits—and how to connect with them in meaningful ways.
Demonstrated success developing and leading cross-cultural, audience-centered campaigns that resonate across communities and drive measurable impact.
Deep fluency in the digital landscape, including existing and emerging channels, with the ability to spot trends, adapt quickly, and extend reach, relevance, and brand strength through thoughtful, integrated strategies.
Strong data orientation and performance mindset, using testing, learning, and ROI-based insights to continually refine strategies and tactics that grow awareness, engagement, participation, and revenue in service of the mission.
Experience with marketing technology, analytics, and measurement, with an understanding of how online and offline communications work together to influence awareness and behavior.
Exceptional organizational and project leadership skills, with the ability to manage complexity, balance strategic vision with executional detail, and lead multiple initiatives simultaneously.
Leadership experience building streamlined structures, processes, and workflows in cross-functional environments to enable collaboration, clarity, and high performance.
Experience working with agencies or external partners in fast-paced environments, managing competing priorities and delivering high-quality work through strong collaboration and accountability.
Ability to see and sort a variety of printed and online information.
Work at a computer for extended periods of time with repetitive typing, sitting, arm, and hand motion.
Applicants for employment in the U.S. must have valid work authorization that does not now and/or will not in the future require sponsorship of a visa for employment authorization in the U.S. by Best Friends Animal Society.

Responsibilities

Lead marketing’s Center of Excellence (COE) model, ensuring it operates effectively across teams by aligning stakeholders around shared priorities, improving visibility into what’s happening and what’s next, and driving coordinated marketing efforts that unify activities and maximize impact.
Develop and implement a cohesive, integrated marketing and brand strategy that strengthens and protects brand consistency while driving measurable growth in share of voice, issue awareness, brand equity, and lifesaving actions.
Expand Best Friends’ reach and influence nationally and in key markets through targeted, culturally relevant strategies aligned to priority audience segments.
Design and lead high-impact, integrated campaigns that maximize impact through partnerships, PSAs, earned media, grassroots activation and creative collaboration—ensuring every tactic works harder through coordination, leverage, and smart use of limited paid media.
Inspire an environment of testing and learning, performance, and data orientation through consistent project leadership in collaboration with channel owners, internal stakeholders and external partners.
Utilize data, consumer insights and trends to inform decisions around target audiences, message development and key strategies; partner with the Insights & Analytics team and outside firms to translate market research into strategic marketing and brand campaigns that change public opinion and behavior on critical issues, support development priorities, and help to make Best Friends a household name.
Monitor the marketing and brand landscape to understand trends, audience needs, and emerging opportunities. Use data and insights to inform strategy, improve effectiveness, and guide decisions that drive growth, relevance, and lifesaving impact.
Guide the use of systems and tools that scale impact, maximize resources and create greater operational efficiencies.
Direct an integrated Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned (PESO) media strategy with a strong digital-first mindset—leveraging social, search, web, email, influencers, partnerships, and data-driven optimization—to maximize reach, relevance, and impact with limited paid investment, in close coordination with PR, grassroots, creative and content teams.
Work to find new ways for increasing influence and visibility of the organization and to realign resources to pursue new opportunities as appropriate.
Work closely with senior leadership and cross functional teams to identify opportunities and challenges; provide strong, positive, visible leadership to teams to inspire staff to perform at the highest levels, and to represent the goals, progress, and achievements.