Director of Social Media and Influencer

Steve Madden•New York, NY

About The Position

We're looking for a Director of Social and Influencer Marketing. This role sits at the intersection of brand, community, and content — responsible for upleveling how Steve Madden shows up across social channels, how we build and sustain creator relationships at scale, and how we translate social attention into trust, advocacy, and measurable business outcomes. Reporting to the CMO, you will drive engagement, growth, and cultural heat as you expand on our current social and influencer strategy for our Steve Madden brand. This role will lead creator strategy, strengthen community engagement, and continue elevating the quality and impact of our content. You will partner hand-in-hand with our internal creative team to problem solve the best creative solutions for our social needs and ensure that partner creator content is on-brand. This role requires a forward-thinking, strategic, and hands-on leader who can seamlessly bridge brand building, content creation, and performance-driven social strategy. You must have strong creative instinct and editorial judgment, paired with the analytical rigor to understand what’s working and scale it. We expect you to be deeply culturally fluent, ahead of trends, and actively using the latest AI tools to sharpen workflows, fuel creative experimentation, and strengthen analysis.

Requirements

8+ years of professional experience in Influencer Marketing, Social Media, or Brand Marketing; ideally both in-house and at a social/influencer agency.
2+ years of team management experience; with proven ability to lead cross-functional teams, foster high-impact collaboration.
Experience in eCommerce and Retail; footwear/apparel/fashion experience a big plus.
Experience with affiliate marketing (ShopMy, LTK); TikTok Shop a plus.
A demonstrated track record of building or scaling influencer programs that drive measurable results — awareness, conversion, and brand affinity.
Deep fluency in the creator economy: how to structure partnerships, evaluate and tier creators, negotiate contracts, and build relationships that last beyond a single campaign.
Equal comfort with brand strategy and performance data: you can write a creative brief and present a channel dashboard in the same meeting.
Experience working alongside performance marketing teams/agencies to provide creative & updates on social and influencer content; familiarity with performance marketing metrics is a big plus.
Clear, confident communicator with senior stakeholders — you know how to tell the story of social impact to a marketing channel lead, or a skeptical cross-functional partner.
You're genuinely excited about what AI can do - not just as a concept, but as something you want to get your hands on.

Nice To Haves

Experience in eCommerce and Retail; footwear/apparel/fashion experience a big plus.
Experience with affiliate marketing (ShopMy, LTK); TikTok Shop a plus.
Familiarity with performance marketing metrics is a big plus.

Responsibilities

Build and lead execution of social strategy to grow and engage Steve Madden’s social communities across priority platforms, strengthening brand relevance and improving performance through clear channel plans, content strategy, and measurement.
Oversees development and delivery of social campaigns and always-on content that can be adapted and scaled globally, ensuring our content is best-in-class, thumb-stopping, and inherently social.
Own the end-to-end influencer marketing strategy, from building and scaling a creator program across organic and paid influencer activations, affiliate, offline activations, campaign execution, and measurement.
Set and own the KPIs for social and influencer: reach, engagement, earned media value, follower growth, and downstream conversion.
Collaborate with larger brand teams (including brand, PR/Comms, creative) to ensure social media and content strategies are integrated into broader marketing efforts.
Identify opportunities to bridge digital and on the ground product trends (in retail stores and at wholesale) as content and community building moments.
Partner with performance marketing team on paid social amplification and attribution.
Leads social governance, ensuring audit controls, compliance requirements, and documentation are in place across channels, markets, and partners.
Own and manage the social content creation and influencer budgets.
Establish and track KPIs for engagement, growth, and impact, leveraging analytics to continuously optimize strategy.
Implement a test-and-learn approach, A/B testing formats, copy, and creative approaches to maximize performance.
Stay ahead of platform updates, algorithms, and emerging features, ensuring we are always adopting best-in-class practices.
Lead, develop, and inspire a team of ~5; building a high-performance culture grounded in clarity of ownership, strong feedback loops, and ambitious but achievable goal-setting.