Brand Marketing Manager

Job Purpose

The Brand & Marketing Manager plays a key role in delivering integrated marketing, content and brand initiatives that bring KAUST's mission to life. The role is responsible for developing high-quality content, coordinating multi-channel campaigns, and ensuring consistency across KAUST's brand voice and messaging.

Working closely with the Associate Director, Brand & Content, this role manages day-to-day content operations, leads a team of content specialists, and contributes to forward planning, campaign development, content performance reporting, and continuous improvement across the University's communications.

Major Accountabilities Content & Campaign Delivery

Lead the delivery of high-impact brand content and marketing initiatives across priority University projects and institutional campaigns.

Own the full campaign lifecycle, including briefing, objective setting, audience targeting, messaging frameworks, channel mix, launch planning, optimization, and post-campaign evaluation. Develop and maintain campaign calendars to ensure strategic focus, resource alignment, and cross-University coordination.

Lead the development of comprehensive campaign briefs that guide creative, digital, media, and content teams toward cohesive execution.

Plan and manage content workflows for timely, multi-channel delivery.

Translate campaign strategies into structured execution plans aligned with brand standards and campaign objectives.

Apply data, insights, and performance trends to continuously optimize content effectiveness and campaign outcomes.

Contribute to integrated marketing plans (audience insights, key messages, value propositions, objectives).

Support development of marketing assets across paid, owned and earned channels.

Own post-campaign performance reviews and impact assessments, translating results into actionable insights and institutional learning.

Establish and maintain a campaign performance knowledge base to capture best practices, lessons learned, and optimization strategies.

Brand Positioning and Governance

Ensure KAUST's brand positioning is reflected across all marketing and communication materials and apply brand guidelines to maintain consistency across campaign assets.

Safeguard brand integrity in external collaborations and event marketing.

Content Creation & Production

Produce, edit and adapt content for KAUST channels, including newsletters, web, social, scripts, video assets and reports.

Bring a strong creative mindset and genuine interest in KAUST's core domains of science, education, and innovation to inform and elevate content development.

Translate KAUST stories into accessible and engaging content.

Ensure accuracy, clarity, and alignment with KAUST messaging across all outputs.

Proactively identify high-value content opportunities that strengthen audience engagement, institutional visibility, and campaign priorities.

Channel Coordination

Collaborate with digital, social and other teams to ensure effective publishing and distribution across channels

Monitor analytics and recommend improvements.

Track marketing KPIs and engagement trends to inform planning.

Provide insights to refine marketing strategies and channel performance.

Team Management

Manage a team of content specialists, providing day-to-day guidance and support.

Set clear objectives and ensure timely delivery of team outputs.

Support professional development through coaching and feedback.

Collaboration & Support

Work closely with stakeholders across the University to gather information and ensure content meets project needs.

Collaborate with recruitment, research engagement, community engagement and digital marketing teams to align content outputs with broader marketing priorities and audience needs.

Provide clear and timely updates to the Associate Director, Brand & Content on campaign execution, performance trends, risks, and resourcing needs.

Other duties as required by the Associate Director, Brand and Content.

Person Requirements

Competencies

Ability to adapt to emerging priorities and work effectively under pressure.

Collaborative and inclusive communication style.

Broad strategic outlook to elicit insights from emerging trends, drivers, opportunities and risks.

Analytical with proven problem-solving skills.

Ability to use advocacy skills to deliver advice that positively influences stakeholders and decision-making outcomes.

Strong personal initiative and motivation and ability to maintain confidentiality.

A confident and strong people leader capable of managing and leading a team of professional specialist staff to deliver exceptional service in a high-pressure environment.

Advanced ability to lead and coach a talented specialist team, building rapport and trust to support high performance.

Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to engender trust from senior stakeholders and insightfully communicate complex information or ideas with influence and brevity.

Fluency in English with excellent copywriting and proofreading skills.

Strong project management skills.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Journalism and/or Communications, or other relevant/related fields.

Experience

Minimum 6+ years experience with proven track of achievement in management and content creation.

Experience working within complex organizations and/or cross-functional matrix teams.