What Does a Marketing Strategist Do, and Why You Might Need One Before You Hire an Agency?
Before you hire an agency, or even before you hire your first internal marketing person, there is a role worth understanding clearly: the marketing strategist. It is one of the most misunderstood roles in the industry, often confused with a marketing manager, a marketer, or simply “the person who does the marketing,” when in reality it describes something more specific and, for many businesses, more valuable earlier than expected.
What a Marketing Strategist Actually Does
A marketing strategist’s core job is not execution, it is direction. Rather than writing the ad copy, designing the creative, or managing the ad accounts, a strategist decides what the business should be saying, to whom, through which channels, and in what sequence, based on real evidence about the market and the customer, not assumption or trend-chasing.
This distinction matters because execution without direction is one of the most common and expensive mistakes businesses make. A marketing team, whether internal or an agency, can execute brilliantly on a strategy that is fundamentally misaligned with what the market actually wants, and brilliant execution of the wrong strategy still fails.
Why This Role Often Gets Skipped
Many small and mid-sized businesses skip straight to execution, hiring someone to “do the marketing” or engaging an agency to run campaigns, without ever having someone step back and clearly define the underlying strategy those campaigns should be executing against. This is understandable. Strategy work is less visible and less immediately tangible than a finished ad or a published post, so it gets deprioritised in favour of activity that feels like progress.
The cost of skipping it shows up later, usually as inconsistent messaging across channels, campaigns that perform well individually but do not compound into a coherent brand position, and a marketing budget that produces activity without a clear, cumulative direction.
When You Actually Need a Strategist Before an Agency
If your business has never clearly defined who its ideal customer is, what specific problem it solves better than competitors, and what the customer journey from awareness to purchase actually looks like, bringing in execution, whether an agency or an internal hire, before that strategic groundwork exists tends to produce activity without direction. This is the exact gap our Strategic Services are built to close first, so that whoever executes afterward, agency or in-house, has a clear brief to work from rather than a blank page.
How to Check Whether You Need This Now
Ask yourself honestly whether you can describe, in one clear paragraph, exactly who your ideal customer is, what specific outcome they are looking for, and why they should choose you over a competitor. If that paragraph does not exist yet, or if different people in your business would answer that question differently, that is a clear sign strategic groundwork needs to happen before execution, the same kind of evidence-based groundwork our Growth Diagnostic is built to uncover, and it often surfaces the same inconsistencies our Brand & Creative Systems work is designed to fix.
What Good Strategy Work Actually Produces
The tangible output of good strategy work is usually a short, plain-language document, not a lengthy slide deck, that answers a handful of core questions clearly: who the ideal customer is, what problem is being solved for them, why this business rather than a competitor, and what the customer’s journey from first awareness to purchase actually looks like. Everything produced afterward, ad copy, content, campaign structure, should be able to be checked against that document and clearly trace back to it.
This is also where strategy connects directly to execution. A clear strategic brief makes the work of our creative and content marketing teams dramatically more effective, because every asset produced is answering the same underlying question rather than being judged on its own merits in isolation. Without that brief, even talented creative and content work tends to drift in slightly different directions over time.
Businesses that invest in this groundwork upfront typically find that agency or internal execution afterward moves faster, not slower, because fewer decisions need to be second-guessed or revisited once the underlying direction has already been agreed and documented.
The Bottom Line
A marketing strategist is not simply a more senior version of a marketer. The role is fundamentally about direction rather than execution, and skipping it in favour of jumping straight to campaigns is one of the most common, and most expensive, sequencing mistakes we see businesses make. Get the direction right first, and execution, whether in-house or through an agency, becomes dramatically more effective.
It’s also worth noting that strategy work doesn’t need to take months to produce value. Even a focused, few-week engagement to clearly define the customer, the message, and the journey can meaningfully sharpen everything that follows, long before a full annual plan is in place. The goal isn’t perfection on the first attempt. It’s having enough clarity that execution stops guessing and starts building toward something coherent.
At RGC, we’ve been designing and building websites for Australian businesses since 1998. We’ll give you an honest timeline, a clear scope, and a team that knows how to deliver. Learn more about our Growth Diagnostic, call us on 1300 770 985, or fill out our online form to get the conversation started.