Associate Director, Content Strategy

About this role

Verndale is a digital experience agency dedicated to driving growth by helping businesses create meaningful human connections in an increasingly digital world. With offices in Boston, Montreal, Los Angeles, Quito, and hubs across the Americas, we partner with marketing and technology leaders to deliver personalized web, mobile, and ecommerce solutions that elevate customer experiences.

At Verndale, we thrive on collaboration and innovation, offering a full range of services that span strategy, design, development, personalization, SEO, analytics, and digital advertising. We celebrate diversity and inclusion, striving to create a climate of respect essential for both individual and company success.

If you're ready to be part of a passionate team dedicated to making an impact and driving growth, we invite you to explore a career at Verndale.

About the role

As we expand our Marketing Services practice, we are seeking an Associate Director, Content Strategy: a senior, client-facing content strategist who can lead enterprise content programs across discovery, design, build, migration, governance, AI search, personalization, and performance.

This role sits within the Marketing Services team and reports to the VP, Content Strategy. The Associate Director will help turn content strategy from a project deliverable into a governed content system that fuels discoverability, relevance, and measurable business impact across human and AI-driven journeys.

The ideal candidate is strategic and hands-on. They know how to build content strategy into complex digital programs, integrate it with design, technology, analytics, SEO, AI search, and personalization, and produce polished client-ready deliverables. They must also be AI fluent and ready to build practical solutions using AI tools, not simply experiment with them.

Verndale is fully remote enabled. This position can be remote, with a preference for candidates based in Canada.

Responsibilities

• Lead content strategy workstreams across discovery, design, build, migration, and optimization programs.

• Oversee and execute editorial content strategy, including content inventories, content assessments, transformation strategy, message planning, and editorial planning.

• Oversee and execute UX content strategy, including content audits, gap analyses, taxonomies, content hierarchies, copy planning, and content planning for design and migration.

• Oversee and execute delivery content strategy, including content matrices, governance models, workflows, guidelines, migration support, and authoring guidance.

• Facilitate client workshops, stakeholder interviews, content working sessions, and alignment meetings that connect content decisions to business goals and audience needs.

• Present polished deliverables, recommendations, project updates, and decision points to marketing, digital, technology, and executive stakeholders.

• Design content approaches that support AI Search, Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, personalization, site search, related content, filtering, and content reuse.

• Develop structured, governed, machine-readable content strategies, including taxonomy, metadata, schema guidance, content models, prompt-ready source content, and reuse patterns.

• Use AI tools to improve content inventories, audits, gap analyses, taxonomy exploration, migration mapping, content QA, prompt testing, answer testing, and content performance review.

• Build repeatable AI-assisted workflows, prompts, QA routines, documentation, and review protocols that improve speed and quality without sacrificing judgment, accuracy, or governance.

• Influence the pilot, adoption, and improvement of content-related AI tools in partnership with Strategy, SEO and AI, Personalization, Analytics, Experience Design, and Technology teams.

• Help clients understand where AI can improve content operations, where human review is required, and how to govern AI-enabled content workflows responsibly.

• Define and improve content lifecycle processes across planning, creation, review, approval, publishing, optimization, maintenance, and retirement.

• Set content quality standards, review criteria, performance indicators, and documentation practices that can be used consistently across programs.

• Identify process gaps, quality risks, content ownership issues, and workflow blockers, then recommend practical improvements.

• Create content governance models that clarify roles, responsibilities, decision rights, approval paths, editorial standards, and maintenance cadences.

• Support compliance-aware content processes for clients in regulated, brand-sensitive, or multi-stakeholder environments.

• Use analytics and performance data to assess content effectiveness and inform future content planning, optimization, and governance decisions

• Develop taxonomies, metadata models, tagging strategies, and structured data approaches that help power navigation, search, personalization, content relationships, and reporting.

• Guide information architecture work including navigation strategy, sitemaps, content hierarchy, page-level content planning, and content inputs for wireframes and visual design.

• Lead content migration strategy, including inventories, keep/edit/kill analysis, migration mapping, content matrices, content models, authoring requirements, and migration readiness.

• Help establish repeatable methods and level-of-effort guidance for taxonomy, information architecture, and migration work so these activities can be scoped and delivered consistently.

• Partner with Business Development, Client Services, and Practice Leads to shape content strategy solutions for proposals, pitch meetings, and active accounts.

• Scope and estimate content strategy activities across discovery, redesign, migration, AI search, personalization, content operations, and optimization programs.

• Contribute to packaged content strategy offerings, delivery standards,…