Director of Communications

Responsibilities

• Uphold and role model the company's principles of People, Place and Character; and ensure your team and peers are also modeling the way of our values that drive collaboration, intuition and translocal hospitality
• Build and maintain a trusting and transparent relationship with all stakeholders, specifically taking the time to develop rapport and respect with the Aparium Marketing and Brand Team and property leaders.
• Lead the PR and communications strategy and execution through all paid, owned, shared, and earned channels, while ensuring all initiatives at Aparium and at hotel level align with brand vision and positioning.
• Define how you measure success of the PR and storytelling efforts - establish KPI’s and goals tied to all paid, owned, shared, and earned channels.
• Establish regular PR meetings with the agency and property teams to evaluate performance and support the critical business needs with KPI tracking and reporting to validate all efforts.
• Review and enhance all existing SOP’s and reporting to ensure the team has all the resources and guidelines to effectively operate within defined parameters.
• Oversee, negotiate, and contract agencies and business partners, setting expectations, instilling accountability with ongoing engagement to ensure successful partnerships.
• Demonstrates a high degree of drive and determination and the willingness to complete task and projects as assigned by SVP of Brand + Marketing
• External Communications: Define public relations strategy and approach for Aparium brand and its portfolio of hotels and restaurants; articulate the brand pitch to strengthen the Aparium brand.
• External Communications: Engage, cultivate, and manage high-level strategic media relationships by being a conduit between all agencies; and coach and train General Managers and Executive teams on how to best manage and develop local or regional PR partnerships with third-party agencies for each hotel.
• External Communications: Assist properties with sourcing and vetting local or regional agencies and deliver and support the onboarding process for new agencies to ensure they are fluent in each hotel's people, place, and character.
• External Communications: Partner with Marketing, Brand, and Lifestyle to ensure an integrated, cohesive strategy and drive consistent messaging and storytelling across audiences, with a strong focus on sentiment and share of voice of portfolio and protect and communicate brand reputation.
• External Communications: Be the conduit between Headquarters, agencies, and hotels by identifying cross-promotional opportunities, ensuring public relations and storytelling perspective is represented and shared for portfolio-wide initiatives.
• External Communications: Assist HQ and hotel's Director of Lifestyles in identifying and coordinating influencer strategy efforts in conjunction with campaigns and evolve Aparium's understanding and practices of utilizes social media influencers within the marketplace or region of a hotel's location.
• External Communications: Guide PR agencies during a hotel's pre-opening process; review press releases and coordinate required information with key Aparium stakeholder.
• External Communications: Develop an awards strategy for Aparium and the hotels, including recommended awards per hotel and HQ, tracking national awards calendar to ensure timely and stand out submissions for all applicable properties and projects.
• External Communications: Develop, measure, and report best practices by exploring the appropriate systems and platforms that better measure agency ROI (i.e., TrendKite); and implement platform(s) to track performance with influencer strategy: IZEA, Klear, Influence Kit.
• Internal Communications: Identify and implement internal communication channel(s) for Aparium to communicate to the company's portfolio of hotels key messages, updates, and announcements.
• Internal Communications: Provide counsel as needed to executives to improve content delivery, which may include assistance in writing talking points, scripts, speeches, email announcements, or general presentations to a variety of stakeholders.
• Internal Communications: Collaborate with People + Culture and Brand to identify the company's tone and voice for communications to the people of the hotels and headquarters.