The landscape of marketing has changed greatly since the copywriting-heavy “Mad Men” days of the mid-20th century. Today nearly every operation is constantly in contact with their client base, requiring some communications, marketing, or public relations expertise. Marketing has also become greatly intertwined with technology. With the richness of inputs from client or visitor visits, marketing is now more data driven than ever before. These emerging uses of marketing have pushed the job market forward, and provide more opportunities for individuals to get into marketing than ever before!
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Chief marketing officer positions are the most senior marketing-centered role you can achieve in most organizations. These individuals may not only be in charge of marketing efforts within an organization, but also sales. With sales and marketing typically called the “commercial” division of a company, CMOs have a massive impact on revenue.
More so than nearly any other position within an organization, chief marketing officers must show vision. Vision infectious enough to trickle down into sales calls and the creative work of individual marketers. Typically CMOs have held another leadership position in both sales and marketing and have held this position for close to a decade (a common requirement).
- Pay Range: $92k-$342k
Growth Hacker
Growth hacking is a mindset born from early to mid stage startups. While growth hackers borrow from the toolsets of many other digital marketing positions, they differ in that their key metric is growth. This comes across in the AARRR stack, wherein a marketer focuses on honing customer acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. In short, growth hackers have made client base growth a science.
If you find yourself a multidisciplinary marketer, capable of creating web pages, writing copy, and interacting with customers one-on-one, then growth hacking may be a great role for you. Most opportunities for growth hackers are in startups, which can be a good or bad fit depending on the individual. Typically startups have higher opportunity but also higher volatility than more established industries.
- Pay Range: $47k-$166k
Developer Evangelist
Within software-as-a-service industries, products are ever changing. And one of the ways in which these changes get across to current users is through developer evangalism. Additionally, some changes just aren’t good, and constant feedback is needed. Basically, SAAS companies need to be in constant contact with their customers in a discussion on moving their products forward. This is where developer evangelists come in.
The key role of a developer evangelist is to embody the developer experience (they are one) and create a vibrant community wherein information can flow back and forth from the developer community and the software maker. This job often entails a great deal of travelling and speaking at conferences, as well as the creation of sample apps or projects and educational endeavors for the developer community.
- Pay Range: $110k-$190k
Marketing Manager
Marketing managers are some of the most common marketing positions you can find, as typically every marketing team has one. This individual will likely have several years of experience “in the trenches” of marketing, and will still create some marketing assets on their own. This is also one of the broadest types of positions we’ve mentioned. Marketing manager will mean entirely different things based on the industry of the employer and the objectives of the organization.
One aspect that remains constant about marketing managers is that they tend to need experience in a range of marketing disciplines. For example, a digital marketing manager will likely be in charge of individuals enacting PPC (ads) as well as organic marketing (SEO or social). Within a more traditional industry, these individuals may work as more of an editor or oversee print work that will be placed out into the world.
- Pay Range: $72k-$130k
Corporate Communications Director
Corporate communications directors are particularly important for organizations at high risk for negative exposure. Think of these individuals as both the head of public relations as well as positive marketing-related messaging all at once. Typically individuals in communications roles will have worked their way up from a communications related degree, they may originally have been journalists or public relations specialists. Some communications directors rely heavily on a network of press contacts they’ve built up over time.
Communications roles are more prevalent in large enterprise, and if you drop the “corporate” from this title, very common in governmental and non-profit spaces.
- Pay Range: $110k-$160k
Market Research Director
Market research is tasked with determining if there is a market for a product, and if the product meets the criteria from the product. Essentially, market research is marketing more focused on the community at large than one organizations’ messaging. These lessons yield valuable insights for both marketing and product teams, and can help to avoid roadblocks and failed products down the line.
Market research is typically a more research-heavy role compared to other forms of marketing. And a quantitative degree may be required, or at least work in analytics and with statistics.
- Pay Range: $99k-$114k
Director of Digital Marketing
A similar role to others on the list, this job title is primarily implemented to distinguish between digital and print marketing as well as to establish a “director” who is often above multiple project or product managers within marketing (and their teams). This individual will be expected to be an expert on many forms of digital marketing and marketing technology. Additionally, one of the main tasks of individuals in this role is to guide the organization into the future of digital marketing. Much as a chief marketing officer must provide “vision,” so too does a director of digital marketing need to instill a culture and vision around digital projects.
- Pay Range: $138k-$182k
Freelancer
Perhaps the role with the largest variability in pay ranges, freelancers can be among the highest and lowest earning marketing careers. If you’re into taking full ownership of finding, onboarding, and managing all your clients, but want greater ownership of the earnings from each projects, freelancing might be for you!
In may settings, small marketing agencies start with a single freelancer. The freelancer drums up more clients and then hires indviduals to help with the workload, thus creating a small business at the end of the day. It should also be noted that freelancer is a very general term. These individuals may work in design, copywriting, programming, analytics, or any subdiscipline of marketing.
- Pay Range: $15k-$300k
Marketing Agency Owner
Unless you bought an agency, a marketing agency owner is most likely an individual who started as a freelancer and then formalized their operations as they grew. Similarly to freelancing, marketing agency owners may make a great deal, or very little depending on how business is and how they are investing the proceeds. With this said, as opposed to the freelancer, the upside is higher for marketing agency owners, as some agencies can grow to create billions of dollars in revenue.
Also similarly to freelancing, marketing agencies can be full service or specialize in one area. Popular marketing agency types include PPC-centered agencies, SEO-centered agencies, outreach-centered agencies, growth hacking agencies, web design-centered agencies, and full service.
- Pay Range: $60k-$1M+
Content Marketing Director
For large organizations, there may be many content managers and vectors of content work. You may have large ad productions, tutorials and documentation, community building, and the creation of sites or apps. Within this setting, the content marketing director is tasked with pulling all of these disparate projects into a coherent vision. Individuals in this role will likely have worked either in another senior marketing role or for a number of years as a content marketing manager.
- Pay Range: $92k-$172k
Product Marketing Manager
Product marketing managers are meant to own the public messaging and attention given to a specific product. These versatile marketing mangers are likely involved with a range of marketing types and settings including digital marketing, print marketing, marketing events, and packaging. These individuals also provide feedback to the product team through the form of market research. This total skillset is hard to achieve without years of experience or in-all-likelihood a graduate degree in business or marketing.
- Pay Range: $92k-$119k
Demand Generation Manager
Demand generation managers are related to growth hackers and business development professionals. But their primary metric is rather how many leads and how much attention they can heap onto an organization or product. These individuals may additionally be present within sales organizations in the form of sales development representatives (SDRs).
This role may be an entirely digital focus, or work in a more traditional industry where in-person one-on-one meetings or larger events are hosted. Pay for this role may vary greatly, but often has a low base salary and high potential for performance pay if one can generate a great deal of demand.
Pay Range: $60k-$130k Base
Brand Marketing Manager
Brand marketing managers hold roles similar to product marketing managers, but represent entire lines of products. These individuals are prevalent in both online and more traditional goods and services. Individuals in this role must consistently monitor marketing trends within their industry and oftentimes help to host both in-person and physical marketing events, attend trade shows, as well as perform digital marketing.
Brand marketing manager roles are particularly prevalent in food and beverage product fields. And are less prevalent in health care, IT, or engineering fields.
- Pay Range: $70k-$126k
Digital Strategist
Digital strategists may work in freelance, corporate, and agency settings. These individuals are good at seeing the big picture, at gaining input from clients or stakeholders, and then sketching out a vision for what can “move the needle” in a particular marketing arena. These individuals are often called into external teams to provide an outside point of view that can shift strategy going forward. It’s important for digital strategists to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing and digital trends.
This role also tends to be analytics heavy, as strategists are looking in on projects from a high level and need to be able to monitor success or failure. This means that some quantitative background is often sought in digital strategy roles.
- Pay Range: $61k-$80k
Data Scientist
While most data scientists don’t work in marketing, a handful do find work finding insights in massive amounts of web-centered data. Marketing-related projects that data scientists could be involved in could include serving up relevant ads or content, monitoring news coverage in strategic areas at a large scale, and providing insights into site or store visitors and behaviors.
Data science is one of the mot in-demand skill sets of the 21st century. And whether you would like to work in a marketing-centered application or another, can provide a great deal of opportunity.
- Pay Range: $83k-$200k