Q: How did you get started in marketing?

A: I actually went to school for musical theater and had a dream of being an actress on Broadway. So for my first few years out of college, I was in New York City trying to make it as an actress on Broadway. I was temping and the best kind of side jobs were in financial services. 

I wound up in a private equity firm because they would give me health insurance and one thing led to another and they offered me a full-time job as a marketing associate. I did that for a year or two and then decided to go get my MBA at the University of Texas. 

Q: In marketing?

A: I did not focus on marketing. I didn’t love marketing. The classes and the coursework didn’t light me up. I concentrated on entrepreneurship. I thought I’d do the VC entrepreneur thing, but there was an opportunity to go to GE which had this experience commercial leadership program. I thought of it as a vocational MBA because it was two years of training. You do three, eight-month-long rotations in different GE business units. It was a great gig. 

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career Survey shows a profession coming into its own

Well at GE, pretty early on, I got the digital bug. My sponsors and mentors kind of thought it was a fad and like something for the interns and very marcom-y and not very strategic. But I was like, “Well, we’re supposed to be like the future marketing and sales leaders of the company. And all of the data shows that users, whether they’re B2B buyers or B2C buyers, they’re increasingly spending time online. So, are we going to be relevant and understand that?”

Q: You called it. That must have positioned you very nicely.

A: Yeah, I started becoming known for being a digital expert inside GE. When it was time to graduate from the program, GE was actually one of the first brands to spend more on digital ads than traditional ads. And Jeff Immelt, the CEO, had mandated that every business unit have a mid-to-senior-level digital leader. I kind of got to choose which unit to work with and I went and led digital for GE Transportation, which was a $5 billion business, but GE’s smallest division. 

Q: Sounds great, what made you leave?

A: What I was doing in transportation was great and really well received across the company, but I couldn’t get bigger budgets. There was no CMO in that business and I was one of three marketers for the entire division. There were bigger business divisions that wanted me to come and do digital for them, but at GE at the time, the transportation business would have had to be willing to sell me to the energy business and they weren’t willing to do that. 

Q: Where did you go from there?

I had a friend at a consumer packaged goods company called Central Garden and Pet, and they wanted a digital leader and it was in Atlanta. I was in Atlanta at the time and didn’t want to leave. And I got really excited about the idea of it being a CPG and marketing was really in the driver’s seat. They had a lot of classically trained CPG marketing leadership and they had this big vision for digital. I was going to come in and manage a digital agency, have big budgets, build a team, so I was excited. 

My second week there they laid off the entire senior leadership team. I went from I was going to have a multimillion-dollar digital ad budget to getting $100,000, and you get to fire the agency because of how much they cost you. So we did content marketing, we did social. I replaced our agency with software companies. We also re-platformed all of our websites to Sitecore, like 50-60 sites, and did a lot of training and stuff like that. 

Q: How did you go from Atlanta to Oregon?

A: I wanted to move back to Portland where I was born and raised and got offered a job at Oregon Tool, at the time it was called Blunt International. Up until that point, I’d really only done digital marketing, I really hadn’t done much with ecommerce. And the opportunity at Oregon Tool was 50/50 digital marketing and ecommerce. That was really intriguing. 

Q: But there were problems?

I get there and they’re like, “We’ve spent all this money and hired all these people.” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God, they bought the absolute wrong technology. And I think I can get this team to work together and there’s some diamonds in the rough here, but this isn’t the right skill set for what they say they’re trying to do.”  So I spent my first two years cleaning up and course-correcting. 

I think most senior leadership teams, especially those of a certain age, don’t want to admit that they don’t understand this stuff. They feel like, “Oh, by now I should sort of get that the Internet matters.” The truth is they don’t really know what kind of capabilities and resources they need, but they don’t want to admit it. 

I was there for about four-and-a-half years and built a global ecommerce business and grew revenue from $2.5 million to $30 million. We also developed a direct consumer fulfillment capability and were really starting to do some cool things, like re-platforming the websites. But it was bought by private equity owners. They took on a lot of debt and I was part of a mass layoff. I think unfortunately it’s probably only a matter of time till it’s a shell of its former self. 

Q: What do you like about marketing?

A: I love how multidisciplinary it is. I love how the art meets the science and how it’s all just an ecosystem. It’s the perfect blend between structure and creativity, between technology and art, between data and feeling. And I love how cross-functional it is, especially digital marketing. 

Q: I have to ask, is there a Broadway musical hiding in digital marketing?

A: Funny you should ask that. I have started this side project that I’m calling corporate karaoke. I’m taking musical theater and pop songs and I’m reperforming them with corporate context. My latest is Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” but it’s about SAP and how SAP is the invasive vine in your tech stack that you just can’t quit.

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(You can check out Kathleen’s other funny songs on her YouTube channel, @Corporate-Karaoke.)

The post Salary and Career: Kathleen Voboril can make martech sing appeared first on MarTech.

Newest jobs in Martech:

Marketing Technologies Director @ Midan Marketing (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $133,000 (est.)
• Provides functional management and leadership to the MarTech team. Provides vital cross-functional contributions and serves as team leader.
• Work with Human Resources in the recruiting process of new team members. Provide new hire overview of creative functions.

Marketing Engagement Lead @ Humana (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $55,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Engage with business stakeholders to gather, analyze requirements and map them to solutions that leverage Marketing Technology capabilities – primarily Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Maintain a good understanding of Marketing Technology landscape and take advantage of emerging capabilities.

Marketing Manager @ Fastpath (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $65,000 – $75,000 (est.)
• Driving accelerated growth through the design, creation and execution of high-quality lead generation programs, and customer advocacy through effective nurture programs, including content development, launch, measurement, and optimization.
• Collaborate with creative partners, SME’s and Product Management to write marketing content that advances the Fastpath brand and directly impacts pipeline/ROI goals.

Director of Marketing Operations @ R1 RCM, Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $115,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Shepherd the adoption, management, and ongoing review of operational processes in pursuit of efficiency.
• Support the marketing team’s planning, budget management, project management, and platform/tools management.

Director roles:

Head of Go-To-Market @ KeyBank  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $135,000 – $200,000 (est.)
• Lead baseline industry and competitive research to develop comprehensive view of target markets and marketing strategies. 
• Develop and manage a yearly marketing and external communications plan that supports and informs KeyBank’s Payments product and revenue goals.

VP of Marketing @ Zaelab (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Define and implement a marketing strategy that results in increased brand awareness and increased demand.
• Identify and define Zaelab’s ICP and industry trends to ensure Zaelab is appropriately positioned and communicating to the marketplace. Maintain and improve messaging across all channels.

Senior roles:

Senior Data Product Manager @ Home Depot (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $190,000 (est.)
• Seeks to empathize with and understand the end user deeply and use that knowledge to determine the fastest path to deliver value.
• Translates business goals and end user needs into product strategy; communicates direction and product priorities to the development team, other matrixed teams, and third-party partners.

Sr. Manager of Digital Analytics @ 85SIXTY (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Maintain accountability for the overall data quality, conduct audits and troubleshoot tracking gaps to maintain data confidence and implement data standardization.
• Establish and maintain best-practices for tag management including design strategy, technical documentation, approvals workflows, and quality assurance

Product Marketing Manager – Europe @ Radancy (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $104,000 – $132,000 (est.)
• Creating and delivering internal and external communications for product / enhancement releases to EU markets. This includes:
• Understanding each global release; and then modifying materials and delivering to each local EU market to ensure they are optimal/appropriate (in terms of message, language and product capabilities) 
• Ensuring messaging separates our solutions from competitors in EU markets

Demand Generation Manager @ Verato Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $85,000 – $108,000
• Help plan and drive execution of the digital lead gen strategy and end-to-end campaigns that clearly demonstrate and articulate value and achieve business objectives.
• Cross collaboration with marketing operations, content, product marketing, sales and other departments to deploy and optimize campaigns across the U.S.

Associate roles:

Growth Marketing Strategist @ New Worth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Be the main point of contact for 5-10 CMO’s/marketing heads at B2B tech companies.
• Collaborate with marketing strategy specialists in those fields to ensure the success of New North’s clients.

Marketing Technology Specialist @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $95,000
• Successfully execute auditing, consulting, and implementation tasks for clients using marketing automation (HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo). 
• Help clients execute major marketing automation tasks and implement best practices.

Marketing Technology Associate @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $75,000 – $85,000
• Play a role in auditing marketing technology and sales technology platforms. Report results to the Director of Marketing Technology.
• Contribute to client communication, responding to MarTech questions within the same day.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Of course, this issues goes way beyond marketing and marketing technology roles. Both EU and national governments prioritize gender pay gap reduction in their gender policies. But has there been tangible progress? Many would say, not enough.

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career: The meritocracy myth vs. the real gender pay gap

The psychology behind the gender pay gap

Women who experience the gender pay gap regularly may become frustrated and feel helpless to change it. This frustration can quickly escalate into stress and depression.

Regrettably,  research suggests that many women persist in attributing these circumstances to themselves instead of recognizing the need for reformative action from the system.

The link between the gender wage gap and depression/anxiety in women

A recent large scale survey from Columbia University reported a connection between women’s anxiety and gender pay gaps. From the executive summary: “The study authors suggest that these findings could indicate that underlying structural discrimination — rules and practices that disadvantage specific groups of individuals, such as women or ethnic minorities, and exemplified in this case by wage inequality — contributes to women’s disproportionate reports of depression and anxiety, particularly if women are internalizing discriminatory acts as a reflection of their low worth rather than that of biased institutional practices. “

Note that if women earn equal or more than their male counterparts, their risk for depression and anxiety becomes similar to that of men. Conversely, when female earnings fall below male ones, depression and anxiety risks increase more to than double.

The fear of asking for a raise

As a young entrepreneur, I believe the gender pay gap is not solely about employers exploiting women in tech. Women should become more self-assured and confident of the value they add to their field.

Based on my own observations, and five years of experience in managing positions, women tend to negotiate their salary during job offers less frequently than men do. I’d also been tackling this problem throughout my first three years of a corporate career. It wasn’t that an employer refused to give me more money. It was I who was afraid to ask for more generous pay due to a lack of confidence, impostor syndrome, and plenty of other prejudices.

The book “Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide” sheds light on the disparate experiences between men and women when it comes to initiating negotiations over what they want. According to research conducted, men are twice as likely as women to voice their demands and initiate negotiations directly.

There has also been progress made toward narrowing the gender gap among younger women. They become more assertive when asking for salary increases and are increasingly the main providers of income support to their families.

However, women are still a considerable distance from achieving equal pay through effective negotiation. 

The gender pay gap for marketing professionals

Our 2023 MarTech Salary and Career Survey showed that women in marketing earned, on average, 24% less than men. That is an improvement on last year’s 30% disparity. Marketing technologists had an average salary of $138,000, with higher compensation available in larger companies and to more experienced professionals.

The takeaway: Although the pay gap persists, we can see women beginning to bridge it by taking action and showing their value.

In contrast, the gender pay gap across the healthcare industry must be eliminated on the governmental level as it demonstrates a horrible disparity. Health Affairs published a study demonstrating that women working as physicians with the same credentials and skills make an estimated $2 million less than their male counterparts earn over a simulated 40-year career, leading to an alarming gender pay gap in this profession.

What’s worse, a critical 64% gender pay gap in this sphere was noticed long before in 2016 by the Wall Street Journal.

The connection between gender and racial pay gap

Women of color face two simulatenous obstacles of course — racial and gender pay gaps.

Black and Hispanic, or Latina women earn less than men of the same race/ethnicity. Annual income for women also varies across different races. For example:

• White women — $47K per year.
• Black and African American — less than $40K.
• Latina women — less than $37K.

Contrastingly, Asians outearn any other ethnicities, with women having higher compensation than men.

How can women bridge the gap and earn more?

Reducing the gender pay gap requires a collaborative effort from individuals, employers, and policymakers alike. Although no single solution exists for closing this chasm, women can take steps to increase earnings and career opportunities.

Negotiating salary

According to Beverly De Marr’s “Negotiation and Dispute Resolution,” 20% of the women won’t negotiate their salaries at all. But they should. If they did, DeMarr suggests, they could earn around $7,000 more in the first year.

A woman who refuses to negotiate her salary will lose between $650,000 to $1,000,000 over a 45-year career.

So, negotiating salaries can have a substantial impact on women’s earnings over time. To prepare for negotiations, it is essential to conduct thorough market research and craft a compelling argument. The book “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In” may help you with the latter.

By approaching negotiations with a clear and concise argument, women can take a proactive step toward narrowing the gender pay gap.

Building a network

Expanding their network within the industry can help women find new jobs or connect with employers. Joining social media like LinkedIn, participating in events, and joining organizations are all ways to improve professional contacts. Joan Budden, former President and CEO of Priority Health, has said: “I strongly believe that in order for women to rise in the workplace, we, as leaders, need to provide ample opportunities for networking and mentoring so professional relationships can flourish.”

Being more confident

Women who fail to reach their career goals often receive criticism that accuses them of lacking confidence despite demonstrating it through assertive behavior. Such comments may lower self-esteem and worsen the perception of confidence.

Women should remember that they are valuable members of their teams and that their contributions matter. By recognizing their worth and taking steps to build their confidence, they can position themselves for success. Ultimately, they make meaningful strides toward closing the gender pay gap, both in marketing and beyond.

The post The gender pay gap in marketing: Should women be more assertive or the market be more responsive? appeared first on MarTech.

Q: What has your career path been?
A: I actually freelanced the first five years of my career. I applied to a lot of corporate jobs. I think one year I applied to over 400 jobs. I had four interviews, and one actual job that lasted about six weeks because the person who had left decided they wanted to come back, so they let me go. 

But the job that I’m at now, today has marked one year that I’ve actually been at the company. According to everyone at the company that’s like 10 years. We’ve had marketing directors quit within 90 days, marketing business partners quit within three to six months. So for me to make a year, I’ve seen a lot of people come in and out the door in the last year, but that’s pretty much where my career has taken me.

It’s been a lot of freelance. I actually started my own agency back in 2017, and then about 2020 I was like, you know what? I’m done. Freelancing was okay, but I had headaches for clients and I’m not willing to deal with the headache unless it comes with a consistent check. There was no consistent check. So I kind of closed the doors on it, took down the website, everything. The only clients I took…I was just like, “Okay, I’ll do it, but it has to be like a six-month contract and three of those months have to be paid upfront. That’s how I know that you’re serious, you’re not here to do month-to-month. You don’t see results in marketing in a month. If you can’t dedicate 90 days then I’m not the person for you.“

Q: What attracted you to marketing?
A: Marketing kind of reminds me of fitness. My background is in fitness and it reminds me so much of it because there’s no cookie-cutter approach. There’s not a one-size-fits-all and a lot of companies take the one-size-fits-all approach. 

They’ll say, “Well, if Nike did it, we can do it.” 

And I have to tell them, “We are not Nike. Let’s start there. Your audience is totally different.” 

Another thing that a lot of companies didn’t understand with marketing is you don’t have to be on every platform. They feel like we need to have a TikTok and YouTube and Instagram this and that. And I’m like, “No, you don’t because that’s not where your audience is.” And so my approach to marketing has always been very logical, very driven by data. I’m not one of those marketers who has to jump on every bandwagon.

When I had my agency the mission was beating social media at its own games. Social media has always felt to me like I was playing this video game. Yes, I got to the final level and then it’s like, “Ha ha, algorithm change.” You’ve got to play this. You got to beat this monster. Marketing is like that. It never ends. It’s always changing. And I feel like marketers have to be in a space to just want to continuously learn. It’s something that never ends.

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career Survey 2023

 And then in the position that I’m in now, I had to come in and tell people with 20 years of marketing experience, “You’re wrong. It hasn’t worked. You have been doing this for two years. You brought me in. We’re going to make changes and we’re going to change everything. Every way you think you’ve been doing it is wrong.”

It’s like trying to come in and get the older generation of marketers to understand we’re in this totally new era, this completely new era. 

Q: What’s so different?

A: We have influencers and most B2B businesses don’t realize that they’re actually influencers. They do B2B and they were like, “I don’t think there are any influencers.” 

I’m like, “Oh, I found 10 and already created a template ready to pitch to them, get their rate, figure out how much it’s going to cost us. How much are you guys willing to pay for this to get the results that you’re looking for? Here’s their ROI, here’s their audience. These are the people you guys are trying to target. This is the person you need to use.”

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career: Jennifer Luby on facing challenges

They were like, “We need to increase engagement and we need to increase our followers and it’s like, “Well, can you nurture the current amount of followers that you have before you actually grow more? Are we at that point yet? No. Then we need to figure out how we can nurture our current audience before we try to go search for more.” That’s pretty much why I enjoy marketing so much.

I like the community of marketers that I have around me. We all kind of have the same frustrations. And if I see another job description that says they want a social media specialist to do SEO, WordPress, web design, InDesign, Photoshop, HTML coding and pay and paid ads and Google ads and Google Analytics and this and that, I’m going to scream, yeah.

Q: And they’ll give you $25,000 a year to do it, you know?
A: Exactly. I came across jobs like that and they were like, “Oh, you know, we’re going to our limit is $65,000.” I said your budget doesn’t match the level of experience you’re requesting, so, therefore, take away some of those tasks and outsource them and change the title of the position to match the budget. You say senior, but senior does not get $65,000 a year. Senior is $85,000 minimum and above. 

Q: How do you stay up to date in marketing?
I educate myself. I’m always listening. In terms of learning, I usually just go and look at like the most recent job descriptions. What are they asking out of marketing specialists? What are they requesting that you know in order to be hired for a specific position. A lot of it is like SEO/SEM, HTML, web design, Photoshop. So I will spend my days…I actually have my own blog and activewear brand, but I’ve been rebranding and I’m like, okay so I have to practice SEO. Let’s just practice it on my own website. I’ve been practicing on my own and just keeping up with the data and things like that. 

Q: Everyone’s buzzing about AI, what’s your take on it?
A: AI will never take the place of a human being. And that’s what I wish a lot of marketers understood. AI will never take your place because you give it more personality. You give it a different voice. AI is just like a book, like a textbook. It takes away that energy that you get from just a regular person.

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Monique Battiste on charging ahead appeared first on MarTech.

Q: How did you get where you are today?

A: I started as an HTML e-mail developer for Richmond American Homes. So this was almost 17 years ago, before there were platforms for deploying emails and automations and all kinds of things and automated e-mail sending. From there I started dabbling in website design and HTML pages and that evolved into contracted work to build websites mostly using WordPress. 

Then clients started asking things like, ‘We see that there’s a form that can be filled out and can you somehow reach out to the people that reach out to us for a new HVAC system or a new whatever?’ So I started to do that, literally growing with the marketing technology industry as we know it. 

And then somebody said, ‘Well, there’s this lead management thing called Salesforce.’ First CRM ever and the UI for it was pretty, pretty crude, but that was still really cool. Send volume was an issue at that time, too, if you’re using Outlook. Then we’ve got all these different e-mail service providers, everything from MailChimp to Adobe Campaign, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and I’ve worked in all of them. So that’s how my journey has gone. 

Q: What do you like about your job?

A: What I love is the creativity that comes with implementing a technical configuration and architecture that matches the business’s needs. I’m someone who understands business and has a consultant’s mindset, but who also is technical enough to know what to tell your specialized developers and help them with technical limitations, or say ‘Here’s what you can do and how.’ We have to help them think it through from their bigger outcome desires Into the technical of what it takes to make those outcomes happen. That’s what I love doing.

Q: What types of problems do you run into regularly?

A: The challenges are the change management and education piece and keeping that documentation transparent, clearly communicated and accessible. What I do as an architect, is I’ve got the business hat and education, change management hats and then supporting the project manager as well as the developers to build technical requirements. 

All this is doable and much better than what I’ve faced in other jobs.

Q: Such as?

There have been challenges of inappropriately balanced power hierarchies. Then there’s silos and the territorialism of data in marketing. [An executive said to me], ‘You know, you don’t need to understand the enterprise data warehouse, you’re meddling, you’re stepping out.’ I said, ‘I’m trying to help you stand up a financial services cloud and marketing cloud.’

Q: Our survey found that women in marketing technology earn an average 24% less than men. What’s your experience with this?

A: I have witnessed it working in traditional business hierarchy-type environments. I’ve seen the disparity of income in myself versus even someone that I managed and hired that they brought on at twice my salary. The problem lies in not enough awareness and advocacy, and also women not having the tools to assertively and systematically, and on a very professional level, state their case … and it’s worse for women of color.

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Jennifer Luby on facing challenges appeared first on MarTech.

Q: So how did you get to where you are today?
How I ended up here is just being exposed to marketing service providers and kind of working my way up through the industry in different areas. It’s been an interesting ride.

I started with a company that initially was doing IT training and I got exposure to a ton of different technologies because I was the person to set up the classrooms for different vendors that were renting classroom space. Then I moved on to a company that was doing consulting. It went from a small business to a medium one and then we actually ended up in the enterprise space. Then the owners of our company decided that it was time to start another practice and they wanted to make the shift into enterprise marketing management.

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career: Saidah Abdulhaqq on the making of a unicorn

We grew the business from three people up to like 30 and got acquired by the Allant Group. And then we just became kind of martech solution architects.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to martech?

A: Technologically speaking it’s the pure depth of the marketplace right now. The fact that we went within years from the martech 1000 to now it’s the martech 10,000. Keeping up with all of that has been interesting. 

It breaks down into a series of services that you have to understand. So there’s still campaign management, there’s still data management, there’s still social, there’s still all these different things. And then within those spaces, there are multiple players that kind of overlap. 

A lot of times you have customers who are coming to us and saying, ‘Do you support this specific stack?’ and we’re like, ‘Well, no, but we don’t have to. We can figure out what you’re doing because they all do the same thing.’ It’s like knowing one programming language and learning another. It’s very easy once you understand the structure of it. You just have to move through the different services that are available.

Q: What are you seeing when it comes to people changing jobs?

A: On my LinkedIn network, there was a time at the beginning of 2022 when I’d see 50 people a day posting, ‘I’m starting a new position at … .’ And that’s all marketing technology people. So I saw a lot of people moving around, moving up, moving over, doing, you know, everybody was kind of rearranging. Now I don’t see that velocity at all. It seems like people are staying put. Everybody’s trying to retool and understand how they can best use the investments they already have in place.

Q: What do you like about your job?
A: I think there’s always something new to uncover. I’m always learning because it’s changing so rapidly. We went from traditional database marketing and then digital came around and as digital came, it opened up this whole new world that nobody had really played in before. And now there’s opportunities in UI UX, there’s opportunities for programmers, opportunities for data guys, it’s just all over the place. I’m kind of an architect, a technical architect, so for me it’s like a playground, right? It’s a giant sandbox where I can just take all the toys and move them wherever. 

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Greg Morales on the joy of always learning appeared first on MarTech.

These opportunities contribute to high satisfaction among those who work in the thriving field. 74% of those surveyed reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs. 

“Given that one-third of our respondents were promoted or got a new job in the past year, relatively high happiness levels seem justified,” said Scott Brinker, VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at chiefmartec.com. “Overall, great to see martech pros are feeling good about their jobs.”

Increased salaries. Survey respondents had a wide range of experience in marketing. Nearly half had more than 10 years of experience and 60% had more than seven years in the profession.

When looking at the average compensation for various levels of experience, the survey found that compensation increased, on average, consistently at each stage after the third year. 

After seven years, the bump in pay was most dramatic, climbing from $118K, on average, for marketers in their sixth and seventh years, up to $154K for those in their eighth and ninth years.

Dig deeper: Marketing technologists earn more on average than marketers

Promotions. More than three-quarters of respondents were promoted in the last two years, either within their organization or as a result of changing jobs. This was true for marketers at all management levels.

At the managers/staff level, more promotions came in the first year. For directors and above, more promotions were awarded after the first year than for lower-level marketers.

Why we care. The vast majority of marketers report that they are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs, and the data about pay increases and promotions support these sentiments.

The opportunity for advancement in a competitive job market also explains the high churn rate. In this context, switching jobs isn’t a result of job dissatisfaction so much as on way by which employees gain promotions.

Churn accelerated in 2022. More than 70% of respondents said they noticed an increase in churn at their organization in the last year.

Nearly a third said that the increase of churn was significant, as opposed to a moderate increase.

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post Frequent promotions and salary increases contribute to thriving martech careers appeared first on MarTech.

Q: How did you get to where you are today?
A: My career path has been an irregular one, to say the very least. I have a degree in English, which certainly works towards marketing, but since I work in marketing technology, it kind of makes less sense to most people. After I did my degree, I worked a lot in early internet communications, like the keyword stuffing type of online articles and things to bring people in to websites.

I moved more into generalized content and then, through the recommendation of my husband, into more of an analytics role. This made use of some additional training for understanding programming languages, not necessarily being able to be a programmer but to understand the context around them. And from that moving into more specific digital marketing, which is very data-driven experience. 

Dig deeper: Marketing technologists are well-rewarded

I’ve been working in really highly privacy-focused marketing, for Medicare and Medicaid organizations before getting into the role that I am in now, which is specific to marketing technology, but also still very much focused on the privacy operations kind of element of marketing. 

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself truly a marketer because I don’t do any of the brand content, SEO, e-mail, marketing automation or anything like that. It’s more of the foundational elements 

Q: What’s the biggest challenge for martech?

A: The biggest issue that I’ve seen in marketing technology truly [at previous places I’ve worked] is a lack of understanding and awareness of the value at the leadership level. In my experience a lot of leadership will be very operations focused. It’s kind of like the short term wins focus mentality. The thought they have about marketing is that marketers make things pretty. It’s a long-term perception that marketing and advertising are the same thing, which they are not. 

Bringing in the data and the analytics is a really important layer that a lot of leadership are only just starting to understand. Not having that understanding means that they don’t give the buy in, they don’t invest in the technologies. They don’t think about the foundational marketing tool strategies or governance strategies and things like that. 

Dig deeper: 20 ways to make your marketing team more productive

As a result, it winds up being very reactive when it comes to marketing technology. That’s not the case with the work that I’m currently doing because [Enterprise has] much more of a proactive take on the importance of marketing technology. They’re starting to really look at it as an important foundational element and putting in the budget. 

Q: I know you want to expand your team, are you having trouble finding people with the skills you need?

A: Yes. The reason why there are very few people who can do marketing technology in the way that it needs to be done is because we tend to be very much unicorns. There’s a certain subset of us who grew up with the internet and who saw the changes and worked in them. 

I personally have worked in just about every part of digital marketing technology and digital marketing from content to wireframing websites, to implementation, access management, implementation of advertising and implementation of an analytics platform. Because I’ve had this much experience, I’m able to look at the privacy operations part of it from a very different lens. 

That’s the way things went for every member of my team. We’ve got some members of the team to focus on tagging and analytics operations, some that focus on site speed, some that focus specifically on how best to optimize content on the site.  Each of us went kind of in our very, very unique paths and there’s not a lot of people who have that experience or knowledge or even interest in doing many different things to get that one particular focus.

There is the potential for that to happen with training, but I think it will take some time. It will also take a unique subset of individuals who are interested in both marketing and technology and are willing to do that super deep dive into one very specific area. It’s hard to be a generalist in marketing technology. You definitely have to be a specialist to really do the work that we do well.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

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Those members of the marketing operations team more focused on tech and operations (“maestros”) than the design and execution of campaigns earned, on average, $25,000 more than their campaign-focused peers.

More maestros promoted. A marginally higher proportion of maestros were more likely to have been promoted over the last year than marketers (49% vs. 46%); and 61% of maestros said “demonstrating/proving a positive impact on the business from martech” was the most rewarding aspect of their job (against 58% of general marketers).

Responding to these findings, Scott Brinker said:

Marketers design and run campaigns. Maestroes manage and integrate the stack, design
the processes and workflows, and — importantly — train and support marketing staff on using martech.
Maestros are the giants whose shoulders marketers stand upon.

Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and Editor at chiefmartec.com

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Graduate degrees no impact. It was no surprise that, the larger the employer the higher the compensation. Perhaps less predictably, having a graduate degree had no impact on salary. Directors earned, on average, much more than managers and other staff.

Why we care. It’s important to us to take the industry’s pulse each year and track the opportunities opening up for marketers and maestros and their levels of satisfaction with their work, their compensation and their promotion prospects.

What we clearly see is an industry in which two predominant self-identified types are emerging — those individuals primarily concerned with operations and techology and those primarily concerned with devising and executing campaigns. The place where those professional capabilities intersect is what we call — martech.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

The post Marketing technologists are well-rewarded appeared first on MarTech.

Nearly 65% of those surveyed defined their organizational roles as assisting marketing, such as “Marketing Technology/Technologist” or “Marketing Operations”

“Marketing technology and operations pros are a legitimate profession that’s different than traditional marketing roles,” Chief Martec Scott Brinker says in the report. “They’re a part of marketing  — martech is marketing  — but with their own identity and specialization.”

An astounding 74% of marketing technologists reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs. That number was the same at all job levels.

This year’s survey

The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

Gender inequality improvement

There’s good news hidden in the bad news about the pay inequality between men and women. This year women earned an average of 24% less than men ($116,000 versus $143,000). However, that’s a lot better than last year’s 30%. Also, this year found 50% of women were promoted, as opposed to 46% of men.

Other key takeaways:

• Average isn’t bad: The average salary was $138,000. For VP/C-level leaders the average was about $195,000; for marketing staff it was just over $95,000.
• More degrees, not more money: Mar tech professionals are nearly three times more likely to have an advanced degree than the general population (37% versus 13%). However, the grad school graduates earned about the same as those with a four-year degree.
• Big companies pay bigger bucks: Average salaries for those at companies with 500 or more employees: $152,000. For those at companies with fewer employees it was $120,000. 
• Seven (years) is the lucky number: As you might expect compensation increases the more experience you have, with the most pronounced increase coming after year seven of employment.

Thank you for your help

We are very grateful to those of you who completed the survey. We send special thanks to those who agreed to be interviewed. Some of their comments, as well as Scott Brinker’s commentary can be found in the survey itself. We’ll be digging deeper into the survey results in the days to come.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post MarTech Salary and Career Survey shows a profession coming into its own appeared first on MarTech.