Our 2019 Marketing Technology & Operations Salary Survey has been released, and you can download a free copy here.
Thank you to everyone who participated. For our analysis, we narrowed the data down to the n=365 participants who identified their role as one of these three core martech disciplines:
- 30.4% — Marketing Technology/Marketing IT/Marketing Technologist
- 24.4% — Marketing Operations
- 45.2% — Marketing Operations and Technology (combined)
A few observations that I’ll call out here — more are included in the downloadable report.
First, as you can see from the above chart, the most common role in our field is actually combined marketing operations and technology. I’ve seen this at a number of companies, where “marketing operations” has generally become an umbrella function in the marketing department for all its centralized technology and data services. But it’s great to have the data to quantify that trend.
But while marketing operations may have organizationally absorbed marketing technology, kind of like The Blob in that old Steve McQueen movie, in turn marketing technology has elevated marketing operations. It’s raised it from the underappreciated bridge-keeper of obscure spreadsheets and reports, to the strategic leader of marketing’s digital capabilities.
There are still pure marketing technology specialists. But increasingly, marketing technologists are part of the marketing operations team.
If you’re looking for an accelerated career path, marketing operations and technology is very promising. 77.7% of marketing ops and tech survey participants have been promoted within the past two years. (It’s like a Vegas slot machine jackpot: 7-7-7.)
27.9% have received a promotion just within the past 6 months. That’s impressive.
Martech Educational Backgrounds
A fascinating observation is that although marketing operations and technology roles certainly have technical elements — it’s right there in the “technology” name — yet only 5.8% of our participants got an undergraduate degree in computer science or IT. Another 6.6% got an undergraduate degree in another engineering or science discipline.
In contrast, almost 1/3 — 32.1% — got an undergraduate degree in business or economics. And nearly another 1/3 — 29.3% — got a degree in liberal arts.
Clearly, you don’t need a technical degree to be a marketing technologist. Frankly, given the speed at which things change in our industry, you pretty much have to be continually learning — way beyond anything you covered in college.
The high prevalence of liberal arts majors actually strikes me as a good thing in this environment, as an increasingly important mission in marketing operations and technology is balancing automation and humanization.
Martech Job Responsibilities
In an earlier post, I also covered a detailed break down of martech-related job responsibilities from participants:
As I discussed in that article, the coalescing of a “common core” of marketing technology management responsibilities — things that 70% or more of all participants report as a part of their job — is a good sign of our profession maturing. However, the relatively small percentage who say data privacy compliance and security are a part of their duties is concerning. We need to do better here.
Speaking of places where we need to do better…
Martech Salary Gender Gap Remains
As with last year’s salary survey, it’s also disappointing to still see evidence of a gender gap between what women and men earn in these roles:
The gap kicks in around $125,000 on up. As you can read in the report, there’s also evidence of a gender gap in job levels and promotion rates. While this disparity isn’t unique to marketing operations and technology, as a professional community we must be committed to addressing this problem.
Download the Complete Report
There’s more data and analysis in the full Marketing Technology & Operations Salary Report. You can download a free copy here.
