12 Days of Data 2020, Day 12: US Senior Marketing Jobs Statistics

Introduction

Welcome to the 12 Days of Data 2020 Edition, our look back at the data that made marketing in 2020. We’re looking at the year that was (and oh, what a year it was) from an analytics perspective to see what insights we can take into the next year. Sit up, get your coffee ready, and let’s celebrate some data.

US Senior Marketing Jobs Statistics

On day 12, we dive into the job market for more senior marketers in the United States. We picked this particular focus for a couple of reasons; the vast majority of the Trust Insights audience is based in the United States, and senior job roles – defined as manager or above in title – tend to be more expensive and thus more rare. Companies, and especially agencies, will hire and layoff more junior roles very rapidly; a proxy for the health of the marketing ecosystem overall is how much demand there is for more expensive, more senior roles.

We didn’t start collecting this data until the pandemic began, at which point we started sharing it with our newsletter subscribers and Analytics for Marketers Slack community as a way to help displaced community members find new work more easily.

What did we see during the pandemic?

The headline statistics:

• Despite everything, companies hired for more than 660,000 senior marketing jobs in the last 9 months in the US
• The companies doing the most hiring of senior marketers? Technology, education, defense, and medtech companies – no surprise given the demands of the pandemic on those sectors. Notably absent? Healthcare – because marketing took a backseat to the actual practice of healthcare
• Most common titles? Marketing manager and digital marketing manager, by a long shot
• The places to live for marketing jobs? Major cities – NYC, SF, Chicago, Seattle, and Austin. Despite being a year when we worked from home, companies are still based in those cities

When we look at the year over time, we see this pattern:

The blue line represents the 7 day moving average of open positions, while the red line indicates the overall trend, fitted as a curve. We don’t have data from before the pandemic began, but we saw a resurgence in hiring during the summer and then a dramatic fall in the fall and winter.

Key Takeaway

As the economy goes, so does marketing. When companies are doing well, they hire marketers by the boatload to help them continue doing well. When companies tighten their belts, marketing hiring tightens up. What we see happening in the last quarter of the year is exactly that – companies tightening up on their marketing hiring.

Why? Some of it is clearly seasonal, and some of it is related to the macro economy. We see above that programs like the Payroll Protection Program allowed companies to conduct business as usual, but once money started drying up, so did jobs. What will happen in the year to come is anyone’s guess when it comes to the economy and the pandemic.

What we urge you to do is take the time to build your personal brand, focusing on making yourself more well-known. Your brand is your reputation combined with your efforts to contribute to your company and your community. The more you give, the better known you are and the more likely you’ll be able to land jobs that others won’t. Whatever your situation, we wish everyone the best for a prosperous and healthy 2021.

12 Days of Data 2020 Wrapup

We hope you’ve enjoyed this tour through the data that made marketing work in 2020. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our newsletter to get data like this fresh in your inbox every week.

Methodology

Trust Insights used the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from United States open positions focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations, with a filter to screen out the most junior positions. The period of the study is April 1, 2020 – December 20, 2020. The date of data extraction is December 22, 2020. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.