2024 Q1 Marketing Ops Compensation Data
Where do you stack up?
Are you getting paid what you deserve? 🤨
In my experience, it’s not easy to get a good read on where I sit in terms of the overall job market. Even dedicated “salary recommendation tools” still don’t know what Marketing Operators do, let alone what they should be paid.
There aren’t a lot of comprehensive resources (more on this later), and compensation is still a fairly taboo subject for general conversation these days.
So, what’s a resourceful Marketing Ops pro to do?
Scrape publicly available data, throw it in a spreadsheet, and get to work!
With that, here’s the 2024 Q1 edition of a view into Marketing Ops compensation data. If this turns into something helpful, maybe we’ll continue to do this in the future.
The Dataset
I analyzed 423 roles currently available on LinkedIn, all posted within the last 45 days.
These roles were primarily US-based and weren’t limited by industry, specific title, or remote vs. in-office.
I wanted to cast as broad of a net as possible.
Of the 421 roles, 38% had salary information, so the salary data comes from a sample size of 160.
Main Takeaways
All currency amounts referenced in this post are in USD. For those outside the US, Google can do a quick conversion for you, or you can use a tool like this currency calculator as well.
First of all - the elephant in the room. The salary ranges in job descriptions are ALL OVER THE PLACE. Literally. Here’s an example:
There’s an “Associate”-level role (think “skilled individual contributor, not yet a people manager”) that has a difference between the low value of the salary range and the high value of over $165,000. 🤯
Low = $65,000
High = $230,000
Now I don’t know what your experience has been, but I don’t know too many ICs who are making $230k. They probably deserve it, but it’s just not grounded in reality.
There’s also a fairly large organization that listed their compensation as an hourly rate. Definitely not typical for roles like this in 2024.
That being said, most of these ranges are at least somewhat data-driven. As a hiring manager, I’ve contributed input based on my experience and thoughts on what the salary range for a role should be. There’s also live feedback from the market. If you list a Director role with a salary of $25,000, you’re not going to get that many applicants, so that input is also part of the calculation.
As you read through this, take it all with a grain of salt. I think the biggest value of doing analyses like this is to see how things change over time. This whole concept of sharing a salary range is still fairly new and not very dialed in. I hope we’ll see smaller ranges and more realistic numbers become the norm in the future.
Note: I don’t know if companies are consistently including potential differences based on region in their ranges as well, but it’s a fairly common practice to change (usually lower) someone’s comp depending on assumptions about the competitiveness of hiring someone where they live. The Bay Area and other large metros get the top dollar, everyone else gets some percentage of that.
If you’re lucky enough to work for a company that pays everyone like they all live in the same region, you should be in a pretty good spot, comparatively.
So let’s set some context - I’ll roughly equate some LinkedIn data points to things we’re familiar with.
First of all - Seniority (I’m basing these assumptions on the types of titles most commonly included in the categories)
Entry-level - self-explanatory; first job in Marketing Operations
Associate - mid-level individual contributor, not yet a people manager
Mid-senior Level - High-level IC, could be a people manager, could not
Director - also pretty straightforward: you have “Director” in your title, almost always a people manager
and… that’s it? Our first telling data point, there are no current open roles with a seniority higher than “Director”
Second of all - Salary Ranges
The ranges have a low and a high number, and supposedly the actual compensation for the role will fall in between those two values, depending on your experience and fit for the role.
I believe most people look at those values as cash compensation, or your annual salary. I think that is the case more often than not, but I also think that some companies include total compensation (usually salary + equity) in the range. This allows them to goose that upper number quite a bit. This can be hard to quantify or understand entirely for pre-IPO companies, so if you find yourself in that situation, your mileage may vary.
There are a variety of strategies for negotiating salary and overall compensation, and that isn’t the point of this post, but I will say that you should always negotiate. It’s typically expected at this point, so it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Alright, let’s get to the data:
👋 The Data
The easiest way to read this table is that the MIN Low Range is the lowest low salary number for any job for that Seniority level. The Max High Range is the high salary.
This gives us a rough idea of what the broad salary range for these types of roles are.
The “average of medians” number may be the most helpful here, given how the high ranges skew the data (and likely include equity). It takes the medians of all of the individual ranges and averages them together. This dataset probably isn’t large enough to entirely remove the impact of the outliers, but it helps.
A couple of takeaways:
Looking at the averages, it seems like the roles fall into buckets
Entry-level - Around $80k
Associate - Around $100k
Mid-Senior - Around $130k
Director - Around $180k
$50k for a Director role - really? The high end of the salary range for that role is $90k. That job is going to be open for a long, long time.
Here’s the comparison of Remote vs. In-Office jobs:
Again, with the smaller sample size and the weirdness of some of the ranges, the average of medians might be the more interesting data point - it seems like the key takeaway here is that it doesn’t seem like there’s a consistent pattern of companies willing to pay more to get you back into the office.
Here’s some data on common specific job titles:
Marketing Operations Associate/Specialist - 86 total jobs,
Average: $92,670
Lowest: $50,000
Highest: $230,000
Marketing Operations Manager - 68 total jobs, 24 with salary information
Average: $112,682
Lowest: $50,000
Highest: $183,750
Director, Marketing Operations/Marketing Operations Director - 54 total jobs, 16 with salary information
Average: $169,391
Lowest: $50,200
Highest: $350,000
Wrap Up
So, what are you supposed to do with this now? Well, I don’t think I need to point out the areas where this data set (and probably the analysis) is lacking. But it is a starting point.
Consider this as another data point in the fairly sparse frontier of Marketing Operations salary data.
Knowing your worth is an important step in your career. Being informed going into important financial conversations, like starting a new job and earning a promotion can only help you. You can also be a resource for other Marketing Ops folks as well, sharing this information and helping them make informed decisions.
It should also help when hiring for a new role, allowing you to provide a range that is fair, attractive, and aligns well with the job description and responsibilities.
We need to advocate for ourselves - no one is going to do this for us. Hopefully, this is a good resource for starting the conversation.
Is this interesting, helpful, and would you like to see more posts like this? A comment or like on the post will help me know - thanks for the feedback!
Other Resources:
Sara McNamara has been compiling a ton of awesome self-reported salary data that she has made available publicly. You can submit your information anonymously here, and view the aggregated report here.
Other groups will occasionally publish data as well. Recently Dealhub.io launched their Sales Operations Salary Trends report, another great source of information for Operators.