Is the marketing industry going to shed off thousands of workers in the next few years? Is the outlook good for those who wish to enter \u2013 or stay in \u2013 the field of marketing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article will address all of these questions not by platitudes like \u2018AI can do much but it will never replace human creativity\u2019, but by analysing<\/strong> the tangible data and the verifiable reality of the marketing industry in 2023, and putting them in the context of the most recent developments in AI technology<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time you have finished this article, you will know exactly what to expect for the marketing industry in the wake of the AI revolution, and most importantly \u2013 what prospects it offers to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n For those who wish to enter the world of marketing, the year 2023 may be something of a golden age. This statement is not an exaggeration \u2013 it\u2019s the natural conclusion that emerges by looking at the hard evidence, in particular the latest CMO Survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In spite of the gloomy, inflationary state of the global economy, the marketing industry seems to be experiencing a \u2018mini-boom\u2019<\/strong>. The size of its budgets as a percent of overall company budgets reached 13.8%, the highest figure in the history of the survey<\/strong>. The number of marketing jobs has grown by 15.1% in the last year, in an upward trend that is expected to continue throughout 2023. As well, nearly 60% of surveyed marketers report feeling that their job has \u2018increased in importance\u2019 since the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A LinkedIn report<\/a> corroborates this optimism, indicating an almost surreal 374% increase in job postings in the field of marketing last year<\/strong>. That figure should be taken with a grain of salt \u2013 it probably says at least as much about trends in the use of LinkedIn as it does about trends in marketing \u2013 but as an indicator of growth, it\u2019s pretty unambiguous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The industry itself is therefore expanding, and looks set to keep expanding \u2013 but what opportunities does it offer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Marketing is a very wide umbrella, and its teams may sometimes include creative types like designers, writers, and even actors, as well as purely technical roles like web developers and data scientists. For simplicity, we will leave \u2018borrowed\u2019 roles outside of this discussion, and focus on those jobs that are related to marketing directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While jobs in the marketing industry are growing rapidly, they are changing just as quickly, and the reason is that<\/strong> companies are racing at breakneck speed to keep pace with the digital revolution<\/strong>. Said digital revolution has given rise to an entire new subfield of marketing – what is known as MarTech<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rise of MarTech is the reason so many new jobs are being created in the field<\/strong>, and also why budget expenditures are so high \u2013 they are being pushed up by investment in digital marketing<\/strong>, which according to the CMO survey now takes up 57.9% of all marketing expenditure<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recent article on the most valuable skills in marketing<\/a>, LinkedIn identified the top 10 fastest growing marketing jobs<\/strong> as the following (notice how many of these are related to digital marketing and new technologies):<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The report above also provided a list of the top 10 jobs that are most in-demand<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n These jobs may look interesting to you\u2026 but how many of them will be taken over by AI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on our modern industrial and economic systems as a whole is impossible to overstate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With regards to the marketing industry specifically, AI\u2019s most significant impact on the short to medium term looks set to be in the fields of data processing<\/strong>, content creation<\/strong>, and automation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Data processing means collecting, sorting and to a certain extent interpreting information about your customers and your market<\/strong>. It has become increasingly relevant in the age of the internet as enormous amounts of data have become available, even if the regulations<\/a> as well as the industry standards regarding said data are changing all the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are technologies that are able to process data efficiently and semi-independently. These include PaveAI<\/strong><\/a>, which utilizes Google Analytics to read data, find relevant insights within it, and report them to the user, Wordsmith<\/strong><\/a>, which can be fed raw data and will return a written, easy-to-understand narrative, and Adext<\/strong>, which is capable of designing, managing and optimizing online advertisement campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data processing is an expansive, important field \u2013 enough so that it is possible to build an entire career entirely around Data Science<\/a> \u2013 and the fact that AI can do it so well should not be downplayed. Data processing still needs guidance \u2013 someone who knows what they are looking for \u2013 meaning jobs in this sector will not be replaced. But they will most certainly be transformed, with Marketing Analysts in particular being in a great position to take advantage of their technical skills to pick up new responsibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Content creation refers to the creation of (for now) mostly written material, such as emails, newsletters, and blogs<\/strong>. AI applications capable of reliably creating video content for marketing purposes are not very prominent at the moment, although this is probably only a matter of time, as text-to-video generation seems set to be among the big AI trends of 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The king of this particular jungle is of course ChatGPT<\/strong><\/a>, an AI chatbot that has astonished the general public with its ability to instantaneously produce lengthy, functional and relatively complex essays and stories. Launched in November 2022 and just updated to the latest model, it already has content creators everywhere trembling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In truth though, ChatGPT is only one of a variety of such tools. Other natural language generation (NLG) platforms like Articoolo<\/strong><\/a> and the aforementioned Wordsmith<\/strong><\/a> offer similar services. More specialized applications like Phrasee<\/strong><\/a> can come up with pitches, titles and email subject lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No doubt more of these technologies will follow. How exactly the industry will adapt to them is an open question \u2013 for example, will search engines be programmed to recognize artificially-generated content, and will they treat it any differently than human content? On that, we will simply have to wait and see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Automation, the art of getting a machine to perform a task without guidance or oversight, is directly related to both of the above processes, and to a greater or lesser extent is involved in all of the technologies we have already mentioned. There is therefore no need to repeat ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We should briefly mention chatbots capable of handling interactions with clients<\/a>, because they are very often associated to the field of marketing. This, however, is a misconception. While this branch of AI will doubtlessly have implications for marketers as well, its primary application is in customer service, which is a different field, and which we will not cover in this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The question of which marketing positions will go extinct does not have a simple answer. The main problem is that it\u2019s hard to sift jobs that may actually<\/em> disappear, such as, say, telemarketing, from others that will simply be rebranded<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a certain point we may well see ads for \u2018Digital Marketing Manager\u2019 disappear, but only because digital marketing will become so common and widespread that any \u2018Marketing Manager\u2019 will be expected to already incorporate that specialism, and the word \u2018digital\u2019 could therefore be dropped from the job title. That is the opposite of extinction!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Articles that come up with a list of \u2018endangered job titles\u2019 for this particular industry are therefore speculative at best, and irresponsible at worst. A job title like \u2018Marketing Technology Specialist\u2019 may stop existing, but only to be replaced by something like, say, \u2018Customer Experience Data Scientist\u2019, which will require many of the same skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the majority of the innovations brought along by AI appear to overlap with the work of marketers, almost never to directly replace it<\/strong>. Tools for automated advertising or content generation can perform many of the tasks done by marketers, but they always require greater or lesser extents of supervision and direction, particularly due to their notorious inability to think laterally or creatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While marketing professionals won\u2019t go extinct, it is inevitable that their work will be transformed. Marketers who are involved with, say, designing an advertising campaign, will have to make use of those AI tools that allow them to optimise their approach<\/strong>, in the same way that all modern designers must now be equipped with the skills to use something like Photoshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Marketers in the early phase of their careers are typically not among the highest earners, but their salaries do grow rather rapidly, and jump upwards dramatically once they reach the echelons of management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Listing every possible job in marketing and its expected salary would be a near-impossible job \u2013 the field, as we mentioned, is very broad indeed \u2013 and the results would only be confusing. Instead, here is a selection of marketing salary expectations (measured in $1000p\/y) for a variety of positions that go from entry-level to management<\/strong>. The source of the data is Salarylist.com<\/a>, which focuses on the American market, but similar ranges (adapted for local taxation) can be found on European websites such as Glassdoor.de<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2018s worth pointing out that the LinkedIn report<\/a> we quoted in our section on in-demand jobs also looked at which skills recruiters were having most trouble finding. Digital Marketing<\/strong> was first on that list by a distance, and the top five also included Social Media<\/strong> and Data Science<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One reason these skills are so valuable is precisely that they let companies harness the power of AI. Although everyone in marketing may be talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning, very few people are actually using it<\/strong>. Only 8.6%<\/strong> of companies do, according to the CMO figures, although that number is expected to increase to 22.9% <\/strong>by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This means that any marketer who can use AI effectively as part of their job \u2013 and who can instruct the rest of the company on how to use AI tools \u2013 will be in a position to negotiate a substantially higher salary than those reported above.<\/strong> (If you\u2019re not sure what this sort of work entails, check out our guide on what it means to work as a marketing analyst<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The future of marketing is digital \u2013 it is also bright.<\/strong> As we have seen, the industry is growing and more and more jobs are being created. This is very much the right time to get in \u2013 just don\u2019t fumble the entrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI is much more likely to increase the number of jobs in marketing than to replace them<\/strong>, as it\u2019s already greatly expanding the technical dimension of digital marketing. As jobs in this field call for more IT skills, qualified digital marketers will be in even greater demand, although more traditional marketers will need to learn new skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCONTENTS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Is Digital Marketing A Good Career?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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What Sort Of Jobs Can You Do In Digital Marketing?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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The Top 10 Fastest Growing Marketing Jobs<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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The Top 10 Most In-Demand Jobs in Marketing<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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How AI Will Change The Future Of Marketing<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Will AI Take Over Data Processing In Marketing?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Will AI Replace Content Creation In Marketing?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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What Is Automation In Marketing And What Can AI Do?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Which Marketing Jobs Will Be Stolen By AI?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Does Marketing Pay Well In The Age Of AI?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Will AI Replace Digital Marketing?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n