Is Content Marketing a Good Career? Salaries, Priorities, and Skills

What’s it like to work in content marketing? Does it pay well? How’s the stress level? Are there opportunities for advancement? Robert Rose explores highlights from new Content Marketing Institute research that sheds light on all these questions.

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Aired: October 7, 2022

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Sometimes even we make the news. What’s it like to work in content marketing in 2022 and beyond? Does it pay well? Is there a career path for this whole thing we call content marketing? This week we are proud to announce a new research study that answers those questions. This is the news you need to lead in content marketing.

Hello everybody, Robert Rose here with the news. It’s what’s new and what’s important in the world of content marketing. (For the best in best practices – you can always go to contentmarketinginstitute.com

The crack research team at CMI has outdone itself. This week it launched an impressive new research study on content marketing salaries, career paths, and a whole slew of other data about what it means to be a professional content marketer in the coming few years.

The CMI research team surveyed more than eleven hundred content professionals across a whole range of experience and seniority in the practice.

Most respondents have been content practitioners for more than 15 years, and 96% have more than three years of experience. So these respondents know their content strategy.

Related: Content Marketers Share Salaries, Career Paths, and More in 2023 [New Research]

Interestingly, while the experience was high, the age was young. Millennials made up the biggest group in our research (and they’re roughly 26 to 40 years old).

So, what we have here in this research is a group of young professionals who have made or are making a career out of being content practitioners.

And that’s what makes this research all the more interesting. There are some incredible findings. Some of it will make a great section in a business case about why businesses need to take content seriously as a discrete discipline (with special skills and talents) that needs a dedicated formal career ladder.

What’s our take? Well, it’s that last point that stuck out to me.

While the vast majority of content marketers are satisfied with their jobs, another big majority – 58% – are either planning to find another job in the next year or aren’t sure about their next steps. Put slightly differently, only 42% of content marketers say they won’t be looking for a new job next year.

To put that into perspective: Research from LinkedIn shows that while marketing has one of the higher turnover rates, only 13% of marketers are turning over year on year.

There just simply isn’t a clear career path for content strategists and content marketers right now.

There simply isn’t a clear career path for content strategists and content marketers right now, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. #ContentMarketing Click To Tweet

Content marketers are somewhat stressed and looking for more dough. That shouldn’t come as a shock, though. “I make too much money and have too much time on my hands,” said no marketing person in the history of business.

All in all, there are a lot of extraordinary insights here, including the median salaries for content marketers by gender and median salary by generation.

Make sure to download your copy today.

And that’s five minutes of news you need to lead in content marketing. I’m Robert Rose. Remember, it’s your story. Tell it well.