Are you a Marketer or Maestro? The answer has a big impact on your salary and career

The 2022 MarTech Salary and Career Survey, created jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, found two major groups of marketing professionals leading the way in the field. Depending on which side of the dividing line marketing professionals place themselves, they will have certain tendencies that could influence their day-to-day tasks, who they report to and even how much money they earn.

Marketers and Maestros leading the field

In 2020, the MarTech editorial team and Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com, designed four archetypes to better understand the various hats today’s tech-enabled marketers wear. 

Here are all four quadrants of the marketing profession, as MarTech and Brinker have defined them:

• Marketers: Focused on building campaigns and marketing programs.
• Maestros: The operators orchestrating the technology powering those campaigns. 
• Modelers: The data scientists who analyze and predict based on performance. 
• Makers: The creative geniuses who build amazing experiences leveraging technology. 

In our Salary and Career Survey we found primarily Marketers (53%) and Maestros (35%).

Marketers vs. Maestros

The differences between these two profiles revealed some interesting tendencies that impact careers. 

Salary and promotions. For instance, overall, Maestros seemed to earn more, having an average annual salary of $156,433 versus Marketers’ $123,477.

Both Maestros (79%) and Marketers (72%) saw their salaries rise in the last two years by either promotion or by switching jobs, though more Marketers were promoted recently. About 31% of Marketers earned a raise through promotion or job-hopping in the past six months, compared to 25% for Maestros. On the other hand, more Marketers (14%) have been in their current roles for more than five years compared to Maestros (7%).

Roles. No surprise here, Marketers said their top responsibility is to design, run and optimize marketing campaigns (70%). But researching and recommending marketing technology was the second top responsibility (63%), proving how integrated technology is at the campaign level. Next came designing and managing internal workflows (62%), training marketing staff on using martech (53%), and administering marketing technology (51%).

Although nearly half (45%) of Maestros also design and run marketing campaigns, more than three-quarters see the technology their team uses as a primary responsibility. About 78% research and recommend new marketing technology products and 73% integrate marketing technology products into the existing stack. Also, 73% operate marketing technology products as an administrator, 72% design and manage internal workflows and processes, and 72% train and support marketing staff on using marketing technology products. About 45% of Maestros approve or veto technology purchases, too, compared to 30% for Marketers.

Satisfaction. Maestros report high satisfaction in their jobs. About 27% of Maestros said they were extremely satisfied, and 53% somewhat satisfied. Only 3% are not satisfied in their roles, and 5% said they were somewhat unsatisfied. 

At the top end, about 33% of Marketers said they were extremely satisfied, but few said they were somewhat satisfied (38%). Like Maestros, few Marketers said they were not satisfied (5%) and only 13% were somewhat unsatisfied. Only 11% of Marketers and 13% of Maestros said they were neutral about their job satisfaction.

The rest of the 2022 Career and Salary Survey can be downloaded here, registration not required.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.