How did a tumultuous year impact marketers? Take the MarTech Salary and Career Survey

If you thought ushering the 2020s in with a global pandemic would be the unlikeliest thing to happen for a while, you weren’t alone. But even as 2023 gives way to 2024, unexpected and unexplainable things remain in the air for businesses and their marketing teams.

While the pandemic devastated industries like travel, tourism and hospitality, it created a boom for segments like B2B technology, home goods retailers and home improvement businesses. But with every rise comes a fall, and areas like tech felt the pain in 2023. We didn’t even mention inflation, interest rates and global political instability.

Layoffs in the technology sector alone totaled nearly 250,000 jobs according to Layoffs.fyi. Job losses also piled up in sectors like financial services and bricks-and-mortar retail. It’s often the case that marketing is among the first areas of an organization to be impacted by job cuts, and that seemed to hold true this time around.

But job losses aren’t the only thing impacting marketers and their broader organizations these days.

The AI explosion. Is it a tool? Is it a job killer? Is it a skill that marketers need to master? It might be all of the above. It can help teams scale and move faster, and it helps automate manual tasks. But many of the tasks were previously done by people.

Scrutiny of martech stacks and other investments. When budgets are getting slashed, tech investments get a long, hard look. Contracts up for renewals and new deployments need to show rapid ROI or they don’t stand a chance.

Changing the channels. One of the most impactful social media channels lost a significant number of advertisers when Elon Musk took over the platform. In early 2024, Google and Yahoo are looking to implement new rules for email senders.

Against this backdrop, we want to hear about your marketing career.

This year’s survey will take just a few minutes to complete. We’ll release the survey results, along with analysis from Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com, in the first quarter of 2024.