What It Will Take for a Marketer to Be Successful This Year

When the pandemic hit and Americans hunkered down, spending on essentials and entertainment, but on little else, brands naturally cut their marketing budgets.

One area that survived was social media influencers. After dipping slightly at the outset of the quarantine, social influencer spending quickly returned to pre-COVID levels. Meanwhile, other advertising, including digital, continued to decline so much that 7-in-10 CMOs have seen an average 19% cut in their marketing budgets.

From an almost accidental niche specialty, influencer marketing has become a big part of digital marketing. Spending on social influence was estimated to hit $9.7 billion this year.

Marketers report that for every $1 they spend on social influence they earn an average media value of $5.78. No surprise then that influencer jobs have become one of the hottest new marketing careers. By virtue of the relationship they’ve established with their audience, social media influencers can introduce their followers to a new brand, or boost an established brand’s sales simply by posting about them.

Until recently, influencers didn’t see what for many began as a hobby as a career. They wrote blogs, posted videos and images to YouTube and Instagram channels and otherwise produced content about what most interested them. As they gained followers, they gained influence and companies noticed.

Kylie Jenner, with 164 million Instagram followers, can drive huge sales for her cosmetics line and for other products she promotes. So effective is her influence that companies pay her hundreds of thousands, even up to a million to post about their products.

More typically, the average established influencer earns $30,000 to $100,000. Increasingly, brands are willing to work with nano-influencers who may only have a few thousand followers, but as authorities in their niche, exert an outsize influence on buying decisions.

The money is what makes a social media influencer career so appealing 54% of Gen Z and millennials say they’d become one given the opportunity. Increasingly, companies are offering those opportunities, opting to grow their own social media influencers.ProjectCasting.com found a job posting to become an influencer for a startup. The three positions reportedly pay $120,000.

That’s still the exception. For obvious reasons, brands want to work with established influencers. When they advertise influencer jobs, what they’re usually looking for are marketers to develop and manage a social media influencer program. These jobs may be described as “Influencer Strategist,” “Social Media Coordinator,” “Social Media and Influencer Manager,” “Brand Influencer” and other titles. These marketers identify, recruit and manage influencers, developing campaigns, often creating the content and always measuring and reporting on results.

If working in influencer marketing sounds interesting take a look at the many digital marketing and online creative positions we have available. Even if the right one for you isn’t there today submit your resume. We’re always looking for talented creative people. When the perfect job for you pops up, you’ll hear from us first.

Photo by dole777 on Unsplash

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The COVID-19 pandemic may have wreaked havoc on marketing departments, but it did nothing to quell the hiring of chief marketing officers. If anything, it’s likely to have spurred job changes at the most senior marketing level.

A Forbes report tells us that in the first half of the year hiring of CMOs was up 15%. “Are you surprised,” asks writer Norm Yustin, “that COVID-19 has had a positive impact on marketing moves?”

Yustin doesn’t directly explain the reasons behind the hiring, but a surge in technology hires points the way. Technology CMO changes in the first half of the year doubled from the first half of 2019. Meanwhile, CMO turnover in the consumer industry – retail, consumer digital and media, consumer products and services and leisure and hospitality – tumbled 11 percentage points.

“Shelter-in-place and working from home has had a significant impact on consumer companies, which has negatively impacted consumer CMO opportunities,” Yustin says.

Both of those developments, however, had just the opposite effect on technology. Demand for high-speed internet soared, as did e-commerce, gaming and multiple other tech services. Where CMO tech industry changes hovered in the teens in 2018 and 2019, the first half of this year the sector accounted for 27% of all CMO hires.

Unlike financial services where an industry-high 58% of CMOs were outsiders, tech companies stuck with their own; only 19% of tech CMOs came from a different industry. At least since 2018, that’s been usual for tech firms.

Until the pandemic, other industries have been more willing, even eager to hire outsiders. In H1 2019, 57% of the marketing leadership among industrial and natural resources companies came from other industries. This year, 25% are outsiders. Healthcare went from 60% outsiders to 33% this year.

Yustin suggests that the changing consumer and customer demands that go back well before the pandemic, but which COVID accelerated, should have made companies more open to marketers with different perspectives. Instead, because of the volatility and uncertainty, he says, “Many organizations are playing it safe as opposed to being provocative and bringing on tenured leaders with a more diverse range of industry experiences.”

What hasn’t changed is the commitment to gender diversity. Across the board, 53% of CMO hires in H1 2020 were women, up 5 points from H1 2019. Some industries skew in one direction or another. 75% of CMO hires by non-profits and education were women in the first half of this year. For the same period last year, 57% were women. The industrial and natural resources industries went the other way, hiring male CMOs 61% of the time versus 46% the year before.

The pandemic and the changes it’s brought about in where and how we work and how we shop and how we spend our leisure time “has pushed the idea of customer-centricity to the forefront,” Yutsin writes.

“In turn, leadership capabilities must be realigned to meet the needs of today’s in-charge customer.”

Photo by Fabio Rodrigues on Unsplash

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