Episode 55 - Wistia: Sam Balter on video content marketing strategies for brand building
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Hey folks! Thanks so much to everyone who contributed to this report. We want to give a special shout-out to Becky Lawlor and her team at Redpoint Content, who volunteered their time and support to help us clean up the survey, conduct it, and analyze the data. It was the first time we worked with a professional data analysis team and we’re incredibly grateful. If you’d like to create a similar report, get in touch with Becky.
This year's report is sponsored by Flying Cat Marketing - the premier agency for integrated content strategy, SEO, and AI-driven marketing.
As a small agency of senior-level consultants with a proven track record of SEO success in B2B SaaS, you get a strategic partner that stands in the fire with you. You’ll be happier when you can finally focus on higher-level strategic work, and your boss will be happier when you finally start reporting on revenue-driving SEO. To learn more, schedule time to meet the team.
We choose not to gate this report because we want the data to be as accessible as possible. We kindly ask that you help us share it on social and signup for our (excellent) weekly newsletter.
Before we dive into the data, we want to briefly outline the purpose of this report. By collecting, analyzing and sharing salary data, we achieve a few things:
Transparency benefits all of us. We believe content marketing is rich with opportunities and this report backs that up. Still, we want to provide the clearest possible picture of the industry. Okay, just a few more notes before we dive in.
Okay, let’s get into the data!
So, how much do content marketers earn?
Average total annual income (full-time and freelance income)
This is up 0.48% from last year—the smallest increase in average income in the history of this report.
This data includes all income from all sources, regardless of experience, employment status, gender or ethnicity, meaning that a person could make 90% of their income from a full-time job while supplementing some of their income with some freelance work. Conversely, someone could make 50% of their income from full-time work and 50% from freelance work. All of these variables are included in the average number.
The median annual income is $100,000, down almost 5% from last year ($105,000).
The content marketing industry has experienced a lot of upheaval in the last few years. That income is essentially flat tells us quite a bit about the state of the industry. Additionally, this data is almost certainly affected by survivorship bias. Internal content teams have shrunk, which means there are fewer lower-earning content marketers. It also means that companies rely more heavily on freelancers, some of whom are doing very well in this environment.
Here’s how this data has changed over the last few years:
A quick note on the year-over-year comparison: This year, we only analyzed data from respondents who make a full-time living as content marketers. This was not something we’d clarified in the survey in previous years. For each of the last two years, we’ve also chosen not to include submissions where respondents’ income was below $20,000.
It’s hard to nail down exactly how sample bias affects the data. While 316 respondents may not be technically statistically significant, we do feel confident that the overall trend is accurate based on everything we’ve observed over the last few years. Incomes steadily grew for years, and we aren’t surprised to see it flatten out given decreased budgets, reliance on AI, and a slowdown of venture capital money in the SaaS space.
Here’s a look at the count of respondents by salary band.
50.3% of respondents made $100,000 or more, while 49.7% made less than $100,000.
This is up 4% over last year ($108,824).
This number is meant to capture data from folks who have full-time jobs, but does include any additional freelance income—e.g. someone who makes $85,000 per year from a full-time job plus an extra $10,000 from freelance work would report $95,000. It’s an imperfect number, but we believe it’s the best representation of how much income the average individual earns. This number also includes profit sharing, stock and all other non-salary compensation. About 31% of full-time employees earn at least some additional income from freelancing or consulting.
The highest-earning full-time content marketer earned $375,000 as a VP of Content. The second highest earned $315,000. Both are female. Of the 19 people who earned $200,000 or more, 12 worked in-house and 11 are female.
The average income for people who make more than 50% of their income from freelancing.
This is down almost 11% from last year ($121,224). Only about 23% of respondents are full-time freelancers, so I have less confidence in this data.
It’s both a good and challenging time to be a freelancer. Many companies are also still feeling the sting of layoffs and aren’t ready to hire. Freelancers allow them to keep content production up without hiring.
On the other hand, there are many people freelancing not by choice. There is good work to be had, but an oversupply of writers for that work. (This is an observation from running a job board and marketplace, not a data point.) The freelance market has typically been top-heavy, meaning that a small group of individuals make a lot of money. This year, seven (out of 74) freelancers reported making more than $200,000.
Here’s a quick comparison of full-time vs. freelance income over the past few years. This data isn’t a perfect comparison of full-time salary levels versus freelance earning potential, because our full-time income data includes people who supplement their income with freelance work.
This is down 1.6% from last year ($116,088). This includes both full-time and freelance respondents.
This is up almost 17% over last year ($93,306) which was up 5% from the previous year ($88,421). This includes both full-time and freelance respondents.
B2B content marketers make $5,318 more per year than those in B2C, but the B2C cohort has seen significant growth over the last two years.
It’s worth noting that we had 6x the number of B2B content marketers fill out this year’s survey compared to B2C/D2C folks (as Superpath is tailored more to the B2B community). It’s a smaller sample size and one that we’re not as confident in.
This is up 9% over last year ($85,813). This includes both full-time and freelance respondents. This accounts for only 8% of respondents and as a result, we are less confident in this data than the B2B cohort.
Of course, average income only tells us so much. It's helpful to segment individuals by experience to see what kind of pay you can expect if you stay in this industry. This data includes income from any source and does not delineate between full-time and freelance.
In general, most folks with eight or more years of experience are in the $100k Club, although it’s becoming more common for folks with at least four years of experience too.
Here’s how this data for “Income by Experience” has changed over the past few years. (Note: We didn’t collect data for the 13+ cohort the first two years we ran the survey.)
Income dropped for all but the 13+ group this year. While we believe income by experience to be perhaps the most accurate and useful data in this report, it does vary year to year. In each category, incomes have risen and fallen year-over-year. This is a trend that runs counter to the steady average income growth we’ve seen in the past six years.
Below is a look at the average annual income by job title. We used a simple formula to pull keywords from job titles. Example: “What’s the average annual income of respondents whose job title includes the word ‘Director’?” This data is far from perfect. It’s possible, for example, that a job title like “lead strategist” was counted twice since we are using the same formula for “lead” and “strategist.” For that reason, we’re hesitant to draw any firm conclusions other than job title does matter. And no titles matter quite as much as “Director” and “VP.”
Compared to last year, the “VP” title saw the biggest increase (42%) and “Director” was next (12%). The “Lead” title saw the biggest decrease (-8%).
For the first time, we asked about job responsibilities. Respondents were asked to check as many boxes (writing, SEO, strategy, etc.) as were applicable to their work. We then calculated the average income for anyone who checked that box, so these numbers are a loose correlation at best. It’s important to note nearly all respondents checked more than one box. On average, each respondent checked four boxes.
This section applies primarily to full-time employees. We presented respondents with a list of benefits/perks and asked them to check all that apply.
We also asked in-house respondents about non-salary compensation. The counts were far less than the above (perks).
Content marketing is a well-paying field overall, but sadly, income is not consistent for everyone.
We asked respondents which gender they identify as. While male content marketers are still earning more—by $13,819 on average—than their female and non-binary counterparts, the pay gap decreased by 13% from last year ($15,974).
Women earned about 88 cents on the dollar compared to men, which is only marginally better than the 87 cents on the dollar from last year’s report. Sadly, this trend has held true every year we’ve done this report, despite 75% of the respondents identifying as female. In a field that is mostly women, why are men consistently paid more?
To dig in, we decided to look at average salary of male and female respondents against experience. This paints an even starker image of the divide, with entry-level and senior female content marketers making far less than their male peers.
A study by the Pew Research Center found that “women earned an average of 82% of what men earned” in 2022. While female content marketers do slightly better (88%), it’s not enough. If you are hiring or managing content marketers, we urge you to use this data to inform your team’s salary and conduct a pay gap analysis.
Non-binary and gender-fluid folks saw an 11% increase in average income. Note that we had a small sample size of 5 non-binary or gender-fluid respondents. We started collecting data for non-binary and gender-fluid respondents in 2022 and apologize that we don’t have data before then.
In past years, we’ve compared white content marketers to their BIPOC peers. We realize that is a massive oversimplification. This year, we improved the survey and, as a result, the data as well. It does, however, mean that we don’t have simple year-over-year comparisons.
Here’s a look at average income based on ethnicity.
Note that we did not have any respondents who identified as Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.
While our sample size is relatively small, we strongly prefer to break out income by ethnicity rather than white respondents compared to everyone else as we’ve done in previous years. In future reports, we’ll compare year-over-year data.
Still, it’s important to highlight that white respondents earn more, and sometimes much more, than their minority peers. We don’t have enough data to compare ethnicity and experience as we did for the gender pay gap.
Location also plays a role here. As we’ve noted in past years, the overwhelming majority of American, Canadian and British respondents are white, and these countries also have the highest incomes. The ethnicity data definitely exposes wage gaps, but it also speaks to the economies of each country represented. In future reports, we hope to have enough data to compare ethnicity, location and experience. (In this year’s survey, some countries and ethnicities were represented by fewer than five respondents.)
Average income in the United States increased by almost 8%, while income decreased in Canada (-5%) and the UK (-2%).
We, as content marketers, need to be vigilant about racism and sexism in our industry. There's still a lot of work to be done, and you don’t have to wait for your CEO or people ops to get around to it. A quick pay gap analysis of your team, compared against this data, means you can make changes very quickly.
For the first time, we asked a series of questions meant to capture respondents’ sentiments about the profession and the state of the content industry. This feels timely given all the disruption over the last few years and some lingering uncertainty about where content is heading.
To start, we asked how respondents felt about the current job market. The majority felt that the job market is “Strong” or “Very Strong,” but more than 40% of respondents disagreed, saying that it’s “Weak” or “Very Weak.”
Relatedly, we asked how full-time and freelance content marketers feel that the content marketing profession is valued within the company (or clients) they work for. This paints a different picture than the data above, with the vast majority of respondents indicating that their work is at least “Somewhat valued.” We don’t have year-over-year data on this question, but we’ll report on it again next year as it’s more useful to identify trends versus taking a snapshot.
Like last year, we asked in-house respondents if they had been laid off. 13% indicated that they had been laid off, which is down from last year (16%).
We probed with a few questions about the future. Anecdotally, it seems clear that the skillset required to succeed in content marketing is changing, and the data backs that up.
Relatedly, we asked about future earning potential.
Even with all the noise about AI, most content marketers believe that transitioning into leadership and/or strategy roles will have a greater impact on their earning power.
We included an “other” option for this question and got some interesting responses:
We wish we’d asked this question before so that we could see how the responses have changed over time. Interestingly, “Companies undervaluing the role of content marketing” was the option that resonated with most respondents. We suspect that generative AI and, relatedly, Google’s AI Overviews, have shaken companies’ confidence in content as a key driver of their go-to-market strategy.
Here are some of the responses from the “Other” option:
First, we wanted to know why freelancers are choosing to work for themselves. As mentioned above, there are good opportunities for freelancers, but that isn’t the only reason people prefer to be independent.
More than half of freelance respondents (55%) earned more than the previous year.
The majority of freelancers (61%) are lukewarm about the stability of work right now.
Anecdotally, companies seem to be uncertain about their long-term content plans right now. Freelancers can benefit from that when these companies want to increase output, and they feel the sting of it first when those organizations change their minds.
Some of this data is uplifting, but some of the findings are incredibly frustrating. Here are a few things you can do now:
Come join our Slack group if you want to talk with other content folks about this report and other career development topics. There are already 23,000 of us learning and supporting one another and we'd love to have you.
Any questions about this report? Feel free to DM us on Slack or email Jimmy personally at jimmy at superpath dot co.
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