This is the second annual digital marketing jobs report.
Last year, I analyzed over 10,000 job profiles which led to some interesting digital marketing statistics.
This year, I’ve analyzed 34,224 digital marketing job profiles, thanks to job portals like PayScale, Indeed, Monster India, and Glassdoor.
From this report, you’ll get to know about:
- Average digital marketing salary
- Work experience vs salary expectations
- Most popular digital marketing skills
- State of social media marketing, and many more.
Let’s jump right into current digital marketing statistics.
Highlights and key findings of the research
Here are some of the key highlights of the research report:
- The average base salary for digital marketers in India is ₹547,760/ year.
- Bangalore contributes to 41.82% of digital marketing jobs, which is by far the most for any city in India.
- The most common salary range for digital marketing jobs is ₹0-600,000/year
- Gurgaon, Haryana offers the highest average base salary in India, which is ₹700,724 per year.
- The IT/Computer industry contributes 46.01% of digital marketing jobs.
- Digital marketers with 5-9 years of work experience get paid 2.72 times more than marketers with 0-1 year of experience.
- 55.44% of job profiles prefer a bachelor’s degree.
- 2-5 years is the most common experience range found in 20.06% of total digital marketing openings.
- Almost every one out of two job descriptions mention SEO as a key skill.
- Facebook is still the most preferred platform for social media marketing.
1. What is the average salary of digital marketers in India?
To discover the average base salary in India, I’ve used and analyzed data from PayScale. The average base salary for digital marketers in India is ₹547,760/ year, based on 1,118 digital marketing job profiles.
Also, the comparison of digital marketing jobs with other relevant skills helps us analyze the current state of digital marketing.
Here’s is the finding→
| Job Profile | Average Base Salary (Per Year) |
| Digital Marketing manager | ₹547,760 |
| Social Media Marketing (SMM) | ₹512,255 |
| Search Engine Marketing (SEM) | ₹605,370 |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | ₹501,342 |
Clearly, the study shows that the average salary for having expertise in one specific field (such as SEM, SEO, SMM) is equivalent to the average salary of digital marketing jobs.
2. Which city has the highest demand for digital marketing jobs?
To understand more about the available jobs, I’ve analyzed the 57,990 job profiles on Monster India.
And, I discovered the correlation between the percentage of digital marketing jobs available and different cities of India.
41.82% of total digital marketing jobs are from Bangalore, whereas the second positioned city is Hyderabad, with only 13.3% of jobs.
Last year also, Bangalore was at the top with 21.8% of total job openings for digital marketers.
Also, cities like Hyderabad, Pune have more % job openings compared to last year’s report.
3. Average digital marketing salary vs percentage of available jobs
With Monster India, I’ve analyzed the correlation between the percentage of total digital marketing jobs and the average base salary. The goal was to understand the most common salary range with respect to the % of job openings.
The study shows that digital marketers’ most common salary ranges are 0-3 lakhs and 3-6 lakhs.
4. Which city offers the highest salary for digital marketing jobs?
Based on over 141 reported salaries to PayScale, I’ve found that Gurgaon offers the highest average salary for digital marketing openings.
The average base salary in Gurgaon, Haryana is ₹700,724 per year, which is most compared to any other city.
The average digital marketing salary in Gurgaon is 2.7 times higher than the average base salary in Kolkata.
Also, it is interesting to compare the average salary in Gurgaon with the average salary in other cities.
Here’s the comparison chart:
| City name | The avg. salary for digital marketers (/ year) |
| Gurgaon, Haryana | ₹700,724 |
| Chennai | ₹678,182 |
| Bangalore | ₹657,192 |
| Delhi | ₹505,361 |
| Mumbai | ₹602,495 |
| Pune | ₹573,788 |
| Kolkata | ₹260,360 |
5. Which industries hire the most number of digital marketers?
Since the pandemic, many industries have struggled, such as the travel industry. In this study, I’ve analyzed 73,713 numbers of jobs to understand the industries contributing to the growth of digital marketing in India.
It is found that the IT/computer sector is contributing 46.01% of the entire digital marketing job openings.
Here’s the breakdown of industries and their contribution to job openings:
In 2020, 23.39% of total digital marketing jobs were contributed by the IT/computer industry. But in 2021, the IT/Computer industry contributes 46.01% of total digital marketing job profiles.
6. Digital marketers with more years of working experience get paid more
One of my goals was to understand the key factors behind high-paying digital marketing jobs. For this, I’ve taken help from PayScale and used their ‘compensation research’ feature.
The result?
It is found that digital marketers with 10 or more years of working experience get paid 3.5 times more than digital marketers who have less than 1 year of experience.
In simple words, experience is the biggest driver for high-paying jobs in India.
Here’s a chart that shows the breakdown of salary by experience level for digital marketing job profiles.
A problem solver earns more than a person with a follower mentality.
– Contributed by Arbab Usmani (Co-founder and CEO at UppSkill)
7. What is the minimum qualification required for digital marketing jobs?
One of the biggest concerns of people who want to switch to a digital marketing career is the minimum qualification required to be a digital marketer.
Now, to get a data-driven answer for this question, I analyzed 8,559 job profiles on Indeed.
Surprisingly, I found that:
Over 2 out of 4 digital marketing job profiles in India require a bachelor’s degree (including optional and necessary).
55.44% of digital marketing job openings have an education requirement of a bachelor’s degree. Also, in many job descriptions, this qualification criterion isn’t considered a mandatory factor to hire a digital marketer.
So, the question is:
Do you need to have a bachelor’s degree to become a digital marketer and get high-paying job offers?
Based on the data, it is okay to say that having a bachelor’s degree will be beneficial in getting hired as a digital marketing manager.
But it is also true that a bachelor’s degree or any other education criteria shouldn’t be treated as the boundary.
8. Percentage of jobs available vs years of working experience required
Here, the goal was to identify the common experience range that contributes to most job openings.
After analyzing the job profiles and experience level, it is found that 20.06% of total digital marketing jobs require a minimum of 2-5 years of experience.
Don’t become a fresher; implement while learning. Once you present your skill, you have a lot to add wherever you are going to work.
Exposure is a must in the digital marketing industry. You can learn all the technical terms related to the result, but the result comes only from execution and exposure.
– Contributed by Pranav Jha (Director at AP Web World, Co-Founder at PIMS Institute)
Here’s an interesting finding from this study:
In 2020, 18.75% of total jobs had a minimum experience level of 0-1 years. But the same experience level contributes to only 9.59% of total jobs.
We can conclude that the digital marketing industry in India is becoming more and more competitive.
As a result, the companies are looking for more experienced and skilled marketers.
Here’s the comparison of experience level by the percentage of jobs for 2020 and 2021.
9. Which skills are in demand in digital marketing?
People who want to start their digital marketing career often ask these common questions:
- Which niche should I choose?
- Or, what are the most in-demand skills in digital marketing?
To get a solid answer (backed with data), I studied over 100 job descriptions on MonsterIndia. To get accurate results, I’ve only considered job profiles with the keyword ‘digital marketing’ in the job title.
Here are some of the key highlights of this study:
- SEO is not dead. In fact, it is the most in-demand skill for digital marketers in India.
- The demand for email marketing has significantly increased from 9.53% in 2020 to 32.30% in 2021.
- Copywriting and content writing are some of the most important skills mentioned in the digital marketing jobs description.
I am not at all shocked to see SEO at the top of this list. SEO is not just to please search engines, but all the SEO factors are equally important when it comes to user experience.
So, a business cannot skip optimizing their web properties for users and also for search engines because their target users would definitely be searching about their organization and their services on search engines, even if they are running paid ads, email marketing campaigns, etc.
And thus, SEO is a must-have skill for a digital marketer, and the data speaks the same.
Also, it is not surprising to see the need of having good writing skills to become a better digital marketer. Almost 1 out of 4 digital marketing jobs mentioned writing as a key required skill.
– Contributed by Himanshu Sharma (SEO consultant & founder @ therankingmachine)
Digital marketing + writing is a powerful combination of skills that will make you 10x more powerful and successful.
Because when you know how to write, you can sell anything to anyone, and with digital marketing skills, you can find the right audience who will buy whatever you are selling.– Contributed by Vijay Kumar (Digital marketer turned copywriter)
If you are a digital marketer, learn to write better and if you are a writer, learn digital marketing because together, you’ll become invincible.
10. What is the most in-demand tool for digital marketers?
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of marketing tools available in the market. Therefore the important question is:
- What are the top digital marketing tools that recruiters and companies are looking for while hiring?
While analyzing the key skills mentioned in job descriptions, I’ve found some common repetitively mentioned tools.
It’s not Ahrefs or Semrush, but Google Analytics is the most in-demand tool for digital marketers.
27.27% of total job openings demand the understanding and experience of using Google Analytics from digital marketers.
Here’s the list of the most in-demand digital marketing tools:
- Google Analytics (27.27%)
- Adobe Analytics (12.71%)
- Semrush (7.27%)
- Google search console (5.45%)
- Ahrefs (5.45%)
- screaming frog (3.63%)
11. Is programming required for digital marketing?
While studying job descriptions, I didn’t find any correlation between the digital marketing salary and the requirement of coding knowledge.
But some coding languages are considered a bonus for digital marketers.
Here’s the list of popular programming languages based on digital marketing job descriptions:
12. Which social media channel is most popular for digital marketing?
To analyze the state of social media marketing, I’ve tried to discover the most popular social media platforms based on the number of mentions in the job description.
For this, I’ve analyzed over 100 job profiles in Monster India and found that Facebook is the most in-demand platform for digital marketers.
20% of digital marketing job profiles demand the skill of running Facebook Ads efficiently.
Here’s the full breakdown:
Like last year, LinkedIn and Twitter are in the second and third positions based on the mentions in job profiles.
Facebook still dominates the Social Media world today. Over 2 Billion Active users with a lot of interest in various topics you can leverage to sell your products/services or your clients’. There is no better medium than Facebook Ads to generate the level of Sales, Profits, and Brand Awareness.
Remember, with the new laws related to tracking in place, it requires you to become more creative, patient, testing beast, and write words that capture attention and force the user to check out your product or service.
With Facebook testing new opportunities for AR/VR and New places to run more ads, the Opportunity for real marketers has just begun.
Jump on the bandwagon of Facebook Advertising and capture the attention you deserve.
– Contributed by Karan Parwani (Chief Marketing Officer at Highonm)
Final words
That’s all for this year’s digital marketing jobs report.
I hope you’ve enjoyed and got some fascinating digital marketing statistics about the current state.
Now, I am curious to know your favourite part from the report.
Or, share your feedback so I can make an even better report next for the 2022 edition.
Note: A special thanks to Indeed, PayScale, Monster India, and Glassdoor for making this research report possible.
Methodology
All the data and insights are taken from different job portals. The sample size and the source of data may vary.
For example, the sample size to study the percentage of job openings by industry is 34,224, and the data source is Monster India.
But the data source to figure out the average base salary is taken from PayScale, for which the sample size was 1,118.
Note: The term ‘average base salary‘ represents “gross income before taxes and deductions. It does not include pay such as benefits, bonus, profit-sharing, or commissions,” according to PayScale.
Need your support
As you can imagine, it took weeks of research and study to prepare and compile the full report. So, if you share this research report, it will be a great motivation for me.
Thanks again.
Sk Rafiqul Islam is a content marketing practitioner with 3+ years of practical experience. He spends most of his time helping businesses to build a loyal audience with content marketing. He is also running a tech career blog called 10Pie and content marketing VIP, a bi-weekly marketing newsletter. In his free time, he loves reading books and playing football.