Digital marketing is a booming industry where we see professional digital marketers or even digital nomads in the field making over 6 figures! Especially, in the digital age that we live in, the demand for digital marketers just keeps growing and growing.
But how well-off are freshie digital marketers? Is it really easy to be earning handsomely as a freshie in digital marketing?
There’s no simple answer to this. The best I can say is freshie digital marketers can earn a good-enough living, however, in order to be a rich digital marketer, you need hard work and determination.
Average Salary Of A Digital Marketer
Digital marketing is a vast field- meaning there are many sub-niches to the job. Most often, digital marketers who can do the most get paid the most, while freshie digital marketers who are still going through the learning curve of digital marketing get paid less.
On average, digital marketers earn around $60K/year. But this is highly variable.
Professional digital marketers who are adept at more than a few digital marketing outlets earn much more. Six figures for these digital marketers aren’t really too impossible.
Your salary is highly dependent on your digital marketing skills and the roles you offer as value to the business.
Starting Salaries In Digital Marketing For Different Roles
Freshie digital marketers earn around $40K/year. However, this is highly variable to the digital marketing roles they occupy.
As you may already know, digital marketing isn’t just one job but refers to managing all the digital marketing outlets for a company.
This includes managing SEO, PPC, Content, Emails, Social Media, Ads, SEM, Affiliate Marketing, and much more.
Freshie digital marketers mostly start off with a single digital marketing skill, which is why we’ll dissect their incomes based on the digital marketing role they employ.
| Digital Marketing Role | Description | Entry-Level Salary |
| Content Manager | Fulfills content needs for a business relating to blogs, emails, copies, scripts, and more, creates content strategies, and manages content writers. | $48,000 |
| SEO Specialist | Optimizes the company’s website for Google SEO to help it rank better on SERPs, attracts organic traffic, revamps on-page and off-page SEO, performs SEO audits, and more. | $45,000 |
| SMM Specialist | Handles the social media pages of a business, creating attractive posts and catchy titles, and engaging on behalf of the brand to attract customers and build a reputable online presence. | $40,000 |
| PPC Ads Manager | Publishes PPC ads for the business to advertise on digital outlets, analyses the performance of ads, and aims to achieve the best ROI for the company’s PPC budget. | $45,000 |
| Digital Marketing Executive (Junior) | Executes and manages the above-mentioned digital marketing strategies and outlets. | $56,000 |
| Digital Marketing Analyst (Junior) | Analyses the business’ digital marketing performance through reports, statistics, and analytics, monitors campaigns, and advises for digital marketing strategies. | $50,000 |
What Factors Decide Your Pay As A Digital Marketer?
At the end of the day, your role as a digital marketer isn’t the biggest factor that decides your salary. Instead, it’s your experience, skills, and profile that deduce your value to a company and decides your income.
Experience
Much like in every occupation, your past experience in the job is a significant factor in deciding your pay.
Especially in the field of digital marketing where you fulfill many digital roles for a business, more experience in digital marketing almost always means that the digital marketer is an expert at more roles.
Additionally, this also credits your creativity. Digital marketing is a creative job where you understand the best digital marketing practices only on a trial-and-error basis.
With a higher experience, you can provide more value to a business, increasing your chance of a handsome salary in turn.
The Skills That You Acquire
If you noticed in the above table, solo digital marketing skills don’t help you earn a lot. However, becoming a digital marketing executive or analyst that is adept at more than a couple of digital marketing skills is capable of earning more.
This is why as a freshie digital marketer, your focus should be to explore all the digital marketing avenues- especially Content Management, SEO, SMM, and PPC.
If a digital marketer can work in all these roles, they can earn a much more handsome income than working a single digital marketing role.
Your Digital Marketing Profile
The biggest factor for your pay as a digital marketer is the credibility of your work. When it comes to investing in marketing, every business focuses the most on the ROI.
If a digital marketer can prove a high ROI for a company through their profile that boasts their previous case studies of helping businesses earn significantly more through email marketing, PPC, or SEO campaigns, it will put you in a much more likely position to earn a handsome paycheck than if you had years of experience but no reputation to stand on.
The best way to create a good digital marketing reputation is by starting a blog. And the best part is that a blog costs you no more than $50 in the first year.
On this blog, you can implement all your digital marketing skills, learn the best digital marketing practices through a trial-and-error basis, and ultimately showcase the subsequent success to clients and employers, winning trust and credibility.
How Much Can An Experienced Digital Marketer Earn?
Judging from the above table, it’s clear that a freshie digital marketing earns around the bracket of $40K-$55K per year. Now let’s see how scalable this is.
We’ll be now focusing on the average pay of experienced digital marketers for each role.
Do remember that digital marketing is highly versatile and scalable- two digital marketers with the same background and learning can have an income difference of a million in 5 years. It all depends on how you use your digital marketing skills.
| Digital Marketing Role | Salary (Experienced) |
| Content Manager | $81,000 |
| SMM Expert | $55,000 |
| SEO Specialist | $60,000 |
| PPC Expert | $60,000 |
| Digital Marketing Manager | $110,000 |
How To Become A Professional Digital Marketer Who Earns (More Than) Six Figures?
Earning six figures as a digital marketer isn’t impossible. In real terms, it is actually easier than with other job titles.
Digital marketing is a very vast field where if you use your skills in the right way, you can even become a millionaire!
That’s not a joke. There are hundreds of millionaire digital marketers or successful digital nomads traveling the world who started out as freshie digital marketers doing nothing but writing social media captions.
To help you be on the right track, here’s what you should definitely do as a freshie digital marketer to make the best out of your skills, become one-of-a-kind in your field, and earn six figures in no time!
Start A Blog
Starting a blog may be the best thing you can do as a digital marketer. Why? Because it gives you an outlet to implement and improve your digital marketing skill.
As a digital marketer, you will always be dealing with marketing websites online. So why not test and hone your skills on a website of your own, implementing all the digital marketing skills yourself on your blog and learning their best practices on a trial-and-error basis- whether it’s SEO, SMM, or PPC.
A blog also helps you create a passive income stream, and if you do everything right, you can grow the simplest of blogs into million-dollar businesses!
Your blog will not only be a practicing ground for yourself or a future business prospect, but its success will also work as a profile for you to land top clients and businesses.
Explore Digital Marketing Skills
Don’t just stick to one digital marketing skill- always keep exploring more.
The most professional SEO expert will not be able to earn more than a digital marketer who is adept at more than one skill.
Learn everything that is under the umbrella of digital marketing- emailing, SEO, SMM, CPC ads, and much more. And then leverage these skills to provide more value to businesses, which will help you bag better contracts.
You can always learn digital marketing for free from Youtube, so don’t laze away!
Jump Into Freelancing
If you’re aiming to become a millionaire, you need more than one income stream. This is why as a freshie digital marketer, you should always jump into freelancing as soon as you can to understand how you can work as an independent digital marketer.
Freelancing will not only help you earn more in a given time, but the experience of handling and managing multiple clients can even help you establish a multi-million dollar digital marketing business someday.
Conclusion
A freshie digital marketer may start by earning just $30K a year, but after that- the sky’s the limit.
As a digital marketer, there’s always room to grow, room to find more clients, and room to learn more. This means your income will always be dependent on your own efforts.
And if done right, becoming a digital marketing millionaire isn’t impossible.
Interested in more? Check out 7 Ways To Sell Digital Marketing Services.
