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Melbourne beats Sydney in pay for top marketer and sales roles

Salaries are expected to increase for Sydney’s top marketers this year, however the top pay bracket still belongs to marketers in Melbourne new research suggests.

The pay bracket for a head of marketing job in Sydney rose from $160,000-$220,000 in 2013, to $180,000-$250,000 this year, the 15th annual Robert Walters Global Salary Survey suggests.

Meanwhile Melbourne’s top marketers can expect pay between $150,000 to $260,000, a figure predicted to move between 2013 and 2014.Melbourne’s sales directors also command the highest pay in the sector, as a sales director is predicted to earn up to $280,000 this year. However the bracket is again wider than Sydney’s as the base salary for a sales director is $150,000 in Melbourne and $180,000 in Sydney, where the top salary is estimated to be $250,000, representing no change since 2013.

Andrew Hanson, a director at Robert Walters in Sydney, said New South Wales will have the highest salary increases of 2.88 per cent, while across the country salaries are expected to rise by around 2.4 per cent in 2014.

Most opportunities for marketers and sales professionals will be found in consumer-focused roles, banking, IT and government departments he said, with growth expected in areas of customer-led marketing activities, where there will be more opportunities for digital marketers and data insight professionals.

“The market for professionals was very much up and down in 2013, the second half being more buoyant than the first,” he explained this morning.

Hanson said there was increased demand in banking and financial services, entertainment, liquor and food in the second half of the year, and also a small rise in IT and tech recruitment, particularly in the B2B IT sector and businesses new to Australia.

“We’re expecting the positive sentiment that has grown across the back of 2013 to continue this year however salaries will remain relatively stable and there will be a continuing focus on cost-base.”

Robert Moss, manager of marketing and Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) said there is a continuing trend of businesses pulling back on above the line communication and PR activities, and focusing on below-the-line, trade and promotional activity.

“They are more focusing on the customer marketing and category side of things and a lot of that is being led by better insights-driven analytics, trying to understand the consumer better and engage better with the retailers, ” he said.

As the big multinational companies centralise their strategic marketing functions outside of Australia, the local market place is calling for more executional skills, he said. However Australian businesses wanting to develop their strategic marketing base locally will be looking for marketers with strategic skills which will win business, rather than traditional brand-delving PR and communications exercises, he added.

Data analysis is another key driver for marketing roles and Moss said Australians have been increasing their skills in this area over the last two years.

“We are seeing that there’s a lot more talent locally, those people are starting to develop those skill sets, particularly across shopper marketing, as well as in retail banking and that comes down to that added commercial element to the marketing space that we didn’t see before,” Moss said.

“Businesses are asking how much can we actually get out of every dollar that we spend, are we maximising our dollar spend for every single campaign that we run? Are they being targeted to the right person, can we look at different channels of doing that in digital or traditional media? So across all markets, whether it be IT, consumer, there’s definitely a much bigger focus on that digital space.

“Again it’s an area that we’ve only started on in the last two years, but you can see that everyone is sort of scrambling to work out what their strategies need to be.”

Megan Reynolds

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