With marketing roles expanding, is the CMO salary on the rise?

Silicon Valley marketing guru Regis McKenna once famously stated, "Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing." 

This sentiment seems to be the reason behind the growing value and compensation of marketing roles in India. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and senior marketing professionals are now among the highest-paid executives in India, with top-tier salaries reaching Rs 70 lakh per annum during October 2023-24, according to Naukri data. 

The average CTC for marketing roles stands at Rs 32.29 lakh per annum, while the median salary stands at Rs 25 lakh per annum.

But, why is this so? Hiring experts suggest what causes the salaries to rise and fall is based on the demand.

Khalid Raza, Associate Vice President Human Resources, PeopleStrong explained, “Not every marketing leader, but a few marketing leaders now also hold sales responsibilities in terms of contributing to the pipeline and if they're seeing the ROI, it's perfectly fine for them to also pay little more for the same role. That is what is increasing the compensation.”

Experts suggest that while companies might be spending big money on the role of head of marketing, they should also be very mindful that there are a lot of areas in marketing which can be done far better by outsourcing. Hence, a fine balance needs to be struck rather than just spending a lot of money on a head of marketing.

One needs to do a fine balancing act into how much of that role can be done from outside and how much they want that role to be in-house, shared Rajneesh Singh, CEO, Simpli Group.

The Naukri data also mentions that there is a 19.49% increase in the hiring of marketing heads during Q2 of September, when compared YoY. 

Lokesh Nigam, CEO and Founder, Konverz AI said, “If you look at all indicators in the last quarter, the economy is growing and if you look at organisations, particularly the startup community, there is a lot of action in work. And with so much content being generated by AI, that emotional connection piece is missing.”

Raza said, “One is B2B marketing and the second is B2C marketing. Now especially in the digital world, there has been growth in both aspects because organisations are also trying to focus a lot on how they position their brand, how they do performance marketing, what can they do differently, which articulates their product or service.”

Marketing so far was essentially limited to introducing your brand to the market. However, according to Raza, it has now returned to the tracking section, which shows how many leads are being created and whether they are returning to the funnel or the sales pipeline.

So, accountability has increased and thereby the hiring is for those who can directly impact sales.

Singh of Simpli said, “This is a time to probably spend time on talent, on the marketing side and prepare for a future, keeping a very optimistic mindset.”

Furthermore, Naukri data suggests there has been a significant increase in the hiring of Technology, Media, Telecom (TMT) roles in marketing. So, whereas professional services of marketing have seen a decline of 6% from Q3 of FY23 to FY24, there has been an increase of 7% in the TMT side of the marketing function.

“Tell me, these days how simple it is to create content? Hence, the professional services side will naturally see a decline. Even from a consulting perspective, if I needed 10 consultants to do something a year ago, I can actually do that with 2 now,” added Nigam.

Singh opines that professional services would be taking a pause right now. It is more of a temporary thing rather than a major permanent feature. “It could also be the time of the year since we are in a quarter three, when things would be going a bit slow. Things will eventually pick up in quarter four,” Singh added.

Another reason could be that other sectors are being impacted by the advent of AI, but marketing is yet to see the impact of Artificial Intelligence.

Singh expressed, “The advent of AI could be in the stage of infancy to really see an impact on marketing but it could happen over a period of time .”

Nigam shares with the advent of AI, specialisation has started becoming more fuzzy. “A marketer can actually do work in joint combined spaces because now the content design or content writing work is something that the AI can do. But, the contextualisation is through the human mind.”

“When we talk about sales and marketing, which is let's say finding out target addressable markets or sales for example or finding out e-accounts, AI can do that. Today if FMCG is my target area, I will analyse through AI all the FMCGs and retrieve people who are investing the most and who are my target people to go to.”

Further, experts suggest the role of a marketer is only set to grow.

Nigam analysed that there is no way that this role is going away anywhere because no matter how much content we have, even if we remain close to 4 Ps of marketing, it is still the placement which matters.

“Getting the attention of people still requires a lot of attention and therefore you need more and more people actually in marketing who can integrate information and create context and connect,” he added.

Raza doesn’t see the rising demand for marketing heads changing in the near future.

Singh concluded that marketing will become sharper with leveraging more of tech.