When it comes to rates and salaries for the job, it’s the ‘how much’ that everyone wants to know. In the evolving field of content strategy, the most accurate answer is ‘it depends’. But as part of our Content Strategy Hiring Trends Survey*, we wanted to at least get some idea of where employers rate content strategy, having seen generally high employee remuneration (and a high level of required skills) in our survey of 30 content strategy job ads last summer.
So, in our third results post – one of two on the subject of pay – we start to delve into where content strategists can pitch themselves based on content strategy hirers’ target rates for both salaried and freelance content strategists.
The simple benchmarking we’ve used here is based on a discussion question we posted on LinkedIn and on our job ads survey, where the majority of US and UK roles were advertised for above £50,000. Here are the results from 30 employers based in the US, UK, mainland Europe and beyond. For reference, we’ve also added in some of our other survey results based on what content strategists are charging to see the overlap.
How much are hirers paying freelance content strategists?
We asked: What is your target day rate for a mid-level freelance content strategist (5-10 years’ relevant experience)?
The results showed that the majority (61%) expected to pay £500 per day or higher for a freelance content strategist. Only a quarter of respondents benchmarked the job below that level.
These figures reflect Contentini’s 2010 survey of 42 content strategists, which found the mean average across all experiences and $USD day rates to be $939 (£586). The UK average was £300 per day.
CJ Walker, head of niche digital communications recruitment agency, Firehead, says the lack of defined job definition regarding both role and pay makes setting out a pay scale difficult.
“The good news is 23% said they would pay above our £500 benchmark for the right fit but the demands were specific, broad and high. As we saw in our content strategy jobs ads survey last year:
Inventory, audit, analysis, planning and resourcing, creation, delivery, governance, analytics monitoring, roadmapping and creating iterative strategies were all standard tasks.
Management, liaison and presentation skills are also frequently cited on hirers’ wish lists in addition to hands-on content experience – those from purely content backgrounds may need to develop skills in project management, training, leading and driving teams, client presentations, cross-department liaison and budget management in order to firm up their applications.
“Content strategy is seen as a relatively senior, management level role, with high-level skills and experience needed to command the higher day rates. The job requirements may be more senior than some transitioning content workers might be expecting – and hirers are certainly asking for a skill set that includes more than just content experience.
“Of the other respondents: 38% felt that £500 was in line with their expectations for this level, while 27% responded below this mark. I know this doesn’t add up to 100 – we also had answers such as “it depends on the task at hand”, and “anywhere from 500 to 800 euros” to “no information”.
“The one thing our survey clearly shows is that there is no standard profile for a content strategist to use as a concrete benchmark for role/pay definition, as there are no industry norms yet. Defining 5-10 years’ experience or ‘mid-level’ is pretty vague in this field, which has only seriously gathered momentum as its own separate field from 2009. Add to that, the disparate demand for skills depending on the role within the organisation, the organisation’s view of content as an asset, the kind and size of the organisation, where the organisation is geographically located, the background experience and skills of the content strategist… and there are no easy answers on pay.”
How much are employers paying salaried content strategists?
We asked: What is your target pay range for a mid-level salaried content strategist (5-10 years’ relevant experience)?
The results showed a fairly even split between hirers who valued content strategists in the upper bracket above £50,000 per year (37%) and those who valued them below this mark (33%). For 15% of respondents, £50,000 was about right. Those who answered ‘other’ had insufficient information, didn’t employ full-time content strategists or noted that salary was dependent on the candidate’s skills.
A 2012 US survey of 114 web content strategists by AIGA, the professional association for design, found pay in the US to be slightly lower than our results suggest – their survey showed a median wage of just $65,000 (£40,500) a year for a content strategist.
CJ Walker suggests the pay differential may be down to old hands whose careers have perhaps morphed alongside technology and include an array of other related skills that may raise the rate, versus the new generation of incoming content strategists who have less strategy or management experience but bring a native understanding of online. (We’ll be looking at what skills bump up content strategy pay in our next survey post.)
“People who have been involved in the web for more than 15 years are a different breed from the next generation of adopters (the Generation Y demographic). The former are still making much more money in content strategy roles because of the strategy part. Quite simply, it gives them more credibility with the C-level, where content strategy needs to be sold in.
“Experience still counts when it comes to pay. Older Generation X adopters have learnt content strategy from the ground up rather than from received wisdom and often have useful experience in related areas – project management, cross-team liaison, presentation skills, budgeting, etc. While web content wasn’t around when they were starting their careers, they’ve grown alongside new technology and are coming in at a managerial level, which, of course, brings higher salary expectations.
“Where they hold advantage is that they know what it is to try to convince others in their organisations to use new technology – and have learned how to use it themselves. This has been vital to their careers. They know what their skills are, they know their realistic salary expectations and they know how to make an argument for content strategy because they’ve had to in order to get where they are.
“But…
“Generation Y ‘digital natives’ also have valuable skills that set them apart. For content creation, for example, they’re often the crowd to turn to, and they’re flexible and open-minded when it comes to pushing creative boundaries. They’ve never had to convince anyone to use social media or browse the web because they eat, breathe and drink it. They ‘get’ how to do social media in an organic way that can’t be learned in a class or by analysis alone.
“The trick they have to learn is to how to convince the establishment – the boardroom-level decision-makers who don’t always ‘get’ technology and may be almost the end of their careers by now – to take their content ideas seriously.
“I know I’m comparing apples and oranges here, as it’s obvious that young workers can’t compete on experience while old hands can’t necessarily compete on price. But remember that this is a new field and it’s still developing. No one started out as a content strategist so it is just as likely that a talented young content worker could learn the context and how the strategy works as someone who is coming from another field who has the other side of the skill set.
“The key points are talent and experience – and fit, of course. I believe that in the next five years, we will see more and more talented, young content workers contributing to the field of content strategy as they gain experience. And this could shift the inequalities in the salaries.”
More results to come: in our next post, we analyse at what skills/experience bump up the pay level for content strategy.
* Our online survey questionnaire was disseminated via the Firehead blog and social networks inviting anyone in a position to hire in content strategy work, from HR managers to department heads. The survey remained open from 1 March to 1 August 2012. We also contacted a number of recruiters on Firehead’s client list as part of the exercise. The 30 respondent hirers came from a range of countries and backgrounds. Further results will be shared here on the Firehead blog. Firehead is a leading recruiter in digital communications and is based in Europe.
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