Morgan Missen

Q.Hey Morgan, another Marketing guy here. I’m 29, I’ve been working at a startup in SF for four and a half years, and am now a Marketing Director with four direct reports and an intern. The company is six years old and a few hundred people now, but it’s not the rocket ship I’d hoped it would be. I spent the last year just kind of waiting to see what would happen. Now I’m ready to move on. I’ve had my fill of the niche market we specialize in and now want to work on web products that have a global audience. I’m talking to larger companies that have a lot of Marketing Managers like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Apple. I know I’ll be giving up my Director title by joining any of these, which is okay with me, but my question is: how do different Marketing titles affect salary? In your previous answer about Marketing Managers, it seemed like there can be a large discrepancy, and I’ve noticed these companies have a lot of different titles that seem to be about the same seniority. For reference I have a BS in business, and my salary is low (I think) at $89,000 but my equity works out to about $150,000 per year over the four years I was vesting.

A.Before I get into specific salaries at the companies you’re interested in, let’s look at broader data on marketing titles. Based on Glassdoor surveys, all salaries at San Francisco companies with “Marketing” (Associate, Analyst,  Specialist) in their title ranged from $40,000-$118,000 (compared with $35,000-$114,000 nationally). I ran a few title comparison searches on SimplyHired, and edited this graph to make the Boolean results more readable:

Source: Simplyhired.com

It won’t surprise you that a level up in title (Director of Marketing and Marketing Director) don’t equate to a higher salary. For many companies, especially startups, it’s easier to give out a higher title or even management responsibilities than pay more. Your desire to trade your title for a chance to operate on a global scale is definitely on the right track for optimizing your compensation, with Global Marketing Managers being offered $15,000-$20,000 more than their Director counterparts.

Remember that sites like Glassdoor are essentially Yelp for companies, so the employee reviews aren’t objective and the self-reported salaries aren’t guaranteed accurate. To get 100% accurate salary data we’ll have to dig deeper to find data that’s legally verifiable. A relatively easy way to do this comes courtesy the US government’s immigration visa application disclosures (pictured below). I’ll also include some of the prevailing wage information to give you a sense of how competitive these salaries are compared to the market.

Facebook has dozens of open marketing positions with different titles in areas ranging from ads to analytics. Here is a range of titles and starting salaries:

Next, Apple. According to filing data, Apple paid a “Product Marketing Manager III” $125,580 on February 8, 2012. Below are more salaries from the past few years.

Google’s job site groups Marketing with Communications and actually names the product you’d work on in a lot of the titles. A title you would get, however, is fairly uniform. Here are salaries for their associate-to-director-level marketers:

LinkedIn is another global-scale Internet company to consider. They paid a Marketing Analyst $85,000 in 2010, when the prevailing wage was $79,622 for Market Research Analysts. Here are more of their wage disclosures:

And finally, here are the Glassdoor ranges for similar tech companies like eBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, PayPal and startups like Kamam, Yammer and OpenTable. Again, these aren’t guaranteed to be accurate, but because they’re so close to the verified data, it’s worth sharing:

Source: Glassdoor.com

Q. I’m a 31 year old Senior Marketing Manager at digital entertainment company in LA. I’m relocating to the Bay Area with my girlfriend this summer and starting my job search. She is starting grad school at Stanford so we will definitely live in Palo Alto, but I can work in either San Francisco or San Jose / Santa Clara. What can I expect in terms of salary, and is there much difference whether I target San Francisco or the South Bay?  -  a MM asking @mm

A.Great news MM, Marketing Managers make a lot of money–especially in the Bay Area. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2011 median annual wage (salary + bonus cash compensation) for 168,410 Marketing Managers was $126,190 (the mean, or 50th percentile, was $116,010). In San Francisco, 4.23 out of every thousand employed people are Marketing Managers, with an annual mean wage of $169,520. That’s more than dentists and many types of physicians and engineering managers. There are almost two thousand more Marketing Managers 40 miles south toward San Jose, and they’re paid about $9,000 less on average.

Compare the mean wage for Marketing Managers in San Francisco and San Jose to Los Angeles and New York:

Before you get too excited about these numbers, note a few things at play here. First, this is annual mean wage, meaning the total cash compensation that would be reported on a W2, not just base salary. Second, the majority of these employees are classified as “management of companies and enterprises,” meaning they are leaders within organizations rather than consultants or individual contributor service providers within companies. Compare Glassdoor’s self-reported salary averages for people with the title Marketing Manager vs. Marketing Director:

Also, based on the same data, all salaries with “Marketing” in the title (e.g. Associate, Analyst, Strategist, Specialist) ranged from $40,000 – $118,000 in the Bay Area, and $35,000 -$114,000 nationally.

Splitting the difference between Manager and Director titles to look at Senior Marketing Managers, data from PayScale support the same ranges:

Source: PayScale

Putting this data all together, average Marketing Manager pay ranges in the San Francisco Bay Area are:

• Individual contributor (salary)  $70,000 – $110,000
• Senior individual contributor (salary)  $80,000 – $150,000
• Tech company leadership level (salary)  $110,000 – $160,000
• General leadership level (bonus included)  $160,000 – $170,000

Most people have no idea what the market rate or prevailing wage is for their profession and career level, much less where they fall on the pay scale. The first step to getting what you’re worth is knowing what you’re worth.

Using the example of a Web (UI) Designer that lives in San Francisco and has 2-6 years of experience, below are ten ways to determine salary ranges. I chose a designer specifically because it’s tricky — there are a lot of different titles (UI, UX, Product, Interaction, Graphic, Web…) and it can be difficult for both the designer and the employer to quantify the value of work produced. Even at a large publicly-traded tech company, design is often viewed more as art than knowledge work; and, like purchasing any kind of art, its worth is often in the eye of the potential beholder. It’s also one profession in the technology industry that has a particularly high wage gap between men and women, with women only earning 76 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts.

Below are ten reliable research tools for determining market salary for a UI, UX, Interaction, Graphic or Web Designer:

1. The Bureau of Labor Statistics

Part of the US Department of Labor, the BLS produces extensive employment reports and has a search engine based on the results of a semiannual survey.

Source: US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

2. Glassdoor.com

The best-known site of its kind, Glassdoor tracks employee self-reported salaries, employer reviews, and interview experiences. Below are designer salaries at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and eBay as of April 2012.

Source: Glassdoor.com

3. Salary.com

Below is Salary.com’s data visualized for Web Designer II in San Francisco. This site requires users to submit a lot of personal data before it offers any value, so I wouldn’t recommend investing ten minutes in this one unless you can use it for negotiation purposes immediately.

 

4. PayScale.com

Another salary reporting site with reports based on position titles, industries, companies and geography. This site produced a $77,750 average from a $58,672-$95,739 salary range based on 45 self-reports from UI Designers in San Francisco.

5. H1B Employer Submitted Data

Unlike a lot of online salary resources, these are verified salaries from specific companies on specific dates. Where does this information come from? When companies apply for an H1B visa for an employee, the government requires them to disclose the proposed title and salary for the employee, compared to the prevailing wage for the position. They must also post this information publicly both in the office and online, it’s just (conveniently for them) hard to find. The data is the same on every site, but a few more aggregator examples are immihelp.com, h1bwage.com and salaryquest.com.

6. Tech Company Pay

This site is an H1B visa data aggregator, with LinkedIn mashed-up to give you immediate examples of people making certain salaries. It was made by a former Google engineer. Below are verified salaries of a few different types of designers at large tech companies.

• Google User Interface Designer  –  $102,250
• Google User Interface Designer  –  $85,700
• Google Interaction Designer  –  $80,000
• Facebook Product Designer  –  $87,000
• LinkedIn Marketing Designer  –  $92,000
• Apple Senior User Interface Designer  –  $120,000
• Yahoo! Interaction Designer II  –  $80,000
• Yahoo! Graphic Designer (Senior Interaction Designer)  - $92,400

There was no information from Square, Zynga, Twitter, PayPal and eBay; presumably they didn’t extend H1B visas to any designers in the past few years.

6. Quora

Quora is a knowledge marketplace in the form of crowdsourced Q & A. It’s hit-or-miss these days, but you can ask anyone anything and get answers based on their experiences (often anonymously) or expertise (very publicly).

8. AIGA (Professional Association for Designers)

The AIGA’s website has an extensive research tool to determine market salaries for all different types of designers. A designer told me about this site after I’d started composing this list. A cursory Googling reveals that there are lots of other compensation resources like this for other industries.

9. Salaryshare.me

SalaryShare.me is a simple salary pool tool that allows you to anonymously compare salaries with a group of people. You have to get others involved, but if you joined your company as a new grad or were told you couldn’t negotiate because everyone is paid the same, this is a fun way to find out if that’s true.

 

10. AngelList Talent

AngelList, the online community that matches startups with investors to streamline the fundraising process, now has a job board feature that specifies salary and equity ranges for advertised positions. I found the broad salary ranges irritating (e.g. “.01-99.9% equity” for a employee #5 at a startup, when there are probably founders with less than 10%) but most seem legitimate, if not too generous on cash. If you’re thinking of joining an early startup, this is especially helpful for getting a sense of equity vs. salary compensation. Below are the salary and stock option ranges for a UI or Product Designer at the Silicon Valley or San Francisco startups MindSnacks, Bloodhound, Storenvy, Chart.io, PlayerPro, YourMechanic, StartupDigest, ChartBoost, Pintics, Postmates and (so meta) AngelList.

I didn’t include the most obvious and effective method — ask a recruiter. I assume if you’re reading my blog you already know what a great resource recruiters can be, even when you’re not looking for a new job. If you receive emails and LinkedIn messages from recruiters, I’d encourage you to take them up on their offer for an introductory call. Mine them for information. You have no obligation to other companies’ recruiters, but it’s customary to offer them a solid lead or LinkedIn endorsement in exchange for their time.

Putting it all together

Averages

• Bureau of Labor Statistics – $72,820 in San Jose and $69,190 in San Francisco
• PayScale –  $77,750 ($58,672 – $95,739)
• Salary.com  - $83,626 ($58,230 – $95,424)

By Position & Company

Product Designers

• Facebook – $79,000 ($75,000 – $87,000) reported, $87,000 verified
• Twitter – $98,670 ($82,000 to $115,000) reported
• Apple – $112,000, $115,000, $120,000 and $122,000 verified

UI Designers

• Google – $87,661 ($65,000 – $108,000) reported; $80,000, $85,700, $91,400, $97,000, $102,250, and $107,500 verified
• Apple – $110,000 and $120,000 [Senior] verified

UX Designers

• Google – $97,950 ($83,000 – $118,000) reported, $104,575 ($95,000 – $118,000) reported for Senior
• Apple – $120,000 [Senior] verified

Interaction Designers

• Google – $80,857 ($65,000 – $120,000) reported, $80,000 verified
• Yahoo! - $58,100, $72,900, $80,000, $83,700 and $92,400 [Senior] verified

    

Top left to right: Twitter’s Core Values tweeted by @rno, a slide from Netflix’s famous Values presentation, Amazon’s Leadership Principles, Twilio’s Nine Company Values, Yahoo’s Values (see also what they Don’t Value), Google’s Mission and Core Values snapped by Blogoscoped in Hamburg, Facebook Analog Research Laboratory slogans snapped by Mike Hickinbotham, Zappos Family Core Values via its About page, Square’s building philosophy via its careers page, Google’s Ten Things We Know to Be True (actually different from its core values), and the first day greeting given to Apple employees instagrammed by @m.

Zappos Family Core Values

Google’s Core Values

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google’s Ten Things We Know To Be True

How We Build at Square

Twilio’s Nine Values

Amazon’s Leadership Principles

Yahoo’s “We Value”

Facebook’s Analog Research Laboratory Posters