The True Cost of a Digital Marketing Intern

June 25, 2013 by Heather Baker 5 Comments

You probably recognise this scenario: someone in the sales team points out that your corporate nemesis is making something of a splash in the target market with a clever blog that’s being shared all over Twitter. Or a candidate points out in an interview that a newcomer to the market has somehow managed to build a large community of your own prospects on Facebook. Or your CEO attends an industry event and finds no one (not even your competitors) has even heard of your company. A meeting is called and the first point on the agenda is ‘Marketing’. You all discuss and agree the urgent need for marketing, but then someone makes the observation that this will probably cost money. Since no one’s set a marketing budget since September 2008, you all put your heads together to come up with a way to do this on the cheap. It’s not long before some bright spark suggests hiring a marketing intern – someone “straight out of uni, young enough to understand social media, and, most importantly, cheap”.

I can see why this would seem like a great compromise, but I would argue that it’s not. And that’s because few companies ever sit down to work out the true cost of a marketing intern. Luckily, I’m here to do that for you:

Salary: total monthly cost: £1,762.50

I’m not even going to entertain the idea of an unpaid internship here. They’re discriminatory (because only people whose parents can afford to support them can apply) and bad for business (because people who don’t get paid don’t make the same effort).

So, let’s say you find yourself a smart grad and offer them a fair entry-level salary of £18,000 per year. With Employers’ National Insurance of around 12.5 per cent and an extra five per cent for the fixed costs of having another person on board, you can expect to pay £21,150 per year or £1,762.50 per month.

Marketing training in year one: £625 per month

Even if you’ve found yourself a marketing grad, they’re going to need training, especially if they’re in a marketing department of one. I speak from experience. I’ve hired 13 grads in my time, and every single one has needed to learn the ropes on the job. Marketing might seem like common sense to you, but for someone fresh out of uni it’s a minefield.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get someone uber-keen who can’t wait to devour marketing books and guides, but in my experience, people earning £18,000 a year would rather read fiction in their spare time (it’s not their business, is it?). So, your grad will need training. At a minimum they will need to learn:

Writing for business (one day workshop).
Google Analytics (one day workshop).
Search engine optimisation (two day workshop).
Google Adwords (two day workshop).
Social media advertising (one day workshop).
Facebook marketing (one day workshop).
Twitter marketing (one day workshop).
LinkedIn marketing (one day workshop).
Google+ marketing (one day workshop).
Video marketing (one day workshop).
Public relations (two day workshop).
Email marketing training (one day workshop).

Be prepared to set aside £500 per workshop day, bringing your total training budget for the year to £7,500 (or £625 per month) to equip them with basic digital marketing skills. And when I say basic, I mean basic – if you think you’ll be seeing your name on FT.com after sending your intern on a two-day PR workshop, think again.

Management time: £2,000 per month

Your intern will have no one to guide them in their marketing activity. They’ll be lost and they’ll be looking to you to teach them about the business. If they’re any good they’ll have lots of questions and be keen to learn, but someone senior will have to be around to answer them, so you’ll need to factor that in to the equation. Let’s conservatively allocate an hour a day to looking after your intern by a senior manager with an hourly rate (conservatively estimated) of £100. That’s another £2,000 per month.

Software subscriptions: £195 per month

If you want your intern to deliver the full digital marketing and PR package, they’ll need the tools to do so. At a minimum, you’ll need to equip them with:

A journalist database for PR activity, such as Gorkana or FeaturesExec. Budget around £130 a month.
Moz for managing your SEO campaigns: £65 per month (the lowest subscription level, covering five campaigns of which you’ll only need one).

That brings the total cost of your marketing intern to £4,582.50 per month. And here’s what you will get for your investment:

A junior person who might be very smart and competent, but who will be working entirely without guidance. That means their learning process will be slow and their campaigns will be limited by their ability to fit them in to five days a week; by the creativity of a single brain; and by a limited set of competencies (I don’t know many people who are great at building relationships with journalists, optimising HTML code for search engines and writing original and highly interesting copy – even more difficult if you’re in a B2B industry). If you’re lucky, you’ll get campaigns that score five out of ten on the marketing scale of greatness, but it’s unlikely you’ll be so lucky. You have quite a few factors working against you so be prepared for a three out of ten.

You’ll also need to consider who will do their work on the 28 days every year when they’re on holiday or sick leave.

Then, factor in the pay rise they will need after a year if they’re any good (and if they are, you’ll have to make it a big one because you’ve invested all that money in training them – they’ll suddenly be quite attractive to your competitors). Or, if they’re not so good and you find your digital marketing campaign plodding along at a slow and unimpressive pace, you’ll need to consider the cost of getting rid of them.

So, now that you know the true cost of a digital marketing intern, you’re in a much better position to evaluate them against the cost of an agency that will come with ready-made skills and business experience, will be able to spread the cost of software over a number of clients, can have their contract terminated at any time without risking an employment tribunal and will deliver a continuous service throughout the year – regardless of staff holidays and sick leave.

What do you think? I’ve worked with some excellent grads in my time but they’ve all had to learn on the job! What have been your experiences with grads?

Web skills in demand

October 23, 2012 by David Geddes Leave a Comment

Digital Marketing and Web skills in demand

The vast majority of our readership work in and around the analytics/marketing/web creation industries. Have you made a great career choice? Demand that grows ahead of supply may be good for your career prospects but not so good for employers needing to hire people with knowledge and experience – a classic skills shortage that threatens to curtail growth and push up costs.

Are these sectors firmly on an upward path? I recently took the opportunity to “spot check” a colleague’s assertion that these markets for suitably qualified and motivated professionals were not only growing, but still in early stages of expansion with lots more to come. It seemed like a reasonable assumption however I wondered just how this was playing out in the “real world” of jobs – actual advertised vacancies.

Using the Trends tool from job search aggregator indeed.com I researched a number of job titles (you can use their tool to map your own specific job title or skillset). The tool worked out the % of matching postings (as a proportion of the total advertised job market) for the key words that I specified.

I ran a number of graphs for various titles (both within and outwith the industry) to cross check my thinking and below are 5 of the them. “Web Designer”, “Web Developer” “Digital Marketing” “Analytics” and “Accountant” … Why “Accountant” ? … because it gives us a comparative for a job title that we know (and love!) and which sits outside of the internet and digital marketing space.

The results certainly show rapid growth in the use of the “digital marketing” phrase and this growth over six years is even more impressive when compared to the “accountant” trend.

Web Designers and Web Developers have followed broadly similar trends to each other although the short term cycles within the Designer trend are more pronounced. It is interesting that both have suffered a bit of downtrend through 2012.

The term Analytics features more times than Accountant. (Although “Analytics” will not always refer to Internet/Web Analytic jobs, an analysis of current adverts would indicate that it does in most cases.)

The 6 year trends for these internet/digital job terms still look strong in comparison to the wider market despite coming off their peak during this year. A growing labor supply is needed to avoid skills shortages and although increasing education and training in these disciplines will help – hard earned experience is always going to be more difficult to source.

Cross checking trends is best done regularly and by using a variety of independent tools – if you have any research or thoughts in this area we would be interested in your comments.

Key Web Jobs Salaries

May 22, 2012 by David Geddes Leave a Comment

Key Web Jobs UK Salaries [infographic]

We all know that knowledge is one of the keys to successful negotiation so when you are planning your next career move, promotion, salary or bonus it pays to carry out some research.

Have a look at these March 2012 average salaries – Whether you are a Web Designer (£28.2k), Web Developer (£32.4k), Social Media Manager (£36.3k), Web Analyst (£38.4k) or Online Marketing Manager (£40.1k) then if nothing else, the infographic will make you want to compare your salary with the average!

When you look at the charts you need to consider your own location, perks, experience, responsibility and qualification however if nothing else it shows how these jobs (all of which are relatively new when viewed against more traditional job titles) have started to fall into their own distribution patterns.

Infographic by Jobs4Web.co.uk

Marketing Jobs UK

March 27, 2012 by David Geddes Leave a Comment

Marketing Jobs UK

As part of our extensive monthly research into the average salaries of Internet related Marketing and Developer Jobs across the UK we have produced the trend graph below. The figures are based on advertised salaries and were gathered just last week and so this is as up to date as you can get!

As always, Internet Marketing Jobs in London will account for the majority of positions however in some categories, notably Web Developers and Web Designers, we have thousands of jobs included in the data with positions open all over the UK.

This is not only a relatively young and mobile workforce, there are of course opportunities for distance working, outsourcing contracts and flexibility. Therefore we would argue that the averages, even allowing for a London Marketing Jobs bias, have a relevance for any employers looking to recruit for jobs like these . You may be recruiting for say Bristol based marketing jobs or Web Developer jobs in Manchester however if the workforce is flexible it may be the case that the geography is less important than knowledge, skills, attitude and experience.

Looking below in more detail at the March data for one of these Job Titles, “Social Media Manager”reveals a median salary range of £31-36k, average salary of £36.3k pa and 26% of our sample salaries fell in the range £31-36k. Before advertising a vacancy, or of course applying for one, it always pays to do your research first. As the graph below shows, there is a classic distribution pattern in evidence – where you should be placed on the scale will of course be a function of experience, knowledge, responsibility and location.

Web Jobs Salary Trends UK update Jan 2012

February 3, 2012 by David Geddes Leave a Comment

Our Salary Trend graph has been updated to Jan 2012 and I have also included a snapshot report for Web Developer and Web Designer Jobs.

The trend in Social Media Manager salaries is interesting. Both December and January are showing some uptrend and at this rate Social Media Manager salaries might even meet the averages of Online and Digital Marketing Managers .

Web Developer salaries are heavily concentrated in the £21k to £31k range and the comparison with Developers is interesting..(where there is a more “classic” distribution pattern). Of course it’s not just seniority, knowledge and experience that infuence salary; geography plays a part as well, especially in London. Given however the virtual nature of this type of work , much of it can be physically carried out in lower cost parts of the country even if the ultimate customer is London based. So whether you are a buyer, employee or contractor we hope the report gives you at least some idea of the range of salaries on offer UK wide.

For more detailed analysis of the distribution of salaries for each job title ( December data) check our average web salaries page. (where you will also find an explanation of how the data is gathered)