Marketers get satisfaction. However, marketing leaders shouldn’t get hooked on that feeling to maintain the status quo.
Seventy-six percent of marketers surveyed for the Content Marketing Career & Salary Outlook 2025 say they are somewhat or very satisfied in their roles.
Yet, more than one in three (35%) are actively pursuing or highly interested in finding another job. And they know that it won’t be easy, as one-third of all surveyed say their company laid off people within the past year.
What’s a content marketing leader to do?
First, recognize the truth. Team members will seek new opportunities inside and outside your company (and sometimes outside the profession).
Second, decide it’s better to nurture your team members and their professional development than to do nothing and hope they won’t leave.
Supported employees will think more positively of you as a leader and increase their affinity for the brand. In return, they may stay longer in their role or be strongly motivated to seek career growth inside your company. If they do leave, they will be champions for your brand — and its content marketing — to prospective employees and potential customers.
Outline the future
Over half of those surveyed say they find it challenging that marketers are not valued inside their organizations — that's 22 percentage points higher than those concerned about generative AI displacing marketing roles. Plus, 34% cite poorly defined career paths as a challenge, while the same percentage point to poorly defined job responsibilities as a problem.
So, if you think AI is the biggest threat to employee satisfaction, think again. These findings point to opportunities for content marketing leaders to truly make a difference.
If your company offers a career path in marketing, make sure your team knows it. Develop an org chart and share it with employees on day one (or even better, give it to candidates in the interview process). Revisit job descriptions and update them to reflect current responsibilities.
If you don’t have a formal career path, develop anecdotal evidence. Craft brief stories about content team members who moved on to other roles on the team or within the company. Invite those people to share their experiences with your team as part of a monthly team learning presentation or a quarterly Zoom call.
You should also find opportunities for marketing to get recognition inside your company. As you share successful marketing reports with your senior leadership, share those wins (and the positive response from execs) with your team. Craft stories that illustrate marketing’s impact and share them with your team, as well as adjacent teams, such as sales and public relations. These narratives can also help the other teams learn how marketing can help them in their work.
Meet with them one-on-one
Though research is helpful for a general understanding, nothing beats what you can learn from talking directly to each team member. Schedule one-on-one meetings to discuss their interests and career plans.
In some companies, these conversations happen in annual review meetings. I recommend scheduling these chats separately, but time them close together. A review is about the employee’s current role — what’s working, what’s not, and what could be done better by the team member and employer/team leader. Sometimes, it includes setting goals for the next year, but only in their current role. Any conversation beyond that usually gets the short shrift.
A separate one-on-one conversation indicates you value their professional development. In this meeting, encourage the team member to speak openly, reassuring them you won’t think they don’t like their current job if they’re talking about other opportunities.
Host regular conversations about their professional growth (at least quarterly) to gain employees’ trust. Once they see you mean it both by your conversation and your subsequent actions, they (and their fellow team members) are more likely to open up.
In these interactions, ask future-focused questions:
If you could learn one other job, what would it be?
How would you design the next few years of your career?
Can you share the top three challenges you face in your career?
If you were paid $1 million each year and could do anything you wanted, what responsibilities would you choose?
Use those answers to inform the beginning of a professional development plan, even if it’s not all related to content marketing.
TIP: Let your team members know they’re welcome (and encouraged) to reach out beyond the one-on-one meetings.
Expand their skills
Content marketers usually love learning. Yet only 36% say their marketing training (internal and external) meets their career needs. Over half (58%) say their organization’s training program is not keeping pace with changes in marketing.
Find out what specific skills your team members want to develop. Use the one-on-one conversation questions or create a short survey for them. Then, offer learning opportunities to support those interests.
In the CMI career survey, the four most popular areas where marketers say they want to advance their skills are:
Working with new technologies
Data analytics/data science
Search engine optimization
Leadership/management
Once you’ve identified the team’s interests, develop a list of relevant professional development resources. You can list free offerings, paid courses, conferences, etc. In each listing, include a description of the lessons, format, and frequency.
If a cost is involved, note if your company is willing to pay it. Even better: Give each employee a professional development stipend so they can choose independently.
TIP: Internal cross-training can expand a team member’s skillset and better prepare your team to handle a planned or unexpected absence.
Ease their stress
Stress is subjective but common. Over the years of CMI’s career surveys, respondents usually tell us they experience stress. That isn’t likely to change any time soon, given all the uncertainty in the world these days.
To nurture those employees who experience stress, explore ways to help alleviate some of it. Some short-term stress relievers could include:
A surprise afternoon off. On a Thursday, tell the team member they will have a half-day bonus the following week. Let them pick which day and time they will be out of the office.
A shortened to-do list. Ask each team member to remove one task from their to-do list every week. (Given how busy everybody is, they most likely wouldn’t get to it anyway, but now they can feel OK about not doing it from the beginning of the week.)
A collective break. Whether your team works remotely or in person, block off a one-hour window every month to get together for snack time. Let one team member pick the snack (have it delivered to the office or team members’ homes). If your team likes to play games, choose one. (Always let team members opt out — after all, this is supposed to be a stress reliever, and forced participation is stressful.)
Longer-term stress relievers could include:
Adjusting team members’ responsibilities. Ask each team member to assess (or track) the time they spend on each responsibility they have. Then, review and adjust as best as possible to ensure everyone carries an appropriate workload. (In some cases, their time estimate may require you to understand why it’s taking so long and figure out ways to help them complete the task in a shorter time.)
Discussing (and budgeting for) new hires. If your team is overloaded with work but knows the company plans to hire in the future, they’ll appreciate that relief is in sight.
Increased flexibility. People can feel stressed at work without feeling stressed about work. By offering a flexible schedule, you can help your team members sometimes deal with personal needs during traditional work hours and handle business tasks at other times.
Assess compensation
You can’t discuss your employees’ professional development without talking about compensation. In the CMI survey, higher pay often tops the reasons content marketers look for new opportunities.
Of course, in most cases, you don’t control the salary budget. Nor can you commission a formal compensation study. However, you can do some legwork to assess the compensation of your team members in comparison to industry standards.
Start with the Content Marketing Institute’s salary research based on the general role (hands-on, manager, high-level) and years of experience. You can also review the salaries for similar positions using tools like Glassdoor’s salary calculator and Payscale’s research.
Bottom line
Any successful content marketing leader wants their team members to do well — even if that means they move on from your company. Still, nurturing employees’ professional development takes dedication and time.
Approach it strategically to keep your efforts on track — and reap the benefits of happier employees now and loyal supporters in the future.
Updated from a January 2023 article.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
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