Salary
Average Salary: $119,480
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $4,988,000
Marketing managers are white-collar employees who make a median salary of $90,000 a year (source). That's a truly beautiful number, but it isn't going to be yours for a long, long time. See, when you start out in marketing, your salary is going to be low because everybody and their dog thinks they have what it takes to be successful in marketing, and so there are a lot of people competing for the same work.
Entry-level marketing associates make around $40,000 a year; more experienced marketing associates make around $50,000 a year. A more specialized marketing position—say, in market research analysis—can bring in $60,000 to $70,000 a year. You won't be seeing anything over $100,000 until around the time of your mid-life crisis (source).
And, even if you make it all the way to a marketing management position, there's no guarantee that you'll earn that $90,000; some marketing managers earn as little as $60,000 a year. It all depends on who you work for, what products or clients you're responsible for, and what your duties in the position are (source).
Remember, too, that marketing managers don't work just anywhere: They're clustered in certain geographic areas, particularly on the East and West Coasts and in Texas. So, while the hourly mean wage for a marketing manager in the state of New York is amazingly high at $83, the cost of living in and around Manhattan—where many of New York’s marketing managers work—is prohibitive.
Also, keep in mind that lots of companies and lots of different industries employ marketing managers…and that you may not want to work for some of those companies or industries, no matter how good the pay is. For example, oil and gas extraction firms pay their marketing managers, on average, $85.00 an hour.
But what if you think that ExxonMobil and BP are Satan's spawn here on earth? Well, there's always the tobacco industry. Tobacco manufacturers pay their marketing managers, on average, $69.00 an hour. But do you really want to be the poor soul tasked with trying to convince consumers to smoke and dip, given that everybody knows tobacco use can kill you?