The analyst relations profession has, like the industry analyst industry, been a beneficiary of the difficult times over the last few years. While staff turnover has slowed greatly, AR managers continue to win a substantial salary premium over other marketing and communications managers. Because the compensation packages of AR managers can be complex, it’s been hard to get clear data until this month when the IIAR> published its first AR salaries survey.
Online job sites like Simply Hired, which are often used for more junior AR roles, says that its AR vacancies have an average salary of $67,000; around 30% more than public relations. However, even those impressive figures conceal the value that large companies place on the ability of senior AR managers to turn around details.
Average salaries for AR professionals are between $110,000 and $130,000 a year, with higher salaries for global responsibilities and lower salaries for managers working in PR agencies. While AR people are normally in billion-dollar revenue firms, the turnover of AR staff is extremely low: reflecting the deep expertise needed to get to world-class standard. It’s no wonder that AR specialists are also called on to lead activities like market intelligence, influencer relations and media relations.
The IIAR surveyed 89 managers in the niche analyst relations community. A full presentation of the results is available to IIAR> members on our Member365 portal.
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One of the interesting things about this survey is that the average salary is in the $100K to $130K bracket. That’s both the median and mode of the data. However, as I point out in the above article, average salaries advertised on simplyhired, the website which powers LinkedIn jobs, show an average of $67K. There’s an easy explanation for this.
The IIAR’s survey was heavily advertised on this blog and, in particular, among IIAR members. The IIAR’s members and followers are heavily weighted towards the better-paid members of the AR community, partly because the IIAR helps its members to be more effective and thus get better salaries. Furthermore, the IIAR only accepts as members people who are going AR more or less full-time: that also strips out people who are not AR specialists, but might be doing AR: they also tend to be less well paid. Finally, I suspect that public relations agencies, which organise a large part of less well-paid part of the AR community and are much less likely than vendors to pay IIAR membership fees, are under-represented in our sample.
Duncan.