Marketing budgets are on the rise (woo!), with almost a quarter (24.1%) of companies reporting to have increased their marketing spend during the first quarter of 2022 - the highest since 2014.

Despite challenges businesses continue to face around Covid and inflation, they’re positive on the whole about their future outlook. With 33.1% of surveyed companies expecting further growth to their marketing budgets during 2022/23.

How does investment impact recruitment?

Though increasing budgets are not always an indication that companies are looking to hire, it does show that they’re either experiencing growth, are looking to grow or may be re-focussing their marketing strategy.

With this often comes a need to increase team sizes or hire people with specialist skills. But where can we expect to see some of this demand come from?

Events

After a turbulent few years, many events are back up and running. Marketing investment has increased by 18.7% as a result, and more jobs are entering the market, with Indeed showing positive growth in positions for Events Managers and event marketing at the end of Q1 (2022).

Advertising

Main media advertising has seen the highest growth in investment, which has largely been bolstered by increases in online spending (18.6%), alongside video (9%).

Consistent with the rise in e-commerce and brands shifting to a digital environment, we’ve seen a steady and gradual increase in demand for Paid Media Managers, PPC Executives and Facebook Ad Specialists to name a few, demonstrating the shift in focus to a digital landscape is influencing recruitment.

Public Relations

Whilst investment into PR has only seen a marginal growth of 0.6%, we’ve seen a substantial increase in demand for PR professionals over the course of 2022 so far. This is likely due to the integration of media in the PR sector, which is making the picture surrounding PR investment unclear. For instance many agencies will focus their attention on paid media, PPC or Content Marketing, hiring people with more specialist rather than traditional skillsets to execute campaigns.

​

Image credit:

Header: Image adapted from Photo by fauxels from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-man-sitting-in-front-of-people-3184299/