New Weapon in Salary Negotiation Launched.

Aquent and the American Marketing Association has launched MarketingSalaries.com, a site with a 70,000 survey base providing marketers insight on salaries for various positions, levels of experience and location. It’s always good to have some persuasive data when having the salary conversation but visiting the site for the first time is a bit freaky. Once past the very lifelike head shots of people peering out from the site with their heads turning and their eyes blinking as though they know work should be getting done instead of gold digging for a higher salary, the site provides a pay dirt motherlode of salary information.

Methodology

This survey was administered via e-mail invitation. An initial sample of approximately 122,000 marketing professionals was selected from the current AMA membership and Aquent newsletter lists, and was then filtered to remove non-US-based marketers, students, and incorrect and redundant e-mail addresses.

Result: a total valid sample population of 70,734, making this one of the largest surveys of its kind ever performed.

The survey instrument was designed by 6 Degrees, edited by Aquent, and approved by the AMA. All materials, list management, respondent contact, data collection and validation, tabulation, and production were handled by 6 Degrees to ensure integrity. In order to provide the most holistic perspective possible, a variety of research techniques were utilized, including qualitative responses, Likert and importance scaling, rating, and sentence completion.

Two Surveys in One

Primarily designed as a compensation survey, the research project also offered participants the opportunity to opt into a secondary, more in-depth survey.

Those who characterized themselves as “Creative” or as “Students” in the first survey were excluded from participating in the second stage of research. In addition, because the response to the compensation survey was exceptionally high, only a statistically relevant and random subset of the broader population was invited to participate in the secondary questionnaire.

All research was conducted anonymously and participation across surveys was synchronized to facilitate deeper analysis and reporting.

This procedure helped to maintain a high degree of confidence in the compensation findings, while allowing for a much more extensive investigation of the marketing community.

The Invitation Process

Online survey sample members were contacted via a series of four e-mails, beginning July 14, 2004. The e-mails directed participants to an access-controlled form on 6 Degrees’s online research engine, QIRAS™. To increase participation, all respondents were offered a copy of the final report for their participation in the project.

Initial participants were asked to log-in utilizing a blind access key, which had been supplied in their invitation e-mail. This effectively prevented them from taking the compensation survey more than once, thus increasing accuracy.

Maximizing Accuracy

Responses were cut off for final editing, cleaning, and tabulation on August 11, 2004. Usable Web survey returns totaled 9,851 (a 12.6% response rate). Outlying data was identified and scrubbed by utilizing both visual scatter-plots and varying levels of standard deviation.

As a representation of marketing professionals associated with AMA and Aquent, the data presented here is accurate to within a margin of error of +/- 1% at the 95% confidence level.

The surveyed population constitutes only a fraction of the entire U.S. marketing community. Therefore, the data is not necessarily representative of the community as a whole. Rather, it provides a solid perspective of the current state of marketing, and a highly precise view of AMA and Aquent members and clients.

To check your salary CLICK below:

http://www5.marketingsalaries.com/aquent/index.html