Australia’s marketing jobs market has nearly halved, and what’s left pays differently
We built an index of Australian marketing job listings: every major specialty, live counts from the country’s biggest job board, plus 195 archived data points reaching back to 2019. The picture: listings are down 45% from the 2022 hiring boom, sitting below pre-pandemic levels, while the salary premium has quietly moved to technical and lifecycle skills, and AI now appears in more marketing job ads than SEO does.
The market is smaller than it was before the pandemic
The shape tells the whole decade: the COVID crash of 2020, the frantic rebound into the 2022 peak (a 4,752-listing average, topping out at 5,435 in April 2022), then four consecutive years of contraction. 2026’s year-to-date average of 2,621 isn’t a dip from the boom, it’s 25% below where the market sat in 2019, before anyone had heard of lockdowns or large language models.
At the single-role extreme: in February 2021, at the height of the talent crunch, Seek displayed 16,846 results for “marketing manager”. Today the same search shows 3,381. Even allowing for the looser search matching Seek used in that era, the direction and the scale of the contraction are unmistakable.
The July 2026 snapshot: who’s hiring, and at what level
The index tracks live listings for every major marketing specialty, together with the share of those roles advertising a salary of $100k or more (Seek requires advertisers to supply salary data for filtering, so the shares cover effectively all listings).
| Role / skill mentioned | Live listings | Advertising $100k+ |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Manager | 3,381 | 60% |
| Digital marketing | 3,153 | 57% |
| Marketing Coordinator | 3,076 | 51% |
| Content marketing | 2,627 | 54% |
| Brand Manager | 2,427 | 67% |
| Social media | 2,201 | 48% |
| AI (in marketing roles) | 1,463 | 65% |
| E-commerce Manager | 1,439 | 73% |
| Email marketing | 1,305 | 48% |
| Marketing automation | 1,276 | 65% |
| SEO | 1,059 | 58% |
| CRM Manager | 806 | 76% |
| Google Ads | 774 | 48% |
| Copywriter | 567 | 50% |
Two lines in that table deserve a second look. First: “AI” now appears in more Australian marketing job ads (1,463) than “SEO” does (1,059). Eighteen months ago the comparison would have been absurd. Second, the entry level is holding up better than the top: Marketing Coordinator listings (3,076) now nearly match Marketing Manager (3,381), a ratio that would have been unthinkable in 2021 when manager roles outnumbered everything on the board.
The salary premium has moved to the technical end
Highest six-figure share: CRM Manager (76%), E-commerce Manager (73%), performance marketing (70%), marketing automation (65%), AI-related marketing roles (65%).
Lowest: copywriter (50%), Google Ads, social media and email marketing (all 48%).
The pattern is hard to miss: roles built around owning systems and revenue (CRM, e-commerce, automation, performance) carry the strongest salary structure, while the classic content-and-channels cluster sits 15 to 25 points behind. If the market is telling marketers anything about where to skill up, it’s saying it with money.
SEO’s round trip: a decade of growth, given back in nine months
The strangest series in the index belongs to SEO. Listings sat around 1,044 in early 2019, climbed for years, and spiked to 2,006 as recently as October 2025, plausibly the scramble as AI reshaped search. Nine months later they’ve nearly halved to 1,059: almost exactly where they sat seven years ago. Copywriting shows the same recent shape: down roughly 60% from its 2025 levels to just 567 live listings.
Where the jobs physically are
Sydney remains the centre of gravity: 1,201 marketing manager listings, more than Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide combined (767). Melbourne holds 861. The same split runs through every specialty we track at city level; in SEO, Sydney and Melbourne together account for 61% of the national market.
What this means
- The generalist middle is where the contraction bites. Marketing Manager listings fell 37% in a year while coordinator-level roles held. Teams are getting flatter: fewer managers, more doers.
- Skill toward systems, not channels. The six-figure share gap between CRM/automation/e-commerce roles and the content-channels cluster is now 15 to 25 points, the clearest salary signal in the data.
- AI literacy is becoming table stakes. More marketing ads now mention AI than mention SEO. The premium (65% advertising $100k+) says employers aren’t just name-dropping it.
- Benchmark against 2019, not 2022. Anyone waiting for the market to “recover to normal” should note that 2026 is below 2019. This looks structural, not cyclical.
Methodology
Live counts are the publicly displayed listing totals on seek.com.au search pages, captured 19-20 July 2026 across 18 specialty searches, five cities and salary-filtered variants (66 data points). Historical counts are parsed from Internet Archive snapshots of the same pages: 195 monthly data points from January 2019 to April 2026, densest for the classified Marketing & Communications category (77 points), Marketing Manager (44), Marketing Coordinator (27) and digital marketing (25). Pre-2023 Seek search used broader results matching, so cross-era comparisons lean on the classified category series, which has a consistent definition throughout; keyword series count any listing mentioning the term. December-January troughs are seasonal, so year-on-year comparisons are used. Salary shares use Seek’s salary filter, which draws on advertiser-supplied ranges including those hidden from display. The index re-runs monthly; series definitions are frozen as of July 2026.
