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We know the tech industry isn’t looking very rosy these days with layoffs. It does feel chaotic, but that’s because the biggest companies like Meta, Google, Amazon and X (again) have been doing the layoffs. It's like a viral post exploding across social media. When it spreads, it's impossible to ignore.
But rest assured, it’s not the end times for the tech industry — and that includes jobs in partner marketing. In a CNBC article, Bert Bean, the CEO of Insight Global, one of the largest IT staffing firms in the U.S explains that the big companies who over hired during the pandemic are now level-setting. This was confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg, who has admitted that Meta did hire too fast during 2020-2021.
Where does this leave jobs in the partner marketing space? Pretty positive, according to Zippia, a career website. They found that partner marketing manager jobs are expected to grow 10 per cent from now to 2028.
See more: What to know about partner account managers in 2024.
Emerging trends in partnership marketing
In Canada, there isn’t specific data on future job trends for partnership marketing but there is information on specific areas of partnership marketing such as affiliate marketing.
Employment and staffing firm, Randstad Canada found that the number of sales and marketing job openings grew by 63 per cent in 2023 and will continue to grow into 2024.
For people looking at partnership marketing roles, here are a few to consider.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing will continue to grow and change in 2024 with an expected $8.2B USD — which means more companies are continuing to increase their investment in it. Some roles in the space include affiliate program manager, email marketing specialist and referral program coordinator.
Related: 2024's top articles for affiliates and affiliate programs.
Loyalty program manager
If you love analytics, stakeholder management, strategy, mapping the return on investment and knowing every step of a customer lifecycle, then you’ll be pleased to know that this role is only going to grow.
Experts see this role growing as businesses know the importance of engaging customers to increase conversions which increases sales and leads to company growth.
Content creator
Partnership companies operate in the tech space but there’s a need for talented content creators to produce guides, analyze and disseminate industry data, create product reviews and establish SaaS companies as disruptors. They can also work with product ambassadors and influencers to create content that will convert.
Successful creators will also have a good understanding of SEO, some knowledge of SEM and PPC ads.
AI does and will continue to play a role in the partnership marketing space but talented people are still needed to ensure that AI-produced content is actually good wuality and isn’t producing random hallucinations due to wrong results, bad data or biases introduced by the data used to train the program.
Influencer program manager
Speaking of influencers, there’s a need for managers to handle the relationship between influencers and brands. This role focuses on creating and executing strategies to increase brand awareness, boost interest and convert sales through influencer marketing. If you like data analysis, campaign planning, execution and management and good communication skills, then this might be a job for you.
Related: Here’s why your B2B company should be on TikTok.
Remote work and partnership marketing
As much as CEOs and executive management may prefer to have their employees back in the office five days a week — as seen when Zoom, the company most associated with remote working, made its employees return to office — the argument that greater collaboration and productivity isn’t always the case. Hybrid working doesn’t affect productivity according to The Evolution of Working from Home. The study found that hybrid working is also popular with firms because “it improves employee recruitment and [employee] retention.”
The authors of the study concluded that hybrid working will continue to grow because of new developments in technologies. The pandemic may have triggered the mass work from home movement but it has also led to what the authors call a longer-run growth acceleration in working from home.
This is nothing new. In a 2023 Cisco survey, Canadians said that a flexible work policy is no longer a perk, it’s expected, with 81 per cent of Canadians saying that flexible work policies impacted their job choice. The study also found that there is a discrepancy between expectations between employers and employees.
One way to deal with that is to understand the cost to hire and onboard an employee versus focusing on retention. Costs are lower to retain an employee, so offering remote or hybrid work policies with the right technology will help you attract more and better partnership marketing talent in 2024.
