Growth Marketer
Also known as: Growth Manager, Digital Marketer, Growth Hacker
Use creative experiments, data analysis, and rapid testing to grow a product's user base fast.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for growth marketers.
About 1 in 200 reaches this level
No BLS occupation code covers growth marketing specifically; est. ~80K growth marketers in the US (est., no BLS code). A growth-focused CMO at an established company earns ~$375K+ total comp; only ~400 hold such roles (~0.5%).
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Growth marketers run experiments to get more people to find, try and keep using a product. They write ad and email copy, test versions against each other, and dig through data to see what works. Almost all of that happens on a computer with words and numbers, which is where AI is strongest. A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Market research analysts and marketing specialists, the government job category closest to growth marketing, came out 26th of 785 jobs, in the top 4%. BLS expects AI to cut into nearby work: it projects advertising and promotions manager jobs to shrink 4% from 2025 to 2035, partly because managers and their staff will use AI "to more quickly generate, test, and modify digital advertisements." That is a fair description of a growth marketer's week.
There are early signs at the entry level. A Stanford study using payroll records from ADP, the largest US payroll company, found that from late 2022 to September 2025, employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed jobs fell 6%, while employment of 35 to 49 year olds in the same jobs grew more than 8%. It names marketing and sales managers as showing the same pattern as software developers, though smaller.
What keeps this at 4 rather than 5 is that the wider field is still growing. BLS projects market research analyst and marketing specialist jobs to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average, with about 82,000 openings a year, as companies use more data to understand customers. There is no separate government count of growth marketers, so these are the nearest numbers. The job is shifting toward choosing which experiments are worth running and reading results critically, with AI doing more of the production.
What would change this score. If marketing specialist openings start falling the way advertising manager jobs are projected to, it goes to 5. If new graduates keep finding growth and marketing analytics jobs at the same rate as AI tools spread, it drops to 3.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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