2026 Salary Survey: marketing, PR and digital trends

How can charity marketers best survive the current recruitment market, already facing tough competition from their own weight of numbers, and now threatened by the electronic assistant to end us all?

Here’s what our specialists had to say in the 2026 Harris Hill Salary Survey (available here).



Marketing, PR and digital recruitment market trends

Glance at this year’s marketing salaries and all seems well on the surface: modest increases in line with other teams, nothing to write home about, not least because it’s 2026 and might prompt concern for your wellbeing.

Look more closely, however, and you’ll see plenty of activity behind the carefully-crafted, perfectly-pitched façade, and behind much of that is our new-friend-we’re-not-quite-sure-about-yet, AI.

Given its ability to knock out a passable press release, social post or promotional campaign by shamelessly pilfering everyone else’s, AI is regularly predicted to wipe out swathes of marketing jobs.

But while vacancy numbers suggest it may have made a start, we’re yet to see this at any significant scale. Which makes sense at this stage: AI’s transformative potential largely remains just that until you have people who understand it well enough to help you reconfigure entire structures and ways of working.

Of course, once they’re on board, cutting vast numbers of marketing jobs might be rather more achievable, but for now, it’s fingers-in-ears time everyone, and the words are ‘la, la, la’.

For those who'd rather be a little more proactive, marketers' best move may be to build up their AI skills and expertise, to position themselves as the kind of AI and marketing authority that organisations are looking to hire, and indeed we know plenty of Heads of Digital who are currently studying hard for that very reason.

AI has also bucked the trend of all marketing roles, regardless of seniority, doing much the same thing (job description: everything everywhere all at once), as we’ve begun to see a small increase in more specialised roles, chiefly around AI and AI-adjacent areas like AEO (answer engine optimisation, or How to Appear in the Only Google Result That Anyone Looks At Now).



Marketers have been among the hardest hit by the waves of redundancies that have swept through the sector in recent years, and while the surges may have diminished in size, they still keep rolling in, sweeping ever more candidates into an already crowded pool of people competing for a very limited number of jobs.

Plenty of highly employable candidates are finding themselves out of work for months, yet there’s little point applying if they’re anything less than a 90% match with the stated requirements. If not, sheer weight of numbers means that others will be, so employers who are prepared to hold out for a 100% jackpot have a good chance of getting one.



How can candidates improve their prospects?

There’s no silver bullet here, however applicants can at least maximise their chances by carefully tailoring CVs and cover letters to each position, including full details of all relevant skills (you’d be surprised how many don’t), using examples you can quantify, and here at least, keeping it AI-free.

Despite embracing it elsewhere, many charities are checking applications for signs of AI assistance, which is less welcome in this context, on account of its ability to make very different candidates look very much the same. In marketing particularly, the ability to craft compelling, well-presented material is fairly fundamental to the job, so managers will want to see that you can do it, not just your robot sidekick friends.

If you don’t get the job, keep trying, although it’s increasingly hard to know where it might ultimately lead.

Marketers are seeing more of their leadership positions than most being melted down, mixed with something else (very often fundraising), and reconfigured into roles like Director of Fundraising and Communications or Head of Marketing and Fundraising, which experience suggests are more likely to favour those from a fundraising background.

For more on the market, including this year's figures across each major department, see the full 2026 Salary Survey here, or for help with recruiting or your charity job search, just contact our specialists, call us on 020 7820 7300 or email info@harrishill.co.uk