Average salary for a digital marketing manager in Dubai

As a digital marketer with over 20 years of experience in this field, I was often asked how much a digital marketing manager can earn. After we started our digital marketing agency in Dubai, I did a lot of research myself to understand the average salary of a digital marketer in Dubai. I have summarised a lot of information here regarding the salary scale in Dubai for the digital marketing professionals. 

If you are looking for the average salary of a digital marketer in Dubai, you are in the right place. I will explain everything related to the pay scale for digital marketing executives and digital marketing managers in Dubai. 

But before we dig into the details, let us share some details regarding the digital marketing profession, and the career prospects.

What are the different roles in the digital marketing profession?

There are several roles in the digital marketing profession:

1. SEO: I started my journey in digital marketing as an SEO person. I developed a blog for myself and started optimising it so that more and more people would recover it. At that time, I didn't know I was becoming an SEO person. The role of an SEO expert is to tune and optimise the website to improve the ranking of a website on search engines. This role requires a strong knowledge of search engine algorithms, should be up to date on the latest opportunities in SEO, should be familiar with SEO concepts and should have a good level of technical knowledge on various technical SEO concepts like Schema and structured data. While junior-level SEO professionals play around with just the keywords, meta tags and link building, there is a lot more to SEO. To rank a website on search engines in the long term, a proper SEO strategy needs to be planned and implemented. An SEO expert should be able to guide the development team to make changes to the website to support advanced SEO techniques. 

The average salary of an SEO expert in Dubai is AED 4000 to AED 8000 per month

2. Social media Manager: A social media manager is responsible for managing all the social media profiles of a company. We have employed several social media managers in our company to manage social media marketing for our clients in Dubai as well as many other countries. This role includes creating social media pages (like FB Page, LinkedIn company page, Instagram account etc), publishing creative posts periodically, sharing company information through the channels, monitoring the comments and enquiries from users, responding to negative as well as positive comments etc. The social media manager should have a strong passion for community management and should be able to understand people's psychology. These days a major part of the branding happens through social media and the social media manager is responsible for making sure the creatives and posts can make a good impact on the overall branding strategy of the business. The person should have good language skills since any small mistake in the language used in social media through an official business handle could cause embarrassment to the company. 

The average salary for a social media manager in Dubai is AED 3500 to AED 7000 per month

3. Google/Meta Advertising Specialist: In SpiderWorks, we have a dedicated team handling the Google Ads and Meta Ads for our clients. Unlike other job roles in digital marketing, I personally involve in the hiring process for Google and Meta Ads managers since this job role requires a lot of experience and responsibilities. Your company's advertising budget will be handled by the advertising manager and a small mistake can cause a big loss to the company. So, you should hire a person who has worked on various paid advertising platforms including Facebook, Google Ads, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. If you are a small company with a very limited advertising budget, then nothing wrong with using your social media manager to do advertising as an additional task. But in the case of a heavy advertising budget, then you need a very skilled and experienced advertising manager who knows how to take advantage of every optimisation opportunity. By using various conversion optimisation strategies, an advertising specialist can bring the best conversions at the lowest possible cost. if you try to save on the salary by hiring an inexperienced person for this role, you may end up losing more money on your advertising budget. Due to the high responsibilities and skills associated with this role, usually, it is a highly-paid job in Dubai.

The average salary for a Google Ads/Meta Ads manager in Dubai is AED 5000 to AED 8000 per month

4. Graphics designer: A graphic designer plays an essential role in digital marketing. Creative designs and videos are commonly used in social media marketing and only an experienced graphics designer can do this job. While many digital marketing experts may be able to do social media, SEO and content work, usually they won't be able to do graphic designs. A dedicated designer may be required to handle the creative design work for the social media posts as well as other marketing requirements of the company. The salary for a graphics designer could vary significantly according to experience, creativity and skills.

The average salary for a Graphics designer in Dubai is AED 3000 to AED 5000 per month

5. Copywriter: The role of a copywriter is to prepare highly attractive, short and precise advertising taglines for social media posts and other marketing materials including the website. Excellent command of the language is mandatory for this role in addition to creative thinking ability. In the case of Copywriting work, creativity is more important than the volume of the content delivered.

The average salary for a Copywriter in Dubai is AED 4000 to AED 6000 per month

6. Content writer: Content is the most important part of SEO. If you like to have your website rank on Google for several keywords, you need a lot of content on your website. While the language quality is important, the volume of content generated is very important. You will need to hire one or more content writers who can produce relevant, high-quality content in good volume. There is no maximum limit on how much content you need to write. The more the better. Sometimes content writers may be able to do the job of a Copywriter as well but that is not the case always. 

The average salary for a Content writer in Dubai is AED 4000 to AED 6000 per month

7. Digital marketing strategist: The Digital Marketing Strategist is responsible for planning and advising on the execution of marketing campaigns. This role requires a lot of practical experience in digital marketing as well as the domain of the business. The strategist is responsible for identifying which platforms and channels to use, what budget to allocate for promotions in each channel, whether to use SEO or paid ads, what sort of content to build, what branding strategy should the business adopt and so on. Finding a digital marketing strategist with good experience and prior success stories is a big challenge to companies in Dubai. A wrong strategy can cause a lot to the company. So, always go for a strategy that has some success stories to share. 

The average salary for a Digital marketing strategist in Dubai is AED 6000 to AED 8000 per month

8. Digital marketing manager: This is a senior role. A digital marketing manager should have all of the skills mentioned above, especially SEO skills, social media management and paid ad campaign management. While there may be separate people working under a digital marketing manager to handle each of these responsibilities, only if the manager has strong knowledge and experience in all of these fields, he will be able to guide his team in the right direction. A good digital marketing manager will have all of the skills listed above and in addition, he should have excellent people management skills, sales skills and interpersonal communication skills. Then only he will be able to coordinate all activities within the team, between the departments and with the clients. 

The average salary for a Digital marketing manager is AED 5000 to AED 10,000 per month

Average salary for a digital marketing manager in Dubai

While salaries can vary significantly based on several factors including the budget of the employer, experience level of the digital marketer etc, we have come up with a table that shows the average salaries. Even within our company, there are people with salaries in the lower range as well as in the higher range depending on their experience and skills.

Below is the average salary for a digital marketing manager in Dubai:

In the above table, you may notice that a digital marketing manager is the highest-paid role among all. This is because a person in this job role is expected to have multiple skills including SEO, social media management, paid ad management, digital strategy planning and so on. 

Even if you can hire a multi-talented digital marketing manager, you will still need a separate graphics designer and content writer since these skills are usually not part of the manager's role. So, you would need to plan for the salary for a minimum of 3 employees to run complete digital marketing in-house. For big agencies like SpiderWorks, there are people in all experience range, starting from digital marketing interns who are paid just minimal stipends to managers who earn in the higher range of the salary table. 

Now, the question arises - is it worth hiring an in-house team for digital marketing? Or, is it more cost-effective to outsource to a digital agency?

Hire a digital marketing manager or outsource to a digital marketing agency?

Finding a good digital marketing manager who possesses all the skills listed above is a big challenge and that is why most companies end up hiring a digital agency in Dubai to manage their digital marketing. Having an in-house team is a good idea but in many cases, this approach fails because of the difficulty involved in finding good professionals who have experience in all areas of digital marketing. in most cases, outsourcing digital marketing will be the cost-effective approach than hiring multiple professionals in-house.

Large digital marketing agencies like SpiderWorks will have several professionals in their team with expertise in various areas of digital marketing. For example, SpiderWorks Technologies Pvt Ltd has more than 50 employees with separate teams for SEO, social media, content writing, copywriting, graphics designing, video editing, website development etc. If a company like to have an in-house team to handle its digital marketing, they might need to hire separate people for website maintenance, social media management, paid ad campaign management, SEO, content writing etc. This will end up in significantly higher costs than outsourcing to an agency.

If you are looking to hire a digital marketing team in Dubai, please feel free to contact SpiderWorks. We can assure you that you will save money on the salary you need to pay to your own digital marketing team.