How to choose your first job in digital marketing so your salary grows, not stalls

Choose the first job that builds your skills and network fastest, even if another offer pays slightly more. Varun Satia, founder and CEO of Kraftshala, calls this a high-potential job role: a large brand or a fast-growing smaller company, with good managers and real problems to solve.

The reason is simple maths. A ₹2 lakh gap in your first salary can turn into a ₹14 lakh gap by year three. Here’s how that happens, how to spot a high-potential role, and how to get one even if you’re starting with no experience or are already stuck on a low salary.

Why does a small gap in your first salary grow so fast?

Picture two freshers. Your friend takes a ₹5.5 lakh job. You take a ₹3.5 lakh job. The difference looks like ₹2 lakh. Three years later, in Varun’s example, the ₹5.5 lakh job can be paying ₹20 lakh, while the ₹3.5 lakh job sits at ₹6 lakh.

That happens because your skills and network are mostly built in your early jobs. A classroom can teach you enough to get hired. It can’t copy what you learn while a brand spends ₹10 to 40 crore on an IPL deal. The stakes, the data and the people around you are at a different level. (For a sense of how pay moves across roles and years, see this breakdown of digital marketing salaries in India.)

Network matters more than most freshers think. Varun says most of the people he hires at mid-manager or senior level come through referrals, not job postings. With AI making polished CVs easy to produce, a referral from someone who has worked with you carries more weight.

Timing matters too. Switching tracks is easy at the start of your career and much harder later, whatever your age. The real risk is spending your first few years in a weak role and then trying to jump.

What makes a marketing job high-potential?

Varun looks for four signals:

1. The company is a large brand or a fast-growing small company. He calls the second type “probably the best”.
2. You work on high-impact problems. The work affects real revenue, real budgets or real customers.
3. Your managers are good. Varun calls this the most important point, because your early managers shape your skill level and the opportunities you get.
4. Your peers are strong. You learn from them and compete with them in a healthy way.

Call this Path A. The opposite, Path B, works like a loop. Small clients pay little, so the company pays you little. People leave, and nobody invests in training. You end up doing operational tasks, learning by yourself and slowly losing motivation. Varun calls it a vicious cycle.

Should you start at a brand or an agency?

This is a separate choice. Agencies tend to train junior talent well, while brands expect more skill on day one, so many freshers start at agencies. Either one can be high-potential. What matters is the size of the problems you get to work on. As Varun puts it, “If you don’t work on a 40 crore campaign, you can’t handle a 40 crore campaign.”

What do years two and three look like on each path?

Year two

On Path B, you can now see the environment is weak, but switching is hard. You keep doing the same kind of work, so you gain experience without gaining skill. People around you start saying digital marketing has stagnated. For them it’s true, Varun says, because they’re in the wrong companies.

On Path A, year two brings good hikes, harder problems, awards and promotions. You start building real expertise.

Year three

By year three, the gap is wide. On Path B, salaries are often stuck at ₹5 to 7 lakh, and people want to change fields but fear starting from scratch.

On Path A, salaries reach double digits and sometimes cross ₹20 lakh. Recruiters reach out to you. Freelancing or starting a company becomes realistic, because you have good brands on your CV and a strong network behind you. (Here’s what a typical digital marketing career path looks like role by role.)

Ayush, a 2021 Kraftshala graduate, is a good example of Path A. He spent about 18 months at Performics (an agency), then 18 months at Games24x7 (a brand), and then joined Meta in Mumbai and later its London office. International moves usually happen this way, through large companies that move people between offices.

How do you get into a high-potential role without experience?

Start from the person who will hire you: your future manager. Managers tend to play safe and prefer candidates who have done the work before. If you want to work at Nykaa, you should have handled campaigns in beauty, even at a small scale.

As a fresher, there are two ways to get that experience.

1. Pick internships and trainee programmes carefully

Varun’s warning is blunt: 19 out of every 20 internships should be avoided, because they give you administrative work. Skip internships arranged through personal contacts. At Nestlé, he saw such interns get ignored, while the structured summer trainee programme was excellent. (If you do land one, here’s how to make the most of a summer internship.)

To find the good 1 in 20, go through Kraftshala’s placement reports, which list more than 100 vetted companies. These companies hire in bursts, so keep applying.

2. Build relevant work yourself

For performance marketing, run real campaigns on Meta and Google for a real brand in the category you want to work in. Small scale is fine.

Varun’s benchmark is that real work is 8 to 9 times harder than a typical college assignment, so get feedback on everything you produce. Pick one channel and go deep before you spread out.

Want real campaign experience before your first job? Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement, has you run live campaigns for real brands across Meta, Google and e-commerce, then puts your profile in front of its hiring partners.

Already stuck on a low salary? How to break the benchmark

Take a common situation. A performance marketer has spent two years at ₹40,000 a month. Every company that calls offers a 30 to 40% hike, taking them to around ₹50,000 to 55,000.

Varun’s explanation is that the companies calling work like the current one, so a 30% hike feels generous to them. “On this path, even if you jump, all your jumping is on a low base,” he says.

The fix is to apply to companies where your current salary means nothing, because they pay for problem solving and communication instead. Varun says he regularly hears from people who got 100% hikes after just one year in the right company.

Expect some resistance. These companies sometimes reject CVs from weaker roles, and closing that gap means raising your skill. Two tests show what that looks like:

• Most people run Meta ads using only what the platform allows. Strong teams make optimisation decisions specific to the category and the user. Can you explain the decisions you’d make for your category?
• A luxury brand’s competitor cuts prices by 20 to 30%. Can you turn that into concrete next steps for the brand?

If you can answer both clearly, you’re ready to apply to Path A companies.

Wrapping up

Your first marketing job sets your learning speed, your network and the salary base every future offer builds on. A slightly lower-paying role at a strong company, with good managers and real problems, usually beats a slightly better-paying role at a weak one. The gap shows up by year three.

If you want a structured route in, Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad is a digital marketing course with placement that runs online for 6 months full-time or 11 months part-time, with live campaigns on real brands and placement support with its hiring partners. If you’d rather learn on campus, the PGP in AI-Led Marketing is a 9-month, full-time program in Gurugram. Both publish batch-wise placement reports, so you can see which companies hired and at what salaries before you apply.