Digital Marketing Manager Interview Questions And Answers

Don’t dislike any part of working in the digital marketing industry? Sorry but I think you’re fibbing! And the employer will too! Why? Because there’s always something, big or small, that everyone dislikes about their job.

Think about which parts of your last job you dreaded and why – and consider what bugbears you have with the industry. Above all, be honest! You never know; the employer might feel the same way – and it might convince them to take you on. Similarly, if you voice your dislike of a particular task now, the employer might end up tweaking your role if they do take you on to ensure you don’t have to do something you don’ like.

Search Engine Optimization widely known as SEO is the process of improving the structure, content and organization of your site, so that the Search engines can index them correctly. It also involves doing promotional activities to boost your search engine rank.

The primary models for determining Pay-Per-Click are

☛ Flat rate PPC:
In this type of model, both publisher and advertiser agree to a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In most time, the publisher has a rate card for PPC plan based on different areas of their website or network. The amount varies as per the content that generally attracts more or less people.

☛ Bid based PPC:
In this type of model, the advertiser competes with other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher. The advertiser will inform publisher for the maximum amount of bid he is willing to pay.

Some of the useful online marketing tools are

☛ Google Analytics
☛ Digital point keyword tracker
☛ Crazy egg heat maps
☛ Keyword discovery
☛ StumbleUpon
☛ XML Sitemap Generator
☛ Favicon generator
☛ SubmitExpress Link Popularity

Do they know who the main user group is? How do they know this? What sort of testing have they done to find out? What sort of data have they used? Have they made assumptions?

Do they care about their field? Are they excited by it and its possibilities? Hopefully you’ll sense some in their eyes as they answer this question.

This question also probes whether they have their ear to the ground. As a follow-up question you could ask: What makes for good content or a good digital campaign?

The two most important metrics for social media are engagements and leads. Whether they’re using Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or YouTube, a good social media specialist should be able to show quantifiable evidence that they’re reaching people who could become customers.

Focus on your ability to co-ordinate and delegate activities in an efficient and practical way. Detail how you defined and divided project roles and responsibilities, kept personality clashes and conflict to a minimum and monitored and fed back to the project team.

Outline your particular management style and why it was successful. Focus on the management skills that you utilized to ensure success.

There are numbers, metrics, KPIs, and other data that you, as the lead digital marketer, should be in tune with regularly. Then there are the numbers that executive brand management should be able to see at a glance. The most important numbers that executive management should see on a regular (e.g., monthly) basis are the ROI on marketing spend. The CEO and CFO are generally not going to care how many new Twitter followers you’ve generated, but they do want to know that, when they give you a dollar to spend on marketing, you bring them $3 or $4 or $5 in revenue. So, ROI for each marketing campaign and then an aggregate digital marketing ROI would be very valuable to any executive.

☛ Do not link to any other site with bad page rank
☛ Avoid Poison words, for example word “link”, when you hypertext this text to give the link to your site it becomes poison words
☛ Avoid stealing text or imagesfrom other domains
☛ Avoid re-directing users to another page through refresh meta-tags – don’t immediately send user or visitors to another page even before he or she clicked on the web page link

Google Adwords is the single most popular PPC advertising system in the world. It works on Pay per click model.

The AdWords platform enables the business to create ads that appear on Google search engine and their other properties.

Digital marketing is the brand marketing tactics through the internet. It includes various techniques like SEO, SEM and link building.

Now obviously this one will only be relevant to graduates but it does get asked, particularly if you have a degree which isn’t necessarily directly related to marketing or digital marketing. In this instance, consider what core skills you needed to complete your degree and dissertation and how these can be transferred to the digital marketing industry. For instance, if you have a Journalism degree, you could talk about how your degree has equipped you with knowledge of how to approach outreach – and how to structure an article/report properly.

Similarly, if you have a degree in Economics or Maths, you might want to talk about how your degree has benefited you when you’ve had to manage budgets and calculate daily spend allowances for PPC campaigns.

With this question, the employer wants to know what skills and knowledge you picked up at university that could benefit their business in the long run.

Again, with this answer, it’s best to be honest. Consider which tasks you look forward to in your day and which areas you particularly enjoy working in… but be careful not to just go for the ‘easy’ tasks. The employer wants to hear that you enjoy being challenged and is again looking for an insight into who you are as a candidate.

With this answer, it’s best to list a couple of things, preferably across a range of niches (eg. SEO, PPC, Social, Affiliates etc) to demonstrate your skills and your passion for the sector overall and to show that you’re not a ‘one trick pony’.

When an employer asks you this question, they want to know how you deal with challenges and roadblocks and – potentially even how you deal with failure. Why? Because challenges are guaranteed to crop up in every role – and the employer wants to make sure you’re not going to crumble and struggle to cope when they do.

Think carefully about the challenges you’ve encountered in your career and what the outcome of these challenges have been. In this instance, it’s OK to mention a challenge which resulted in failure – as long as you can say what you’ve learnt from it and how you’ve used that knowledge to affect the success of a future campaign.

For example, you could talk about a site you’ve worked on that was hit with a Google Penguin update – and how you had to work hard to clean up the site’s link profile in order to recover rankings and Google’s trust. In this case, you could say that you learnt that Google’s constantly changing its algorithms, you learnt what makes a good/bad link and the importance of sticking with a project from start to finish and you learnt the importance of keeping a clean backlink profile.

Pay Per Click also known as Cost Per Click, is a technique used to direct traffic to websites. In this technique, advertisers pay the publisher ( website owner or host of the website) when the ad is clicked. In other words, it is the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.

For effective Pay Per Click campaign, you need to do following things

☛ Add more PPC keywords: By adding more keywords that are relevant to your business, you can expand the reach of your pay per click
☛ Split Ad groups: By splitting up your ad groups into smaller and more relevant ad groups, you can improve click-through-rate (CTR)
☛ Review costly PPC keywords: Review expensive and under performing keywords
☛ Refine landing page: To align with individual search queries modify the content and call-to-action of your landing page
☛ Add negative keywords: To improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend, add non-converting terms /negative keywords. ( When search with that keyword, it will not show your website/content)

Hopefully their response will go beyond measuring statistics like ‘time on site’ and ‘number of pages per visit’ and talk about measuring the achievement of the organisation’s aims using digital.

Ask them how they’d measure the achievement of the organisation’s aims online, and what experience they have in doing this. Of course, once you’re able to measure how well an organisation’s digital presence is helping it achieve its objectives, you can try to improve thi, in an evidence-led way.

They might also hit on the thornier question of social media measurement. They’ll hopefully talk about engagement. Perhaps they’re even reading Beth Kanter’s new book ‘Measuring the Networked Nonprofit’. Ask them how they’ve increased this, how they’ve measured their successes, and what returned has come from this.

Hopefully you’ll have some idea about what could be improved with your digital presence before the interview. If you don’t have any expertise in house, I’d recommend jumping on to a platform like Sparked and asking the volunteers there for their opinion before the interview. The community there is very helpful with challenges like this, and will give you some good ammunition.

There are lots of things that could be wrong with your digital presence. Perhaps the website displays horribly on tablets, maybe the twitter presence is more marketing spam than useful, engaging material. Perhaps the branding is sloppy, the accessibility is imperfect, or the tone is all wrong. Maybe the digital communications are focusing on the wrong things.

Whilst the substance of the answer to this question is important, also evaluate how it is articulated. Is this someone who will be able to diplomatically deal with stakeholders across the organisation?

Key marketing manager competencies that this question explores include accurate research and analytical skills, the ability to develop realistic and workable objectives and the ability to initiate and monitor strategies and activities that support these objectives.

Efficient utilization of resources reflects sound judgment, planning and organizational skills. Use this question as an opportunity to highlight your strengths as a marketing manager.

Using the marketing funnel, either with historical data or through small experiments, we can determine the value of a subscriber or follower by calculating the dollar value in revenue per our total social or email reach, and then dividing that revenue by the number of followers. Calculating this value lets us discover how much we should be willing to spend to gain email subscribers or social followers, very similarly to how we arrive at our cost per lead.

For better page ranking, you must use the keywords in following areas

☛ Keyword in Website URL
☛ Keyword in Website Title
☛ Keyword in Meta tag
☛ Keyword in Web page content
☛ Keyword density in body text
☛ Keywords in Headlines

With this question, the employer is asking why you applied for the job so it goes without saying that your answer needs to reflect the job advert and the business you’d be working in. Think back to when you first saw the job advert and ask yourself what it was that made you click ‘apply’ – was it the actual role itself? The business? The location? Or was it the salary? Normally I’d urge you to be honest, but if you did apply for the job because it had a great salary, I’d urge you to keep quiet in this instance – you don’t want the employer to think you’re greedy!

From a perfect answer point of view, I’d advise you to focus on the role itself and the company in question. If it’s true, you could say that you applied for the job because you liked the variety the role offered and you were keen to work for a well known, well respected brand. Alternatively, you could say that you applied because you wanted to work for one of the best employers in the area and the opportunity sounded perfect in terms of taking the next step in your career.

You should try and answer this question as honestly as you can. Think about why you applied for your first digital marketing job – was it the reputation of the industry? Its fast-paced nature? The fact high-paying salaries were on offer? Or the fact that it’s constantly changing, growing and adapting on a weekly basis?

The employer is asking this question to test your commitment to the industry and to find out what makes you tick as a digital marketing candidate – so your answer needs to convey your commitment and enthusiasm for the sector overall.

A good answer would be to say that you were attracted to the industry because it’s got a good reputation and there are lots of opportunities available to progress your career, learn new skills and expand your knowledge. This answer shows you’re committed to the sector long-term and demonstrates that you’re a candidate who’s constantly looking to improve and enhance their skills.

“Keyword” in digital marketing is the word that a user’s or person enters into a search engine to find specific information.

From SEO point of view, for better page ranking keywords are very crucial. How and where you have used the keywords will reflect your site ranking.