Essential Digital Marketing Manager Interview Preparation Guide

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It is important that you are able to recognize why a plan went wrong and to learn from the experience.

Your analytical and problem solving skills are under scrutiny. Campaigns often fail due to poor research and groundwork, inappropriate objectives, or ineffective communication.

Again, it comes down to judgment. It might be tempting to respond to every negative comment on social media, but a good social media specialist will know how to distinguish between legitimate customer complaints and people who are just looking for attention.

Good social media managers won’t just blast content onto their channels. They will have a deliberate strategy behind their campaigns and use professional tools to monitor their effectiveness. Dashboards like Hootsuite and Sprout Social give social media specialists the ability to both manage channels and perform basic analytics from one interface.

In answering this marketing manager interview question, focus on your skills in mobile and online marketing including search engine tactics and optimization, click-through advertising, writing for the Web using keywords, designing for customer usability, utilization of social media and tracking success of the campaign.

This is an opportunity for the professional to demonstrate both their strategic thinking as well as their judgment and soft skills. A good social media specialist should be able to work with your CS team to make sure that they’re providing support that’s helpful and on-brand, and also recognize when it’s better to take the conversation off social media.

☛ Off page optimization: It is the process of boosting your search engine ranking by getting external links pointing back to it

☛ On page optimization: On page optimization directly deals with the content and structure of the website.

There is no single solution when it comes to social media. Trends change, communities evolve. A good social media specialist is constantly looking for new ways to engage with their audience. They should also know how to use the results of their experiments to inform future campaigns.

Nobody likes it, but it’s a fact in today’s digital age: Sometimes things can go wrong on social media. A great social media expert can describe the steps they’d take to resolve the situation. If you have a set of best practices in place, they should follow that plan; if you don’t have one, they should help create it.

An effective PPC keyword should be

☛ Relevant : List out the targeted keywords
☛ Exhaustive : Apart from most popular keywords it should include the “long tail of search”
☛ Expansive: PPC is iterative, therefore the keyword list should be constantly growing and adapting

Your ability to evaluate a situation, problem or opportunity and understand the action that needs to be taken is key to success as a marketing manager. Gaining a clear perspective is necessary before deciding on the focus of your innovation.

Taking into consideration the available resources and how they can be best used is important in determining the best course of action. Your ability to capitalize on the situation should be highlighted.

The marketing channels we pursue most aggressively must be the channels that our target audience populates and participates in most. We can begin with educated assumptions based on our knowledge of our ideal customer persona. Then, we conduct small, precise experiments on the various channels that could be a good fit, and determine the optimal channels based on the data we gain from these experiments.

Your social media specialist will be responsible for devising and executing campaigns, so you want to get some insight into how they approach their work. Great candidates should be able to articulate the problem they were trying to address, how they set goals, what tactics they used, and how they measured their results. It’s not necessary that the campaign was a smashing success, as long as the professional approached it in a deliberate way while gaining insights that helped them develop better campaigns in the future.

A social media strategy is only as good as the content it produces. To be successful, a social media strategist needs more than a flair for click-worthy headlines (though that certainly helps). They need an eye for relevant, shareable content. If they’ve managed a blog before, ask them to share some examples of articles they consider successful.

This question should be on the mind of every brand leader since far too many PR disasters have originated on social media. The answer originates in the brand’s core values. If the brand has established core values for how it will interact with its customers, suppliers, prospects, employees, partners, etc., then those brand values should be applied to social media. This means having serious conversations with every employee, management included, and a very clear understanding of the repercussions of acting outside the brand’s core values.

While that may come across as a negative approach, the exact opposite approach is how we should proactively prevent such social media disasters. The brand’s values should be so strong and so clear, and every new hire should be so immersed in the brand’s values, that behavior on social media that does not reflect the brand would be completely out of character. That’s very easy to say and very difficult to build, but the behavior of a company’s employees is rooted in the culture that leadership builds and rewards.

The digital marketing/communication is categorized into two segments

☛ Inbound Marketing:
This techniques takes the help of social media, digital content in e-books, webinars or e-newsletter to increase the number of clicks on links and learn more about a company and its services.

☛ Outbound Marketing:
This segment includes placing ads, cold-calls, e-mails or reach out potential customers through digital mediums

If you’re doing digital communications, you’ll probably be involved with content and content management systems. Hopefully your candidate will have used a few and have been paying sufficient attention to prefer some over others, and have intelligent reasons for doing so.

Do their points suggest an awareness of the strategic issues at play in choosing a CMS? Issues like security, updating, the availability of developers to work on a particular platform, data liberation, and open source will hopefully be raised.

Coming up with new and effective ways to market a product in such a competitive economy is a tough challenge. Keeping up with technological developments and trends is another challenge. Customers have more power than ever and marketing initiatives have to meet these new customer demands and give the customer what they want.

There is enormous accountability for marketing managers to ensure that the marketing operation is efficient and cost-effective and to show how marketing spend translates into growth and profitability for the company. In such a highly competitive market standing out from other organizations is an ongoing challenge.

This is a slightly mean but actually very manageable question about search engine optimisation (SEO), designed to trip up charlatans. If knowledge of SEO is on the job description, don’t be satisfied with waffle about keywords and page rank.

This question refers to two big changes to the workings of the Google search algorithm in the last year or so. These are the ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ updates. So this question will tease out whether they keep up-to-date with search engine optimisation (SEO).

In short, Panda aimed to reward sites with quality content, and to punish sites with low quality and duplicate content. The Penguin update aimed to tackle sites that manipulate search engines to rank more highly than they deserve to be ranked. This includes tactics like stuffing pages with keywords, or obtaining links from disreputable websites in an attempt to pretend that a website is seen as useful.

The characteristics of “bad links” are

☛ Links from sites that are unrelated to your sites
☛ Links from low Page Rank and Low traffic
☛ Links from link exchanges
☛ Links from those sites that are not in Google index
☛ Paid links
☛ Link from the same anchor texts coming from multiple sites
☛ Spammy links from blogs or articles.

With this question, the employer is testing you to see how much ambition you have and to see how much you’ve thought about where your career is going to go. Now, we’ve addressed this one on our Blog before but in regards to digital marketing, if you really want this particular role, I’d urge you to think about the role you’re being interviewed for and how you might be able to progress within that particular company before you give you answer.

It’s OK to be ambitious – but you also need to be realistic too. If you’re interviewing for a digital marketing executive role, you could say you’d like to be a digital marketing manager either in-house or in an agency – which will show the employer you’re keen to progress and take on extra responsibility – possibly at their business. On the other hand, if you’re applying for a digital marketing manager vacancy, you could say you see yourself in a Head of Digital role – or running your own digital marketing agency. Although the latter might put a few employers off, it shows you’re keen to be successful and not just stagnate in one role.

With this question, it’s all going to come down to your own personal experience – so think about what you’ve done in the past and what skills you’ve picked up which they might not necessarily have in-house which could benefit the business overall. Also consider any particular digital marketing campaigns that you learnt a lot from – and how this particular knowledge could help the business or one of the business’ existing clients.

In this instance, the employer is really asking what differentiates you from the rest of the applicants – so think carefully about what makes you unique (in terms of your digital marketing skills, knowledge, experience and contacts) and how this could have a positive effect on the business.

Conversion rate is nothing but to bring more visitors to your site. To increase the conversion rates you have to focus on following things

☛ Write compelling content on your site that is relevant to the keyword or search query
☛ Maintain a high degree of relevance between your ads and corresponding landing pages
☛ The webpage should easy registering process, signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase
☛ Check design of your landing page which should have right combination of color, layout and GUI to attract more customers

We’re looking for technical skills, strategic direction, problem solving, stakeholder management, expectation management, and a drive to learn from problems and improve processes. Don’t hesitate to ask them to frame their answer differently if it’s not making sense.

If SEO were dead, revenue from ads in Google search would not represent 98% of Google, Inc.’s annual revenue. That said, SEO has changed in that the visual aspect of social media and internet advertising has become the primary means of engagement with one’s audiences. So, search is text and social is visual, but no matter what any individual is searching for, the individual must type a word or words into a search box somewhere, and the search results must be pulled from somewhere. Therefore, SEO remains of primary importance. Your plan to win at SEO consists of three primary components:

☛ Time – no matter how great your website or your content, it takes time—sometimes up to a year even when done perfectly—to climb the rankings of the billions of web properties represented in any Google search result.

☛ Care – Google has rules, which are the guts of their search algorithm. In order to rank highly, you must follow Google’s rules such as mobile friendly, secure, fast, etc. Google is kind about showing you how to comply with their rules in Google Search Console. Implement and follow those rules religiously.

☛ Content – The highest ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm is, and always has been, content. Fresh, real, consistent, authentic content applied on a web property that is fully compliant with Google’s other rules will always win the day.

☛ What are common risks at (Company)? And how to face?
☛ How did you prepare for this work?
☛ How do you cope without motivation?
☛ How do you maintain a positive discussion?
☛ How did you react when faced with constant time pressure?
☛ What are your expectations regarding promotions and salary increases?