Education Marketing Specialist Interview Preparation Guide

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A typical entry-level salary for a communications specialist is around $45,000 with senior communications specialists earning a median salary of $75,000 and directors earning anywhere from $75,000 – $120,000, depending on location and experience.

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.

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.

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 addition to working on internal communications strategies and branding programs, communications specialists also act as the public face of the brand. Working either with PR specialists or on their own, they are responsible for responding to media requests, crafting press releases and even managing events on behalf of the company.

Many early-career employees won’t expect to work at the same company for five years. So it’s OK to be vague. The most important element is to show drive and development. You can say, “I plan to lead a team of marketers that tells compelling stories about a product I’m passionate about.”

Although this job definitely has its share of challenges, it also has a lot of benefits. These include establishing great relationships with the public and the media, liaising with thought leaders in one or more fields and and organizing high-profile events that are likely to generate attention for the company. This is a great way to gain exposure to various areas of the communications and media industries, while building a solid reputation and a strong professional network.

Focus on your planning and organising skills to get the best return on the marketing budget.Detail what controls were put in place to track and stay on top of expenditure and how planswere adjusted when necessary. Discuss your ability to react quickly and accurately to meet newdemands and constraints.

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.

Before giving you an answer, the best candidates will come back and ask you about the blog's metrics, how many leads and customers it generates, what the goals are for it, how much you're investing in it, and so on. This is also a great way to test whether they actually prepared for the interview by reading your blog.

I was working in the engineering department of a large manufacturing company and we were running behind on timelines for a project. So, I arranged and led a conference call to explain the reasons for our delay to the client. It was a case of managing their expectations, which resulted in us over-delivering for the project. As a result, the client was much more understanding and decided to pursue another commercial opportunity with our company.

I would take the opportunity as a representative of the brand to address the customer in a respectful and holistic way, assuring them that our brand feels accountable to making the customer happy and discussing how we can best accomplish that in the customer's future interactions with our brand.

Being a communications specialist certainly does come with its share of challenges. These include having to perform “damage control” in any instance where the company gets bad publicity, being able to ensure consistent messaging across all communications materials and generally being able to balance all of the different tasks involved. In addition to these challenges, communications specialists are also sometimes called upon to handle problems with the organization or with external third parties and they must ensure that they keep their cool while always representing the company in the best possible light.

Pore over the company’s website, your interviewer’s and the CEO’s LinkedIn posts, and news about the company’s initiatives. Then come up with three steps you’d take once you’re in the door to help them achieve a goal your team is likely working toward. You can say, “I’d start by fully acquainting myself with the marketing team and all of the adjacent teams I’d work with, like design and accounting; diving deep on our target client segments and getting in front of as many clients as possible; and working with the growing research team to identify future markets.”

Pluck three jobs from your resume and for each one, prepare an example of a challenging situation you overcame through problem-solving. The setting matters less than the step-by-step process you undertook; you likely overcame difficulties not only at full-time jobs, but when you were the president of a college club, you volunteered at an animal shelter or you were an intern. Prepare a few examples so you can fall back on them if your interviewer asks this question multiple ways.

In my last accountancy role, I noticed that the way we did our monthly purchase ledger was very long-winded and took too much of everyone’s time. Given that there was a long gap between transactions being logged, it also introduced financial errors. I decided to implement a new procedure, which made individual staff accountable for entering their own transactions, which they were asked to do once a week. This new process both reduced the amount of errors balancing the books, and freed up more time in the finance department, all within the first month.

Or, "Which aspects of our business are you passionate about?" You want to hire someone who's both qualified and has the desire to do the work. Otherwise, why would they work for you instead of the company next door?

Part of their answer will lie in their body language and enthusiasm. The other part will lie in how concrete their answer is. Get at the details by asking a follow-up question, like: "Let's say you're at home, kicking around, and doing something related to marketing. What is it that you're doing?" Perhaps they're reading their five favorite marketing sites, or analyzing traffic patterns of websites for fun, or writing in their personal blog, or optimizing their LinkedIn profile. Whatever it is, you want to be sure they're deeply passionate about the subject matter you'd hire them for.

The relationship between Marketing and Sales is known for its unrest (Sales wants better leads from Marketing, and Marketing wants Sales to close more, faster).

"Marketers are the lead generators and salespeople are the lead closers" isn't necessarily wrong, but the candidate who ends his/her answer here might not be someone who can align both departments around a single, unified approach.

The best answers describe the responsibilities that Sales and Marketing have to each other, and the duties each commits to as part of this partnership. They have a plan for forging consensus on what makes leads marketing-qualified versus sales-qualified, creating a shared Service Level Agreement with agreed-upon metrics, and using content at different points in the marketing and sales funnel to turn strangers into customers.

I came into a team that had a brand that had released a faulty product and accumulated negative associations with customers. We rebranded by creating a bright and cheery new logo that signaled the change in the product. We acknowledged to customers that the product had had issues and was being reformulated, and we communicated throughout the rebrand. Customers gave us a chance, spread their satisfaction with friends and the new brand became successful.

☛ What marketing metrics do you regularly track? How do you organize and parse the data? (e.g. in spreadsheets)
☛ What are the biggest challenges in our industry for the next five years?
☛ What statistical analysis software have you used?
☛ Describe the process of product positioning.
☛ What metrics indicate that a campaign failed? How would you use those findings to inform your next campaign?

☛ Describe your most successful marketing campaign so far. What was your role and how did you work together with other teams to achieve your goals?
☛ Have you ever participated in an advertising project that failed? If so, what went wrong and what did you do differently next time?
☛ Which do you prefer: creating a report or giving a presentation to explain marketing results? Why?
☛ How do you explain to a manager or client that a campaign didn’t bring the results they wanted?

☛ What strategies would you suggest to increase our market share?
☛ Between emails, social media and radio ads, which would you choose to attract our target audience, and how?
☛ What methods would you use to gather customer feedback?
☛ What digital channels would you choose to promote a new product we’re launching?

Think about your true strengths and weaknesses, and prepare one in advance for each. Employers across industries will value strengths that relate to your communication skills or your ability to solve problems. Choose one that’s specific, like “I’m comfortable in front of a crowd,” “I manage stress well,” or “I build rapport with others quickly,”.

Your weakness might be that you’re impatient, you’re not a strong number cruncher or you don’t ask for help well. But steer clear of weaknesses that cast doubt on whether you’re a team

I'm really excited about the prospect of creating an experiential marketing campaign, where we can activate the brand in the wild, where our customers are. I've researched a variety of marketing activations, such as one where a vegetable company brought branded trucks to a festival and served vegetable snacks to health-conscious consumers.

This is another casual but useful question, as it can tell you both about a candidate's personal interests and how they perceive marketing content on social media. The best answers go further than which companies a candidate likes buying from -- they indicate why he or she trusts certain companies, what about their content strategy appeals to the candidate, and what specifically about those companies the candidate looks up to (and maybe wants to emulate in their own work).

If you need a candidate to elaborate, follow up by asking them to describe a post from a brand they like or follow, and what made that post so memorable to them.