Manager Digital Marketing Interview Questions And Answers

This question isn’t coming from a particular angle, but should hopefully see how they combine problem solving, instincts, data, initiative and creativity, as well as their ability to deal with uncertainty.

This question lets the employer know that the potential employee understands the importance of interacting with people online and not just scheduling daily posts.

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.

This will show you how they value their career and whether they see themselves progressing in a PM role. Ask them why they chose that rating.

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.

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, 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!

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’.

It’s worth probing the technical skills of candidates. Can they talk knowledgably about fishbone diagrams, De Bono’s thinking hats, role play? Branch out to talk about the last project issue they resolved with creative thinking.

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?

I would need to hear about the determining goal of the campaign (brand awareness, leads, social media followers, etc) and then planning the campaign around the desired result. Candidate will need to talk about TRACKING and using analytics (Google or otherwise) to get as much data as possible. Tell me how they're going to track it. Adding URL parameters and the like. The key to digital marketing is having as much data as possible in order to be able to leverage that data to make actionable insights. The more they can tell me about how they're going to gather the data and the ways they can look at the data to see what worked, what didn't, and where things could be improved the more likely it'd be they would get the job.

Most applicants can rattle off the blogs and podcasts they know are leaders in their industry. I then follow that question up with, What have you learned recently from one of those resources, and how will it change the way you do your job? This follow-up separates the contenders from the pretenders. You can't fake it. Applicants either have a quick, confident response, or they flounder. Job seekers should prepare for questions like this by paying attention to the leading industry blogs, podcasts, and newsletters. Then, they should think about how recent changes impact their current or past companies.

Things are changing fast, so if you can’t say how you’ve bettered yourself in the last year you’re pretty much moving backwards. Hopefully you’ve learned from your own experience, and from changes in the wider world of digital communications.

Follow up: How do you keep up-to-date with changing practice?

They may well use a mixture of twitter, in person meetups and RSS feeds. Ask them to name a couple of favourite sources of information – they can be people or organisations or websites.

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.

This will also start to give an idea of whether or not the applicant possesses cross-platform skills or if they are more heavily skilled in some areas over others. SEO, Social Media & Content Marketing are all one in 2016.

This'll show you how well a candidate understands all the different tactics of inbound marketing and how to tie them together into a holistic plan. It'll also give you insight into how creative they are and whether they can come up with new and interesting ways to do marketing.

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.

I use this type of question as a way of exploring whether they take a strategic or tactical approach to marketing decisions. Far too often, the responses I received were tactical. They'd describe what they would do on Facebook (or whatever channel or tool I presented them with), rather than taking the time to step back and consider the situation before jumping to a solution.

The answer I would want to get to that question would go something like:
Well, before I can answer that, I'd have a few questions for you -- who, specifically, are you trying to reach and what, specifically, are you trying to achieve?

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?
Does it feel like they'd focus on the core issues, or get lost in vanity projects or sideshows?

☛ How would you explain the difference between online and offline marketing?
☛ How do you foresee the future of online marketing?
☛ What does it mean to have a responsive website?
☛ Have you looked at our company website, can you suggest how you would improve it?
☛ What is the most effective way to increase traffic to your website?
☛ Explain how you would carry out keyword research? Which keyword research tools would you use?
☛ What website CMS platforms have you administered in the past (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla?)

☛ Can you explain what content marketing is?
☛ What blogs do you read?
☛ Why and how would someone share your content or talk about your company?
☛ Explain the link between content marketing and SEO
☛ Explain the link between content marketing and your social media strategy
☛ Can you explain the steps you would take to build a content strategy for our business
☛ Can you talk to me about a content strategy that you have implemented? Was it successful?
☛ How important is video content?

☛ Talk about one of your most effective campaigns. What made them so effective?
☛ How do you know when a campaign has failed? What metrics do you use?
☛ What does the conversion funnel look like at your company?
☛ How many people are on your current marketing team? What are their roles?
☛ How would you describe your current brand’s tone of voice and visual identity?
☛ How do your customers inform your approach to brand-building?
☛ How do you get product feedback from your customers?
☛ What tools do you use to stay organized?
☛ Talk about your experience with editorial calendars.
☛ What is the relationship between SEO and content marketing?
☛ What are some common SEO mistakes in digital content production?
☛ What are the most important and effective social media channels for your brand?
☛ What is your experience with marketing automation?
☛ What role does paid advertising play in your overall strategy?
☛ What is your experience with co-marketing campaigns?
☛ What is the importance of thought leadership at your current organization?
☛ Describe a time you worked with a team to create a campaign on a tight budget.
☛ What is your approach to structuring a marketing budget?
☛ What is your approach to editing copy?
☛ Describe a time you gave constructive feedback to a colleague.
☛ Describe a time your team didn’t agree with your direction. How did you handle it?
☛ How would you handle negative feedback about your brand?
☛ What’s interesting about our current marketing? What could we do better?

☛ What web analysing packages are you familiar with?
☛ Why it is important to monitor your website traffic (or the lack of it)?
☛ How do you assess engagement/the value of a visitor to the business?
☛ What is 'Bounce Rate'?
☛ Explain the difference between a page view, visit, visitor and unique visitor?
☛ What does Google Webmaster Tools do?
☛ Explain what a conversion rate is.

☛ Can you explain what PPC stands for?
☛ Do you have experience directly managing a Google Adwords campaign?
☛ How do you improve quality score?
☛ What does CPC means?
☛ With CPC ads, how can a lower click through rate lead to a higher ROI (Return on Investment)?
☛ Is it good, bad or indifferent to pay for ads on terms that you already rank on for natural search?
☛ How do you measure ROI?
☛ What’s your methodology in creating ad copies

☛ What is the purpose of social media?
☛ Give an example of when you have had to write a social media strategy explain how you approached this task
☛ What are the differences between writing for traditional web channels and writing for social media?
☛ Why do you think we should use social media?
☛ In what ways do we need to be careful when using these tools?
☛ How do you measure social ROI?
☛ What is your experience managing multiple social media accounts?
☛ What social media tools have you experience with?
☛ Which social media brand strategy has inspired you lately?
☛ What is your policy on moderating comments?
☛ How does social media affect SEO and your online profile?
☛ Can you tell us about some of the challenges you have faced when introducing social media in your previous job, and how you overcame them?