Digital marketing is more important than ever because businesses depend more and more on online interaction to grow. In order to move forward in your digital marketing career, you’ll need to stand out from the crowd and do great in your interviews. This is true whether your background is in numbers and data analysis, in editorial where you’re good at telling stories and coming up with content strategies, or in public relations or brand representation where you look out for the best interests of your clients.
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But since there are so many jobs available in the field, what traits and digital marketing skills do hiring managers look for in candidates?
Bethany Cantor, a successful digital marketing director who has worked at startups and corporations like Aaptiv and Teachable, where she is now Head of Content and Brand Marketing, says that the best digital marketing employees are actively curious, work well with others, and take constructive feedback with grace and hard work.
Grace Ouma-Cabezas is the Vice President of Marketing at Food52 and has been a marketing executive for 14 years. When she hires digital marketers, she “looks for people who are curious, creative, have grit, and thrive in fast-paced environments.” ” (Full disclosure: Food52 is a partner of The Muse. ).
You should show these traits along with your skills and experience in a digital marketing interview, no matter what level or type of job you’re applying for. And you can do that by getting ready for these digital marketing interview questions, along with the general interview questions that you’ll probably be asked for any job.
Online marketing is an exciting and fast-paced industry that’s continuously evolving. As more businesses shift their operations online the demand for digital marketing professionals grows. This creates plenty of job opportunities for those looking to break into the field.
However the competition is fierce. To land your dream online marketing job you need to come prepared to interviews. Employers want to know you have the skills and knowledge to hit the ground running in this dynamic profession.
To help you get ready for your next big interview, I’ve put together the top 30 online marketing questions you’re likely to encounter. Read on to get tips, sample responses, and key information to include. With thorough preparation, you’ll impress hiring managers and showcase why you’re the right fit.
Background Questions
Hiring managers often start with broad questions about your general experience. Be ready to provide an overview before diving into specifics.
1. Walk me through your background and experience in online marketing.
This is your chance to give an elevator pitch highlighting your biggest accomplishments. Focus on facts that make you stand out, like:
- Internships or past jobs in digital marketing roles
- Specific campaigns or projects you executed successfully
- Relevant skills like PPC, SEO, email marketing, analytics, etc
- Certifications like Google Analytics or Adwords
- Data and results like leads generated, traffic increases, ROI, etc.
2. Why are you interested in this online marketing role and company?
Share what excites you about the position and how it aligns with your career goals. Do your research beforehand and mention specific things that appeal to you about the company’s mission, culture, and work.
3. What’s your favorite online marketing campaign you’ve worked on?
Pick an impressive campaign where you played an integral role in the strategy and execution. Explain the goal, your process, and the quantifiable results you achieved. Use data to highlight your marketing impact.
4. How do you stay up-to-date on online marketing trends and innovations?
Hiring managers want people who actively enrich their digital marketing knowledge. Mention reading industry blogs, subscribing to newsletters, listening to marketing podcasts, attending conferences, taking online courses, and following thought leaders on social media.
Strategy and Planning Questions
Marketers need strong strategic thinking skills. Be ready to discuss approaches to developing integrated campaigns.
5. How would you go about creating an online marketing strategy for a new product launch?
Walk through key steps like conducting market research, identifying target demographics and positioning, setting SMART goals, selecting appropriate channels and tactics, developing creative assets, executing campaigns, monitoring performance, optimizing based on data, and measuring ROI.
6. What key metrics would you track to determine the success of an online marketing campaign?
Cover vanity metrics like impressions and engagements. But focus more on actionable metrics tied to campaign objectives like leads generated, traffic to landing pages, conversions, click through rate, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, and revenue growth.
7. How would you optimize a campaign that was successfully driving traffic but not conversions?
Troubleshooting is important. Discuss using analytics to identify weak points. Explain how you’d refine landing pages, calls-to-action, offers, and creative to better align with customer wants. A/B testing different approaches can unlock improvements too.
8. How do you make data-driven decisions in online marketing?
Share how you rely on analytics, split testing, and campaign performance data to plan, optimize, and report. Numbers and metrics remove guesswork so you can focus spending where it has the biggest impact.
9. What’s one online marketing campaign concept you’d really like to execute?
Share an innovative idea you have and your thought process behind it. Even if hypothetical, it gives insight into how you strategize campaigns.
Tactical Execution Questions
While strategy is crucial, hiring managers also want to know you have the hands-on skills to successfully execute campaigns.
10. What techniques and tools would you use to do keyword research for an SEO campaign?
Talk about leveraging keyword planners like Google’s, reviewing competitor content, analyzing traffic sources and conversion keyword data, exploring related long-tail key phrases with low competition, and using tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs to find opportunities.
11. What are some best practices for optimizing landing pages to increase conversions?
Cover essentials like crafting a focused headline and value proposition, simplifying layouts, highlighting benefits, adding social proof, using high-quality images, minimizing forms, and A/B testing page variants.
12. How would you improve the email deliverability rate and open rate for an email campaign?
Suggest tactics like properly setting SPF and DKIM records, segmenting lists, sending from dedicated IP addresses, personalizing subject lines, testing different sender names, triggering based on behaviors, scheduling for optimal days/times, and optimizing preview text.
13. What tactics would you use to generate more traffic from organic search?
Discuss important optimization techniques like keyword research, updating page titles and meta descriptions, improving site speed, boosting content quality and length, building backlinks, fixing technical errors, refreshing old content, and leveraging schema markup for better rich snippet visibility.
14. What steps would you take to set up and monitor a Google Ads campaign?
Outline the workflow – creating ad groups around keywords, setting bids and budgets, designing compelling ad copy and landing pages, integrating tracking pixels, monitoring performance data like click through rate and cost per conversion, adjusting bids and targets, using negative keywords, and continually optimizing based on results.
15. How would you analyze website traffic data and use it to make improvements?
Talk through studying sources/mediums, visitor behaviors, conversions paths, top landing/exit pages, acquisition channels driving conversions, referral traffic opportunities, and user demographics. Use insights to better target high-value segments and channels, personalize experiences, and support business objectives.
Analytical Skills Questions
Strong analytics skills are highly valued in online marketing roles. Be prepared to discuss reporting and data analysis.
16. How would you measure the success of an email marketing campaign?
Cover email metrics like open rate, click through rate, bounce rate, list growth, unsubscribe rate, conversions generated, revenue per email sent, and return on investment. Set benchmarks so you can quantify impact over time.
17. How would you create a performance dashboard for a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign?
PPC success hinges on monitoring key data points. Mention essential metrics like impressions, clicks, click through rate, cost per click, conversions, conversion rate, bounce rate, quality score, average position, and return on ad spend. Plot historical data to visualize performance trends.
18. What steps would you take to prepare an end-of-month analytics report for management?
Discuss aggregating and analyzing campaign data, visualizing results in graphs and charts, benchmarking against past performance and goals, spotlighting key takeaways and strategic recommendations, writing insightful commentary to contextualize data, and presenting findings in a professionally formatted report.
19. How can you determine the ROI generated from social media marketing activities?
Discuss tracking brand mentions, engagement metrics, conversions from links, and sales from campaign hashtags or unique promo codes. Compare against campaign costs for an ROI picture. Customer lifetime value models also help quantify long-term value beyond immediate sales.
20. What are some limitations of using vanity metrics like impressions in online marketing?
Impressions indicate awareness but not actual impact. Explain the pitfalls of focusing too much on vanity stats versus actionable performance data tied to objectives. Stress the importance of analyzing meaningful metrics like engagement rates, conversions, and sales.
Teamwork and Leadership Questions
Collaboration is key in online marketing. Show you can align efforts across teams and lead projects successfully.
21. How would you work with sales to turn web traffic into leads and customers?
Suggest having sales reps give feedback on conversion points, co-creating lead magnet offers, coordinating hand-offs, establishing lead scoring rules, and sharing key data like form fills and site visitor trends to help sales prioritize hottest prospects.
22. How would you convince other departments to make website changes that improve conversion rates?
Discuss presenting a business case with data-backed benefits, aligning changes to cross-functional goals, overcoming objections with testing and optimization plans, partnering to implement incrementally, and reporting bottom line impact. Patience and persistence pay off.
23. Tell me about a time you successfully led an online marketing initiative. What made you a good project leader?
Share a story highlighting strengths like collaboration, communication, organization, creativity, data-driven decisions, oversight of details, and motivating team members – especially in the face of challenges. Quantify the results you achieved.
24. How would you go about training a colleague on a new online marketing skill?
Talk through techniques like creating video tutorials, screensharing walkthroughs, slide decks, job shadowing, weekly tip emails, using project work to apply skills, and being available to answer questions. Check for understanding and have them summarize back key learnings.
25. What qualities do you
How Do You Communicate Progress to Your Team, Clients, and Stakeholders?
As a marketer, you need to be able to communicate clearly no matter what position you hold on your team. When you do this, you need to be able to confidently and clearly present information and back up your claims with data, all while keeping a good relationship with your team.
Winikka has worked her way up in digital marketing, so she knows how important this skill is at every level and that it is the key to success in the field. “At its core, marketing is about getting ideas and concepts from one person to the next.” Someone can be a great marketer if they are good at getting other people to agree with them, Winikka says.
“I would be listening for how much (or little) positive intent the candidate uses in their communication,” says Ouma-Cabezas. “I would also be listening for how they take accountability, especially when communicating challenges and progress.” Id also be listening for real-world examples of this. If not answered using an anecdote, I would ask for examples. ”.
You could say:
“When my team got its biggest client, a well-known bottled water company, I worked directly with them to make a plan for how we would keep our promise to feature them at every event in a thought leader speaker series my company put on.”
“Every morning at 9 a.m., my team would get together for 15 minutes to talk about the campaign’s progress and data.” We met on the phone every Friday afternoon to talk about the week that was and set goals for the coming week. We saw a drop in traffic and sales from events during one particular time period over the summer. This made our client very worried that they were not getting the reach we promised. To make up for the slow period, we were able to change our plan for the future and host an exclusive event with a well-known thought leader, giving free tickets to our most active social media followers. ”.
All of these things helped our client get people to like their brand, and during the fall, sales went through the roof. We beat our annual goal before the new year, and our client renewed their contract for another year with twice as much money. ”.
Tell Me About How You’ve Used Google Analytics [or Another Digital Marketing Tool or Skill] Day-to-Day in Your Current Role.
Not only do they want to know if you know how to use the digital marketing tool, but they also want to know what level you’re at (beginner, advanced, or expert). Tell the truth: Don’t say you know a lot about SEO or Google Analytics when you only know the basics!
Cantor says, “If a candidate only has a basic understanding and comfort level with a skill but is truly exceptional in every other way, I will make space and figure out how to get you educated [on the skill you need to learn]—especially if you are open and excited about it.”
This is your chance to back up that list of skills on your resume or LinkedIn profile. Show that you know how to use the digital marketing tool by talking about how you use it in your daily work and how that fits into the bigger picture of your job.
It’s OK to talk about digital marketing tools or programs you would like to learn more about. If the job description calls for Curalate or Buffer and you haven’t used them before, talk to a relevant tool that you’ve already learned how to use and say that you’re excited to learn how to use the programs with your potential team.
One possible answer to this question if you don’t have much experience with Google Analytics in the way that the job requires could be:
“I have used Google Analytics for two years as an account manager. I recently completed a General Assembly course on the subject to further my understanding of this tool. Even though it wasn’t necessary for my client work, I wanted to learn how the media and product teams use Google Analytics to make decisions. That way, my business development team could work better with the other teams and give our clients more accurate analytics. However, I know that as a brand marketing manager I’ll need to learn and use more advanced Google Analytics features. I’m looking forward to learning more about them in the same way I did when I first wanted to learn how to use the basic ones. ”.
Digital Marketing Interview Questions To Ace Your Next Job Interview
FAQ
What is asked in a digital marketing interview?
How do you answer digital marketing interview questions?
And you can do that by preparing to answer these digital marketing interview questions (in addition to the common interview questions you’re likely to get no matter what kind of job you’re after). Tell Me About Your Experience in Digital Marketing. Describe a Digital Marketing Campaign You’ve Worked on From Start to Finish.
What if a marketing interviewer doesn’t ask a question?
If the interviewer doesn’t ask this question and you’re interested in working there, initiate the conversation yourself at the end of the interview. You might even make an impression this way. You should now be prepared to answer the most common marketing interview questions. That’s only half of the victory, though.
What questions are asked during a marketing interview?
No matter what marketing position you’re applying for, some of the following 21 questions will be a topic of conversation during the interview: Why are you pursuing a career in marketing? What makes you interested in this role? What are your responsibilities in your current role? Why are you looking to make a change?
What should you expect in a marketing interview?
In a marketing interview, you can expect to talk about your experience, your interest in the industry, what value you envision adding to the team, and your general work preferences. You can also anticipate getting answers to your questions about the position or company.
