Getting into a digital marketing role is getting tougher these days as not only are there limited positions, but the breadth and depth of knowledge and skills required of a digital marketer is astoundingly extensive – from having an overall understanding of customer experience and sales, to technical SEO, copywriting, and knowing how to interpret reports across various digital marketing analytics platforms.
Companies are increasing their efforts to train and equip existing marketing employees on the ever-expanding plateau of digital platforms, terminologies, and strategies, and new hires are expected to possess this set of skills (in digital marketing).
To create this guide, we interviewed recruiters from over 50 companies and digital agencies who shared common interview questions and how best to tackle some of these questions.
So, you’ve sent in your resume and have been invited for a face to face job interview. You’re wondering how it would go and what you need to prepare. Well, it’s really quite similar to how you would prepare for any job interview, with a few exceptions.
Just like any job interview, you need to:
Additionally, the hiring company or digital agency may ask you to write an article, ad copy, or promotional message to review your copywriting and language abilities. It would be handy to prepare samples of past work i.e. a portfolio (e.g. websites developed, creative designs, strategic plans, blog posts, presentation decks) to showcase them during the interview. Attending a digital marketing certification course and completing a capstone project can boost your portfolio and increase your chances of getting hired.
With that, there still lies a host of questions that you won’t be able to prepare for, as you (the interviewee) will need to draw from your experience in order to convince the interviewer that you are the right person for the job.
Doing a digital marketing internship in a multinational corporation or digital agency can propel your career forward in leaps and bounds. It provides you with the opportunity to hands-on with various digital platforms and work in a fast-paced environment where a digital-first mindset, attention to detail, and good planning and organisational skills are a necessity.
Here are some possible interview questions you might get asked for a digital marketing intern position:
The interviewer’s intention behind the questions is to figure out whether you are serious in getting into and staying in this fast-paced and ever-changing industry. It takes real grit to get things done in an efficient and proper manner, all while trying to learn on the job and constantly upgrade yourself on skills you thought you knew but messed up along the way.
By asking whether you’ve read anything about digital marketing at all and what excites you about digital marketing will reveal whether you have an eye for curiosity and research, which are important traits in this industry.
Your best response then is to reply how much you love marketing and name a couple of industry-leading marketing websites you frequent. This has to stem from being genuinely passionate about marketing and actually reading up on digital marketing.
Above all, you should thoroughly research what the company does and who their customers and competitors are, so that in the event the interviewer asks you to propose marketing initiatives, you will be well prepared.
Prior to the interview, the interviewer may also ask you to send in some written or design works to assess whether you can help out with some of these day-to-day tasks.
Having marketing communications certifications and taking additional digital marketing courses will demonstrate your commitment to this field and save the company time and money sending you for additional training, increasing your chances of securing your internship.
Although this is an entry-level job position, many companies require at least 1 to 2 years of experience across various digital marketing channels and platforms. Therefore, many of the questions that will be asked will be relatively similar to the Digital Marketing Specialists (e.g. Content Marketing, SEO, Digital Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing Analytics) questions further below.
Hence, for this position, we will go through questions that determine the suitability of the candidate in terms of character traits and mindset that are essential for a digital marketer:
As a Digital Marketing Executive, you are expected to embody a myriad of skills such as multi-tasking and project management, a keen eye for detail, an analytical mindset, and many others.
When you’re asked to elaborate your research process, the interviewer is trying to get a clearer picture on your thought process as to how thorough you conduct your research and the accuracy of your fact finding. This is an important trait as big budgets are spent on the creation and promotion of quality content, and poor quality and sloppy implementation can tarnish the brand’s reputation. Cite academic research papers and websites such as the Washington University in St. Louis on a 6-step research process.
Having initiative to do the necessary yet unobvious tasks is another highly sought-after trait. Conduct research on the company’s brand and mission, customers, and competitors before the interview and propose digital marketing strategies during the interview to highlight this trait.
For smaller companies, there isn’t a luxury for creative design and copywriting teams. Consequently, Digital Marketing Executives are also expected to take on some of the creative design and copywriting such as creating dynamic display ads on Google Ads and writing Facebook posts and email updates. Showcasing some of your best creative and written work should seal the deal here.
The daily grind will include managing multiple projects, ensuring timelines are kept in check, and solving problems such as partner disagreements, poor return on ad spend, and many more unexpected issues that may arise out of nowhere.
What the interviewer wants to hear from you is how you deal with these tasks and cope with the daily grind. Citing an actual case of a problem you solved in your previous workplace and going into the details of how you approached the situation will be a closer.
Excellent communication skills are also required since you may be required to work with the internal team and external agencies to develop and implement the strategies. How you present yourself and how well you carry the conversation will make this trait evident.
To top it off, you also need hands-on experience on various digital marketing tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Search Console, Buffer) and platforms (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Marketing Automation software, WordPress).
These are managerial/lead roles and will require a high degree of management and leadership experience, as well as comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience across a variety of digital marketing disciplines, channels, and platforms.
Possible questions during an interview include:
Similar to other managerial positions, exceptional leadership, teamwork, organisational, planning, and problem-solving skills are required.
When telling the story of your career, be as detailed as you can. For example, instead of saying:
“I started out as a one-man team and built it up into a 5-man team.”
Put it somewhere along these lines:
“The company I previously worked for formed a new department and put me in charge of growing it. From a one-man team, I sourced for reliable digital agencies to offload some of the work and grew revenue by 500% in the first year. With the increased capital, I managed to take some of the projects in-house and hired and trained a competent digital marketing team. Despite some disagreements with the management and team, I managed to convince them to adopt my proposed initiative. As a result, our five-man team achieved 30% of the company’s overall profit in the last year attributed to digital channels alone.”
The interviewer will try to probe for any signs of over exaggeration as it is easy to take credit for certain achievements which could have been the result of team effort or initiatives from other departments. Going into the details make your recounts more trustworthy and earn you bonus points.
Budget planning is another key skill interviewers look for. If the interviewer asks you how you would spend a $100k budget to achieve $1million in revenue, don’t give a canned answer like “we should spend it all on digital channels because the reach is wider and everyone is online”.
Instead, provide a more methodical approach and recommend testing a small percentage of the budget on traditional vs digital channels over a short period to see which one is more effective in order to make better informed budget allocations. Share the various formulas and frameworks such as the “Aligning Business Objectives to Digital KPIs and Metrics Exercise” covered in our digital marketing strategy course to determine the budget for each campaign and as previously emphasised – go into the details.
Additionally, you will need to display distinguished leadership and organisational management skills. When asked how you would structure your digital marketing teams, explain in detail why you chose the structure and elaborate how it can help achieve specific objectives.
Depending on the industry and focus of the job scope, the interviewer may ask questions that are very specific to a particular discipline or channel.
Some industries don’t invest in certain channels while others do. For example, F&B businesses tend not to focus on SEM while financial institutions invest a lot in SEM/SEO.
Regardless, specialist roles such as the SEO Specialist, Content Strategist, and Digital Marketing Analyst have been created to provide specialised expertise to support general marketing teams.
Content marketing can get really fuzzy, especially when there is no strategy or governance in place and content is being created and distributed with no clear direction or purpose. Content strategists are in charge of piecing the jigsaw puzzle pieces together to paint a clear and complete picture for the rest of the marketing team to align towards.
If you’re applying for a role that lists content marketing strategy as a required skill set, prepare for these questions:
Content marketers need to have excellent creativity, attention to detail, a strong command in English, and planning and project management skills among many other skill sets. The interviewer will want to see that you embody these skills and are able to apply it to the job function.
For example, when asked what content marketing models you apply, you can mention the hub hero hygiene and hub and spoke models. But of course, you would need to have experience implementing the models in order to demonstrate your competency.
The ability to measure content marketing ROI, allocate your budgets strategically, document your content strategy, and carry out the entire content marketing process are highly sought-after skills.
If you are able to share from experience how you saw through the entire content marketing strategy process such as our 6-step content marketing strategy from our Content Marketing Strategy course (from content ideation to production, publishing, promotion, measurement, and governance), the deal will be sealed.
Search engine optimization (SEO) skills are in high demand as SEO is a long-term strategy that is integrated with many other marketing-related disciplines such as copywriting, PR, and content marketing.
These are some questions your interviewer may ask you if you are applying for a SEO Specialist role:
Being an SEO specialist requires you to have a good balance of creative, technical, and analytical skills. On top of being objective-oriented, a go-getter, you need to demonstrate your ability to analyse data and propose viable solutions and alternatives.
For instance when going through a technical SEO audit report with the interviewer, there may be hundreds of issues that need to be solved. However, there may not be sufficient time and resources to resolve certain issues. Thus, you will be expected to suggest viable alternatives rather than harper on a particular issue that may not even be the priority to achieving the main objectives.
Say for example, there are two technical SEO issues present, one being slow page loading time and the other being duplicate meta descriptions. Since page loading speed affects the user experience and may negatively impact rankings, you will need to prioritise fixing this over the duplicate meta description issue. This comes from having a deep understanding of how search engines work and technical jargon.
An SEO specialist within a large organisation or a digital agency will need to work closely with other marketing teams. He/she will need to understand that not everyone realises the importance of SEO, hence, the SEO specialist needs to be an excellent communicator to push forth important SEO initiatives that can positively impact the organisation as a whole.
An appropriate response to the question “When there is potential conflict between prioritising UX, SEO, and brand, how do you approach the situation without compromising other important aspects?” would be:
“I would first hear everyone’s perspectives and try to find an optimal solution to avoid compromising any aspect. For example, if a UX designer wanted to design a one-pager with content embedded within lightboxes that compromise SEO rankings, I would check with the UX designer exactly what type of experience he wanted the user to have. If the UX designer wanted to prevent the user from loading another page and also prevent content clutter, I would propose another web design element such as accordions which are more SEO-friendly and would almost achieve the same objective.”
Keyword research is a significant aspect of SEO and should be integrated with other aspects of marketing including content marketing, social media marketing, and paid search advertising. Be as detailed as you can when you describe your keyword research processes such as the 4-step keyword research process covered extensively in our SEO course.
Global digital ad spend reaches the hundreds of billions every year with the US topping $100 billion in 2018 alone. – CNBC
In Singapore, many companies run digital ads through Google Ads and Facebook Ads, although there are many other DSPs that larger companies use that can be found here.
If you’re applying for a role as an Account Executive, Media Planner, Ad Operations Manager, or Performance Marketing Specialist in a digital agency or any client-side role listing Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Search Engine Marketing, and Programmatic Advertising as a required skill, be prepared for these questions:
Budget management, technical hands-on experience across various advertising platforms, and data analytics are all important skill sets to have for digital advertising.
If the interviewer asks you any technical questions relating to any digital advertising platform (e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads) such as “what is quality score and what is relevance score?”, it is okay to reply directly and explain what they are.
However, for questions that require more insight and a deeper understanding of the data such as “What could be wrong with an ad campaign that receives many clicks but little to no conversions?”, do not jump to conclusions but instead, take your time to ask more questions and analyse the reports further before producing any insights. This is an important test for your analytical abilities which is essential for digital advertising.
Preparing for an interview for a Social Media Manager, Community Manager, or Social Media-related role? Be prepared for these questions:
To perform spectacularly in a social media marketing role, you need to be creative and an excellent communicator. Besides having a deep understanding of popular social media networks, hands-on experience on various social media and content tools (e.g. Buzzsumo, Facebook Audience Insights, Buffer) will also be essential for this role.
Understanding virality and what makes content “tick” with your target audience. If your interviewer asks you to share an experience of a content that went viral or failed to go viral on social media, be completely transparent while breaking down the exact process and elements (e.g. Jonah Berger’s 6 STEPPS of Virality covered in our social media marketing course) that triggered or didn’t trigger to virality.
Another important aspect of social media marketing is community management. Interviewers may give you a scenario where a customer left a negative sentiment and ask you how you would manage the situation.
Never dive into the answer right away, but investigate further and get to the bottom of the situation in order to understand the whole context. That way, you will be better equipped to deal with the situation having uncovered all the facts.
For example, a customer could have had multiple negative experiences with a brand from the point of sales contact to the followup support. Put yourself in the customer’s perspective and decide how best the brand could appease you. For someone who even bothered to leave a negative review, what if the brand spokesperson sincerely apologised and offered to reconcile in a genuine tone? Would continuing to bombard the brand change public opinion?
Good PR skills and an excellent command of English are also essential skills interviewers will look for. Demonstrating your ability to craft “hard-to-ignore” outreach emails and winning social media influencer partnerships will secure you this job position.
Digital marketing analysts interview questions:
Foundational knowledge of data analytics principles and experience in navigating Google Analytics reports are highly sought-after skills. To understand and accurately interpret report data, you need to have a solid understanding of the end-to-end customer journey and T-shaped knowledge across all marketing channels.
Interviewers want to see that you are able to demonstrate deep analytical skills and attention to detail. A question like “how do you resolve high bounce rates” shouldn’t be haphazardly approached with “let’s implement scroll event tracking to avoid a bounce when a user scrolls down to the bottom of the page”. A follow-up question like “why exactly are we measuring bounce rates” and “are there more important metrics to be measuring engagement than bounce rate” would make you stand out in the eyes of the interviewer.
Actual hands-on experience on tracking implementation on marketing tags requiring JavaScript knowledge would also be advantageous since smaller companies don’t have the luxury of an IT department.
The whole point of the interview is to ascertain whether you, the candidate, understands what marketing is all about and whether you (your personality, character traits, and experience) are the right fit for the advertised job role and scope of work.
When in doubt, avoid trying to smoke the interviewer as it is easy for an expert to see through your smoke screen. Instead, be honest and highlight that there is still a lot to learn in the field of marketing. This will show that you have integrity and the willingness to learn what you don’t know.
Most importantly, come prepared for your interview by referring to this handy guide. We wish you all the best in securing your dream job as a digital marketer!