TYPES OF MARKETING QUESTIONS AND HOW YOU CAN ACE THEM!
With so many types of questions across all industries, it’s impossible to memorize every answer to each potential question. But employers aren’t looking for someone with a good memory. They want you an employee that can demonstrate all the relevant skills, experience and personal qualities that are required for the post. That’s why marketing interview questions are a must to know.
There are 3 types of marketing questions:
- Skill-based questions
These questions examine how your skillsets match the job. Research is the key to every door and it’s the same with marketing questions. You should trawl the company’s website, sign up to its emails and explore every inch of its social-media pages get to know the company from a distance first. Now, think about how you can use your skills and experience to run the brand’s next campaign. Recruiter looks for people who are innovative and have new ideas, people who like to explore different fields so it becomes important for you to be aware.
This approach will handle common marketing interview questions such as, “What do you think about our marketing team or our marketing strategies?”
Start with the good stuff. Do they have an okay blog? Great. Mention how their content marketing is useful and relevant for the customers. Did you find the blog post from Facebook? Awesome. Say how the post successfully brought you to the article. Did the blog link to an impossible-to-navigate landing page? Sweet. Now explain how you’d optimize the page to capture email addresses, they have an email campaign ready to fire the captured leads.
Even a simple, “Why do you want this job?” Really means, “What can you bring to our marketing campaigns?” Which actually means, “How can you make us more successful?” However, you start your answers to skills-based marketing job interview questions, finish with specific ideas on how to improve the brand’s marketing.
- Situational questions
These questions test your mettle and show how you’ve handled real-life marketing challenges. You probably did this already with your answers to the skills-based questions but for this set of questions, you need to go in more depth.
For example “Can you give an example of a successful campaign you worked on?”
This is one of the most common asked questions during an interview, start from the beginning and explain how you worked with colleagues to identify the right channels to reach your target audience. Next, explain how you overcame the challenges of a picky client or fussy creative team to execute the campaign. Finally, reveal how you measured the results. And how all your hard work was set in the place with your patience and management skills.
Ears will prick up now because interviewers want to hear the statistics and how you got them. So, know the engagement levels of social-media posts, the click-through rate of emails and the campaign’s return on investment (ROI). Commit these figures to memory or write them down and take them to the interview (a notebook shows you’re eager).
With all situational questions, go as deep as you canInexplaining how you overcame all the hurdles and were successful at the end of the campaign. And expect questions related to short and long-term sales cycles, generating leads and customer retention. Once you show you know what these mean, answer like the ‘successful campaign’ question showing how you got good results in the past, what you learned from challenges and which ideas you’d bring to the company’s marketing efforts.
- Motivational questions
These easy-sounding questions are actually to detect if you’re the right fit for the company. So treat “What’s your least favorite part of the job?” as the death-arrow it really is.
Start with your research. Don’t be afraid,to be honest, but make sure you turn your answer into something positive. For example, for a company which highly values creativity, might be “I dislike spending time doing admin.” Flip this to meet the company’s ethos – explain how you have turned administrative tasks into fun collaborative working sessions with colleagues at your current job. Explain that the reason you dislike it is that you prefer spending time on creative projects, which is where your strength lies. Remember that every question is an opportunity to show off your skills.
Always bring specific skills and experiences to these questions. Better yet, bring yourself. That’s what employers are really after. So be passionate, hardworking, easy-going whatever your style is. Show them how dedicated and motivated you to stayat your work and how your job is your priority and you will easily win their heart.
Some practice question with their correct answers:
Question: What is an innovative new marketing strategy that youd like to implement while in this position?
Answer: The goal is to see how up to date the customer regarding new innovations in the marketing field.
What to keep in mind while answering:
Can they name one or more innovative marketing tactics? Do they appear fluent in how these tactics can be implemented? Are they confident about new strategies?
Example: "Im really excited about the prospect of creating an experiential marketing campaign, where we can activate the brand in the wild, where our customers are. Ive 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."
Question: A customer left a negative review of our product on a social media site. How do you respond to the customer?
Answer: The goal is to understand how the candidate deals with the negative press. Negative press is something any marketing strategy has to take into account and have a plan to deal with.
What to keep in mind while answering the question:
Do they feel comfortable talking about the issue of negative attention?
Are they able to produce a plan for converting negative attention to positive branding?
Do they see a negative post as an opportunity rather than a setback?
Example: "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 customers future interactions with our brand."
Question: In the case of the product that you successfully marketed, how did you assess the impact of the campaign?
Answer: The goal is to understand how the candidate quantifies success with data.
What to keep in mind while answering:
Does the candidate point to ways of measuring customer awareness online and off?
Do they demonstrate a good facility with metrics?
Do they demonstrate an interest in quantification and data?
Example: "Our team tracked mentions of our product throughout the conference to see how many conference attendees were engaging with the product. We also tracked hits to our website, as well as attendance at the giveaways. Other metrics we computed were sales after the conference, mentions on social media and engagement through other channels like email."
Question: You have been charged with the task of creating a new branding campaign for a product that hasnt been doing well. What is your process?
Answer: the goal is to find out how the candidate changes the course of a brand.
What to look for in an answer:
Do they see the opportunity to rebrand as an interesting challenge?
Do they have experience in rebranding?
Do they have creative ideas for rebranding?
Example: "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 signalled 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."
