The digital marketing industry is growing fast. If you’re applying for your first digital marketing gig, you might be feeling a bit nervous and unsure about what to expect. Conversely, for seasoned digital marketing specialists looking to move into a new role, an interview can be challenging if you haven’t interviewed in a while.
We’ve rounded up some common digital marketing specialist interview questions and thoughtful ways to answer them. You’ll also find some sample answers to these questions to help you frame yours.
Because the role of a digital marketing specialist requires a range of skills, these questions will touch on various components of digital marketing.
You can skip ahead to any section that interests you most by making use of the clickable menu:
- General digital marketing specialist interview questions
- Background digital marketing specialist interview questions
- In-depth digital marketing specialist interview questions
- Sample answers to digital marketing specialist interview questions
- Summary
Ready? Let’s dive in!
1. General digital marketing specialist interview questions
The questions in this category tend to feature in any kind of job interview. Your potential employer wants to know more about you, your interest in the field of digital marketing, and why you’re specifically interested in their job posting.
General digital marketing specialist interview questions include things like:
- How did you get into digital marketing?
- Which form of digital marketing would you say is your strong suit?
- Why did you apply to this role?
- How would you describe yourself?
- Why are you leaving your current role?
- What would you say is your biggest strength?
- What is your greatest weakness?
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
With these general digital marketing specialist interview questions, answer as honestly, but strategically as possible. Relate every answer to the role you’re interviewing for and strive to show the interviewer why you’d be a good fit. Once they’ve gotten a feel for who you are, they’ll be moving on to more digital marketing-focused questions to see how much subject matter knowledge you possess.
If you’re new to the field, find out more about what a digital marketing specialist does.
2. Background digital marketing specialist interview questions
These background questions show your interviewers the breadth of your understanding with regards to digital marketing. Your answers should highlight your grasp of industry terminology, the way digital marketing works, and your overall qualifications in the field.
Some background digital marketing specialist interview questions include:
- What is the relationship between SEO and content marketing?
- What metrics do you use to measure the success of an email campaign?
- What digital marketing tools do you have experience with?
- How would you describe our brand’s tone of voice and visual identity?
- Which social media experts and digital marketing companies do you follow on Twitter?
- At what point would you say link-building is a beneficial part of a marketing strategy?
- What is your process for editing copy?
- What project management tools do you use to stay organized?
- When should you use paid vs organic search engine marketing?
- What do you think is working about our current marketing? What could we do better?
- Which current content marketing trends do you think are worth exploring?
- What’s your experience with PPC advertising?
While you’re interviewing for a digital marketing specialist role, you may find that these are the types of questions asked across the board with digital marketing roles in general. A digital marketing specialist, however, is expected to have a good understanding of all aspects of the field, so brush up on your skills beforehand if you feel like there’s a weak spot.
Regardless of the questions asked, keep your answers succinct, ask for clarification where needed, and be confident.
3. In-depth digital marketing specialist interview questions
For in-depth questions, the interviewer expects you to elaborate on your experience as a digital marketing specialist. They’ll ask you about decisions you made in specific situations (or would make hypothetically). This shows your potential employer how you would address such issues when you begin working with them.
Some common in-depth digital marketing specialist interview questions include:
- Tell me about your experience with marketing automation tools.
- What is your experience with co-marketing campaigns?
- Describe a time you worked to create a digital marketing campaign on a tight budget.
- What experience do you have building a marketing budget? How would you approach it?
- Talk about one of your most effective campaigns. What made it so effective?
- Describe a time you gave constructive feedback to a colleague.
- Tell me about a time your team didn’t agree with your direction. How did you handle it?
- Give an example of how you would sell a certain product.
- How do you approach measurement and optimization? Tell me about a time when you used analytics or insights to inform a campaign or recommendation.
- How do you decide whether or not it’s worth creating content around a keyword?
- What’s your experience building keyword clusters?
These are more meaty questions to showcase soft skills like leadership and communication, as well as the technical know-how required to become a digital marketing specialist.
4. Sample answers to digital marketing specialist interview questions
While it’s helpful to know what shape and size your interview questions may take, it’s twice as helpful to have some sample answers you can tweak during the interview. Here are some examples of answers you can give during your digital marketing specialist interview.
Question: Could you describe a time you worked to create a digital marketing campaign on a tight budget?
Answer: I was in charge of growing the company blog from scratch with a slim budget. I used three main strategies.
The first was focusing on organic instead of paid traffic. Since we couldn’t afford to experiment with many campaigns, I used organic growth strategies, such as optimizing most of our content for search engines, creating lead magnets to grow our mailing list, and connecting with users on social media. In six months, blog traffic grew from 30,000 to 200,000 monthly views.
Next, I chose to create more content in-house versus outsourcing to freelancers. Because it was more cost-effective, I used resource management tools to evaluate how much more work each member of my team could take on. I used this information to assign as many content creation tasks as they could effectively handle, which reduced our reliance on freelance writers from 90% to about 30%.
The last thing I did was to repurposing content to improve our reach and reduce the pressure to create new content constantly. I reshared blog content in newsletters, converted blog content to video scripts for our YouTube channel, and used snippets from blog content as social media sound bites.
Quick tip: Be as detailed as possible when sharing experiences that showcase the soft skills required for a digital marketing specialist role. Be sure to include measurable impact whenever possible.
Question: What metrics do you use to measure the success of an email campaign?
Answer: It depends on what the objective of the campaign is. For example, when we ran an email campaign to encourage webinar sign-ups, I measured its success by keeping track of open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates (that is, how many people clicked the sign-up link in the email and actually signed up for the webinar). After the campaign, I also calculated the campaign’s return on investment. For other campaigns I’ve worked on, I’ve needed to take note of our bounce rates and unsubscribes.
Quick tip: It’s often better to give responses about a specific situation and steer clear of generalized responses. This shows that you understand the principles of good marketing, instead of operating by a rule book.
Question: What SEO tools are you familiar with?
Answer: I’ve used a wide range of SEO tools including Ahrefs (for keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink profile monitoring), Semrush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.
Quick tip: Be prepared for a follow up question about specific use-cases for each of these tools and any unique insights you may have gained by using them on past projects.
5. Summary and final takeaways
Doing well in a digital marketing specialist interview requires an understanding of the role and some experience, backed by specific positive results accomplished in a similar previous role.
As you answer the questions, focus on showing the interviewer how much of an asset you’ll be to the company. Don’t forget to ask any questions you might have about the company and their processes. You’ve got this!
Need more information about the role of a digital marketing specialist and how to become one? Why not take our free, 5-day short course? It’ll give you a great introduction into the field of digital marketing so you can see if it’s something that suits you.
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