Tech Job Interviews 101: 15 Digital Marketing Interview Questions Explained

Learning tech skills is great (and something you should absolutely do right away!)…buuut once you learn them, it’s time to start applying and interviewing for tech jobs. If you’re wondering what to say when you’re sitting across from a real life hiring manager, we’ve got you covered! Tech job interviews are nothing to fear, especially when you’ve already practiced the most likely questions (and some curveballs as well). That’s why we scoured the internet to pull together comprehensive lists of common digital marketing job interview questions asked during digital marketer job interviews, AND tips on how you should prepare for and answer them. You’ve got this!

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And if you need to learn the skills to land your own digital marketing job, consider our Skillcrush Digital Marketing Course. This online class is designed to be completed in 3-4 months by spending just an hour a day on the materials.

Digital Marketing Job Interview Questions

1. What makes digital marketing different from traditional marketing?

Tip: This is a chance to show your understanding of what makes a successful online marketing campaign different than print, display, television, etc. To answer this question, touch on the following points:

Traditional marketing involves:

• Reaching out to locally targeted audiences
• Producing physical marketing materials
• Relying on traditional delivery channels
• In-person marketing events

Digital marketing involves:

• Customizing an audience from a global population
• Audience interaction
• Using multiple delivery channels based on audience needs and preferences
• Online marketing events

2. What types of content make up an effective digital marketing campaign?

Tip: Digital content tends to fall under these main categories:

• Blog Posts—articles that allow you to identify your audience’s problems (or “pain points”) and ways to solve them.
• Guides and eBooks—longer form resources that allow you to explore blog topics at greater length.
• Video content—videos that cover topics relevant to your audience (often posted on platforms like YouTube which can then be embedded on your website).
• Podcasts—audio content that can be hosted on your website and downloaded by your audience.
• Marketing Emails—newsletters and product announcements sent directly to potential customers.
• Social Media—a social media presence acts as a tool for amplifying your overall SEO and brand awareness efforts

3. What do you see as the difference between content marketing and content strategy? Can you give me some examples of each?

Tip: Interviewers want to know that you understand the difference between these pillars of digital marketing as well as the role each one plays. Remember:

• Content marketing is the practice of creating content to use for digital marketing purposes. You can expand on this answer by talking about the fact that digital marketing content provides customers with relevant, useful information as they are guided down a sales funnel (versus the static advertisements associated with traditional marketing).
• Content strategy includes the planning and implementation of all that value-rich digital content. For specific examples, you can point to things like competitive analysis, user testing, website audits, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

4. How do you pick effective digital marketing KPIs and how do you track them?

Tip: Digital marketing campaigns need metrics to ensure they’re working properly (and so you know what to tweak if things AREN’T working). But which KPIs are meaningful for a digital marketing campaign? Show interviewers your know-how by citing examples like:

• Overall marketing return on investment
• Customer conversion rate from marketing content
• Marketing email click-through-rates
• Organic search traffic
• New leads acquisitions

You can also get into the “how” of tracking by referencing these rules of thumb:

• Track KPIs weekly when they are very important to the business, and you can change the strategy week-to-week in response to the numbers.
• Track KPIs monthly when you can alter your monthly strategy to affect these numbers, and when you need to see a percent growth month-over-month (often due to investors).
• Track KPIs quarterly when you need to wait a few months to see if your strategy is working.

5. Describe the sales funnel and why it’s important to digital marketing.

Tip: The sales funnel is a digital marketing model where potential customers are led through a series of events or actions that can be mapped out in the shape of a funnel. This model is essential to digital marketing because it explains how to target customers at every stage of the buying process. An easy was to describe the funnel is as follows:

The top (and widest part) of the funnel is the “Awareness” stage—meaning the stuff that introduces people to your brand for the first time. It includes:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• YouTube videos
• Podcasts
• Paid Ads
• Marketing pages on your website

The middle part of the funnel is the “Evaluation” stage, where people know what you’re selling but they’re not sure yet whether it will solve their particular problem. It includes:

• Sales pages
• Webinars
• Quizzes
• Emails
• Downloadable guides / Ebooks

The bottom (and narrowest) part of the funnel is the “Conversion” stage where (ideally) you’ll convince consumers to become actual customers. It includes:

• Product demos
• Webinars
• Sales pages
• Comparison charts
• Customer stories / testimonials
• Special offers

6. What is your usual method for SEO strategy?/How do you approach SEO?

Tip: Customer conversions from organic search traffic are a HUGE part of successful digital marketing campaigns, so expect to get questions about how you approach SEO. Obviously SEO is a broad topic, but you can keep things on track by focusing on the following:

• Keyword research: Explain how you use tools like Ahrefs and Moz to conduct keyword research and create relevant, high ranking SEO content
• Web traffic analysis: Talk about using tools like Google Analytics to analyze your website’s traffic numbers and trends, and how you use that data to inform and assess your SEO practices.
• Ranking strategy: Describe how you use resources like Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to develop effective ways of improving a site’s rankings. This can include both creating SEO site content, as well as site architecture improvements

7. What are some digital marketing tools you have experience with? / What are some of your favorite marketing tools and platforms?

Tip: There are two things to keep in mind when answering this question:

1. If you’re interviewing for an employer with an established digital marketing team, do some research and find out what marketing software and platforms the team uses. If you already have experience with these tools, great! If not, nail down some basics before you’re interview and be ready to communicate your willingness to quickly get further up to speed as needed.
2. Generally speaking, familiarizing yourself with core, industry standard tools will put you in a good position for most interviews. Make sure you’ve spent time with the usual suspects, including platforms like Google Analytics, Moz, Ahrefs, Meetedgar, Hubspot. And don’t forget to check our list of 50+ free tools for digital marketers if you’re looking to branch out further.

8. Describe a method you use to encourage and leverage customer feedback.

Tip: Business owners, digital marketers, and content creators all have their own hunches and feelings about what resonates best with an audience, but direct feedback from customers is what matters most. Interviewers want to know that you understand this, so this question is a perfect time to stress your obsession with user testing.

A/B Testing is a standard method for testing digital marketing campaigns: two versions (A and B) of digital content are submitted to a target audience in order to learn which version the audience prefers. If you’re familiar with A/B testing (and you should be!) you’ve got this answer covered. If not, you need to learn more about A/B testing ASAP (and you can head straight to this Hubspot article for more information).

9. Describe a digital marketing campaign you worked on from start to finish. What approaches did you take, what challenges did you face, and how were you successful?

Tip: Be transparent about what a real digital marketing project looks like for you. Highlight your wins (the way you increased site traffic, conversion rates, search engine rankings, etc), but don’t shy away from describing the challenges (the conversion strategies that didn’t work, the email subject lines that tanked). Interviewers aren’t looking to hear that you never have setbacks (that’s not realistic). They want to hear how you get past setbacks and ultimately succeed.

10. Describe a digital marketing campaign you worked on that didn’t go as planned. Why did it go wrong, and how did you react?

Tip: Similar to the last question, interviewers are looking for honesty here. Everyone will work on a project that ultimately doesn’t go well, and that’s OK. What’s important is how you respond to failures and learn from them so they don’t happen next time. This is what you need to communicate to the interviewer.

11. What kind of team environment do you thrive in?

Tip: Although you might want to answer this question with whatever you think the interviewer is looking for, it’s way better to be honest. If the marketing team you’ll be working with has a work style that’s completely outside of your comfort zone, then this particular job might not be a good fit for you. That being said, most digital marketing teams are dynamic and flexible, and if your employer knows what kind of environment suits you best, they can help find a spot on the team that WILL work for you.

12. What kind of management style do you respond to best?

Tip: This question is another one where you might be tempted to make the interviewer happy. But you know what’s guaranteed to make YOU unhappy? Working for a manager whose style you can’t stand. Be as flexible and as open minded as you can when describing your preferred management style, but if there’s something that’s a complete deal-breaker for you (or that you particularly appreciate), don’t be shy about making it known.

13. How do you keep on top of industry news and trends, and how do you apply this to your work?

Tip: The digital marketing industry changes constantly, with new Google search algorithms, new content strategies, new software tools, and so on. You NEED to keep up with industry news, but you already do, right? If so, simply rattle off your list of favorite news sources and why they’re effective for keeping you in the know. And if marketing news is something you’ve neglected while being in the weeds of learning the skills, take a few minutes to find some suitable news blogs and digital marketing Twitter accounts to put in your hip pocket (and be ready to bust them out at your next interview).

14. Give an example of how you’d describe digital marketing (what it is, why it’s important) to someone who is completely new to the industry.

Tip: As a digital marketer you’ll find yourself in situations where you need to talk marketing with non-marketers. Making your work make sense to people who have no idea what it is you actually do is a valuable skill. Take off your digital marketing hat for a day and think of some ways to describe what you do to someone who doesn’t know SEO from A/B testing. If you’re looking for an impactful summary to start from, paraphrase this quote from Hubspot:

“Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.”

15. How do you communicate your progress to clients and/or stakeholders?

Tip: Communication between digital marketers and their clients, employers, and other stakeholders is a critical part of any digital marketing campaign. When you’re hired to market a brand or product, you’re spending your client’s money and you need to illustrate how your campaign is producing an acceptable return on investment (a general rule of thumb is that revenue should equal 3 times the cost of your marketing efforts).

The gist here is to demonstrate that you understand the importance of keeping clients and stakeholders up to date, and that you have ideas for tracking your campaign through KPIs and making adjustments as needed.