Digital Marketing Interview Questions And Tips to Crack Your Next Interview

Introduction

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”
–Arthur Ashe

Writing about Digital Marketing Interview Questions I start with this quote by Arthur Ashe, who was the first American African to win men’s singles titles at Wimbledon and the U.S Open, and also a great inspirational figure here because I firmly believe preparation is the most important factors for success in an interview. You may be extremely talented and always get a fair share of good luck to win everything you keep your hands on, but still, a bit of preparation before your interview is important to feel more in control and appear cool and calm. After all, cracking an interview is all about staying organized and proactive and presenting what you know and yourself confidently. So, this blog is all about raising your confidence and preparing yourself for your next digital marketing job interview. We share with you the most relevant and important digital marketing interview questions with answers as well as some efficient tips and opinions from experts to gear up for your upcoming digital marketing job interview. This would be a complete checklist that you shouldn’t miss to check before you appear for any digital marketing job interview.

Digital marketing roles have become one of the hottest career options today, with the industry being the most booming industries in business today. The growing consumer dominance and technology options are forcing companies to explore new ways to communicate to customers and drive them towards their products or services creating a number of digital marketing job opportunities. Every business today realizes the potential of Digital marketing to cater to a wide range of consumer base and improve their returns on investment, and are on the lookout for skilled professionals who knows what it takes to make it big. Being well versed and updated with the digital marketing techniques and tools, and a fair amount of industry knowledge on best practices and practical stuff can help you land on your dream digital marketing job.

So, do you have a digital marketing interview to attend in the coming days? And still wondering what are the digital marketing interview questions that you should know and what other preparations have to be done? Don’t worry we will help you prepare yourself through this article. We have collated all the basic and must-know digital marketing interview questions and some effective tips to help you out with your preparation.

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Basic Digital Marketing Interview Questions and Answers

You should always have knowledge of all the basic information and jargon related to digital marketing before you attend an interview. Here is a list of important digital marketing interview questions with answers that you must know before you attend any digital marketing interview.

1. What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is all about marketing using digital channels or technologies on the Internet. There are various digital marketing techniques based on the digital channels used for marketing including search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Techniques like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), link building, social media marketing, email marketing, etc can help reach your customers effectively and build your brand.

Read more from Hubspot on what is digital marketing.

2. How is digital marketing classified?

Digital marketing is broadly classified into two- Inbound marketing and Outbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing: Inbound marketing is the methodology that attracts the target audience by creating content and experiences tailored to them. It uses techniques like content marketing (blogs, digital content in e-books, webinars or e-newsletters), social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding to draw your customers to your products or services.

Outbound Marketing: Outbound marketing refers to companies promoting their products or services through advertising and sends their message out to their audience. It includes placing ads, cold-calls, e-mails or reach out to potential customers through digital mediums like social media or websites.

3. What is meant by SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving or optimizing the structure and content of your website so that search engines can find your website and index correctly. It includes including keywords in your website, adding links, organizing content using proper subheadings and following best practices for improving content readability, doing promotional activities to boost your search engine rank like getting backlinks and so on.

Read more on SEO from MOZ –What is SEO

4. What is ‘Keyword’ in digital marketing? What is its importance from the SEO point?

In digital marketing, “Keyword” refers to the word that users’ would enter into a search engine to find any specific information that they are looking for. When any user is performing a search, the search engine would be displaying results containing the “keyword” they are looking for. The most relevant content will be displayed at the top.
Hence, from the SEO point of view, for better page ranking using the right keywords is very crucial. How and where you have used the keywords will reflect your site ranking.

5. Which areas you should use keywords to optimize your website ranking?

For a better page ranking, you should be using the keywords in the following areas:

Keyword in Website URL
Keyword in the website title
Keyword in Meta Tag
Keyword in Webpage content
Keywords in headlines
Increase keyword density in body text.

6. Explain what is PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising?

Pay Per Click(PPC) otherwise known as Cost Per Click advertising is a technique used to direct traffic to your website. In PPC, you can run advertisements for your website on the search engines or other websites(publishers). The advertisers are charged by the publishers whenever a user actually clicks on their ad.

Read more on Word stream –What is PPC advertising.

7. What are the primary models for determining Pay-Per-Click?

There are two primary models for determining Pay Per Click rates:

Flat-rate PPC: In this model, both the publisher and advertiser agree to some fixed amount that will be paid for each click. Most of the time, publishers would have a rate card for their PPC plans based on different areas of their website or network. The amount may vary depending on the content’s popularity among people.
Bid Based PPC: This is the most popular model that leading platforms like Google Ads use. In the bid-based model, the advertiser competes with other advertisers and has to give his bids on the maximum amount which can be paid for particular keywords, in an auction hosted by the publisher. The “winners” for search results are chosen based on a combination of factors including relevance to keyword, landing page quality as well as the value of their keyword bids. Read more

8. What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is the PPC advertising platform from Google. The platform enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and their other properties. It works on the Bid based Pay Per Click model.

Read more on Word stream- What is Google Adwords.

9. What should be the characteristics of an effective PPC keyword?

An effective PPC keyword should be:

Relevant: List out the targeted keywords
Exhaustive: Apart from the most popular keywords, the keyword list should also include long-tail keywords which are search phrases with three or more words and are very specific to the product or service you are trying to sell.
Expansive: The keywords list should be constantly growing and adapting.

10. What are the key elements to optimize the conversion rates of the website?

Conversion rate is nothing but to bring more visitors to your website and make them do intended action- may be purchase products, sign up for something or whatever. To increase your conversion rates you need to focus on the following things:

Write a compelling copy on your website that is relevant to the keyword or search query.
Maintain relevance between your ads and corresponding landing pages.
The webpage should have simple to follow ‘call to actions’ like a simple registering process, subscribing for newsletters or even making a purchase.
Watch out on the design of your landing page to attract customers- the right combination of colors, layout, User Interface, everything matters to make customers interested in the product/service that you offer.

11. What should be the approach for effective Pay Per Click campaigns?

For an effective pay per click campaign you need to:

Add more PPC keywords that are relevant to your business to expand the reach of your PPC Ad.
Split Ad groups into smaller and more relevant groups to improve the click-through rate (CTR).
Review costly and underperforming keywords to optimize your return on investment from the PPC Ads.
Refine your landing page with relevant content and call to action to align with individual search queries.
Add negative keywords to ensure your ad doesn’t show up for particular keywords for irrelevant searches. This is important to save money on wasted clicks and create more opportunities for your ad to display on searches that are relevant and could lead to conversions.

12. What are some of the useful digital marketing tools?

Here are some of the top digital marketing tools used:

Google Analytics
Google Trends
Digital Point Keyword tracker
Crazy egg heat maps
Keyword discovery
Buzzsumo
XML sitemap generator
Favicon generator
SubmitExpress Link popularity
Ubersuggest
Keywords everywhere
MailChimp
Hootsuite
Optimizely

Read more on different tools and their use.

13. Explain what is on-page and off-page SEO optimization?

Google’s Search engine ranking algorithm ranks search engine results based on factors like a relevance to the keyword, content quality and webpage authenticity which is calculated using the number of backlinks to a webpage.

On-page optimization is the process of optimizing the content and structure of the pages to improve search engine ranking.

14. What all things should be taken care of to avoid penalties?

Do not link to sites with bad page ranking.
Avoid plagiarism and stealing images from other websites.
Avoid redirecting users to other pages through refresh meta tags- don’t send visitors to other pages even before they click on the web page link.

15. What are the characteristics of “bad links”?

Bad links are:

Links from sites unrelated to your sites.
Links from low page rank and low traffic.
Links from link exchanges.
Links from sites not in Google index.
Paid links.
Spammy links from blogs or articles.

Those were some of the basic digital marketing questions often asked in interviews. Knowing your stuff is very important in cracking any interview. But apart from being able to answer all these digital marketing questions correctly, there can be some effective tips you could use to stand apart from other candidates. Let’s take a look at those now.

Tips to Nail Your Next Digital Marketing Interview

Tips to nail your next digital marketing interview

Tip 1: Research! Research! Research the company’s website/social media channels and try to critique it.

The interviewers would mostly want to know whether you have checked out the company’s website and social profiles. He may ask you questions like “What do you know about the company?’ or a question like “Why do you want to join the company?”This would be to understand how effectively you have researched the company and to know your perspective and insights. This is a very good opportunity for you as well to present to them the research you have done

While doing your research about the company try to answer the following things:
How your experience and skills match the job role or company?
What are the goals of the company and how you can contribute to them?
How the brand is currently doing in its digital marketing areas like social media strategies, SEO and other areas?

Giving suggestions and recommendations on improving the company’s digital marketing strategy, say on how to improve the company’s social media presence, is a great way to prove to them the research you have done as well as showcase your marketing skills. Give valuable points only and just stay away from comments like “It is a very good company or website”. Anyone would just know that you are bluffing.

Tip 2: Have a perfect online presence

A perfect online presence is an indication that you know how to market yourself. AdWeek Survey says that 93% of employers check out their candidate’s social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter before or after the interview process. Out of this 47% check once they receive the CV, 27% after the first round of interview, 15% after the second round of interview and 4% after making the job offer. So its really worth to put some effort into creating social media profiles with all the relevant and updated details.

LinkedIn profiles without a profile picture, public tweets with obscene language, or facebook blogs that had not been updated for years can be a little alarming to employers if they come across them. You should never neglect the importance of being active in social media, especially when you are applying for a digital marketing job which requires you to demonstrate extraordinary social skills and capability to engage people online. So, do spend some time on social media profiles especially your LinkedIn profile which is one of the profiles most of the employers look up first and thus can do a lot in making that great first impression.

Tip 3: Demonstrate your passion for the job and prove your marketing skills.

One thing every employer will be expecting from candidates is a genuine passion to do a specific job. Because having a passion to do something means you are more willing to take risks to get it done. One of the best things about digital marketing is that it is quite easy to showcase your passion and skills as you can just go ahead and create your own website/portfolio. For example, you can create your own blog to showcase your content creating and SEO skills and promote them in social media to prove yourself to be a social media marketer already. This not only showcases your marketing skills but also demonstrates your ability to take initiatives.

Tip 4: Tell your achievement stories with details

You can stand out among the other candidates by telling a few selected stories from your career highlighting your achievements and ability to succeed in the role. For this, go through the job requirements, see how you have handled those tasks in your previous jobs and if you have done some exceptional achievements in any of the areas. Say, one of the job requirements is to improve search engine ranking, mention how you have done this in your previous job and how well you could do it. And whenever mentioning achievements try to give exact figures like KPIs so that it sounds convincing enough. Listing out your achievements related to the job is a great way to show the employer that you are a reliable and proven candidate for the job instead of anyone else.

Tip 5: Be comfortable with analytics.

As a digital marketer, there is no way of getting away without knowing some measurement and analytics. Every digital marketer out there would have to use Google analytics or any other analytics tool out there to measure digital marketing efforts- social media or website or youtube or email whatever digital media you work on. In digital marketing, optimization is mostly based on measurements from the analytics tools and interpreting insights from those values. You can show examples of your previous work and how your inputs made a difference in the results.

Tip 6: The classic job interview tips for any interview applies to digital marketing job interviews as well.

Well, a digital marketing job is considered to be less formal. But these classic interview tips apply to any interview and digital marketing interview is no exception.

Greet everyone professionally and politely to create a good first impression.
Dress professionally and portray yourself as someone serious about the opportunity.
Arrive on time and never miss any important documents like CVs and certificates.
Speak clearly, confidently and always maintain eye contact and good posture.

Those were some of the efficient tips that we had to share with candidates who are looking forward to their upcoming digital marketing interview. Read more tips to kick start a digital marketing career on our blog on How to become a digital marketing specialist.

Expert Tip

Also, check out the video below to hear from one of the world’s most successful digital marketers today- Neil Patel, some of the digital marketing interview tips.

Conclusion

With all this information about the basic digital marketing interview questions and tips, I hope you should be good to go for your interview now! And if you want more information on which career path to chose in digital marketing you can read my other blog on Digital marketing career path. All the very best to grab your dream job! If you have any more questions about preparing for a digital marketing interview or any digital marketing interview questions which you want more information on leave a comment below.

October 31, 2019/0 Comments/by dhanya arumughom