If you’re reading this, then congratulations! You’ve made it to the interview stage in your job search. Now comes the hard part!

Of course if you’ve got an interview lined up, there’s nothing to stop you working with a digital recruitment consultant. Our Herd recruiters give their candidates advice on how to navigate the interview process as well as help them secure other job opportunities. If you’re applying for your next digital role, you should make sure that your CV is helping you stand out and securing you those interviews with our digital marketing CV guide here.

The first step to acing your interview is researching the digital marketing interview questions you will face. We coach digital marketing professionals like yourself through the interview process every day here. And because we work directly with clients to find the candidates they want, it means we know exactly who and what they’re looking for. And we’re here to pass what we’ve learned directly on to you.

The 3 Different Types of Digital Marketing Interview Questions

We’ve found from our experience that digital marketing interview questions are generally broken down into a few different groups of questions. 

1. The cultural fit interview questions.
2. Questions about your experience and background.
3. Technical digital marketing questions about your specific area of expertise.

How many of each type of question you face can depend on the stage of the interview you are at, and the position you are applying for. For example:

1. In a 1st stage interview you’re more likely to face general interview questions and questions about your experience in digital marketing. These can often be less formal, and are the “get to know you” stage of the process.

2. The in-depth, technical digital marketing questions would likely be reserved for 2nd or 3rd stage interviews, when you’ve passed the initial stage and met the requirements in terms of experience. Then they will look to find out if you have the technical skills to be able to complete the role.

In the 2nd or 3rd stage you are likely to be given a task to complete as well. These are designed to provide evidence of your technical skills, experience, and understanding of the business you’re applying for.

3. If you’re applying for a specialist or senior position then you are likely to be asked to demonstrate your expertise to a greater degree. If you’re an SEO Specialist your interview process is less likely to be focused on your background, and more likely to focus heavily on the breadth and depth of your SEO skills.

But let’s have a look at the reason why you’re here, some examples of common digital marketing interview questions and the answers.

5 Cultural Fit Interview Questions

While these questions aren’t as technical as the ones that follow, they’re just as important. These kinds of questions aim to give the interviewers some information about your attitudes and values; to make sure that you’re a cultural fit for the business.

1. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
2. Can you give me an example of a time you’ve had to beat the competition? How did you do it?
3. What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced to date?
4. What is your biggest strength and your biggest weakness?
5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

A lot of people don’t believe these questions are as important as the later questions on our list. But they are. 92% of Senior Management consider company culture as a driving force behind their business, and as one of their most valuable assets. Read here to find out just how important company culture is to hiring managers.

5 Digital Marketing Background Questions

These questions are designed to help the interviewer assess your background and experience: your certifications, the software and tools you can use and the channels and verticals you have worked on

1. What digital marketing tools do you have experience with?
2. What do you think is the most important skill for the position you are applying for?
3. Can you tell us about your most successful campaign to date? And why was it so successful?
4. And what has been your least successful campaign? Why did it fail, and what did you learn?
5. What do you think is going to be the biggest change in the digital marketing industry in the coming year?

5 Technical Digital Marketing Interview Questions

These are the questions that will delve deep into your skills and give your interviewer an accurate idea of if you have the technical capabilities to do the job at hand. The candidates we work with tell us these are typically the most complicated questions and hardest to answer, which means these are also the most important to prepare yourself for.

1. What experience do you have creating, and working with digital marketing budgets?
2. Tell us about a time where you had a disagreement with someone else in your team, on campaign strategy for example. How did you resolve this disagreement?
3. What experience do you have working with clients: From new business acquisition, to translating client aims into actionable outputs, to reporting campaign results to clients?
4. How do you know when a campaign you’re working on is not successful? And what did you do after recognising this?
5. What steps did you take to identify your target audience? And what were your next steps after you had decided who to target?

Digital Marketing Interview Questions and Answers Examples

Here are some common interview questions that our candidates hear all the time, why the interviewer asks them, and how you should answer.

What steps did you take to identify your target audience? And what were your next steps after you had decided who to target?

This tells an interviewer how you approach a project or new campaign, and that you understand the importance of each step. If you’re applying for a senior position, they may be seeing how well you delegate tasks as well.

Example: “In my previous role I created buyer personas from scratch by reaching out to customers and asking for feedback. This meant collaborating with the sales team to send out questionnaires and arrange some over the phone interviews. I used this feedback and research to create adverts that were better targeted at our ideal audience. This improved the businesses ROAS by 30% in the first 6 months.”

Tell us about a time where you had a disagreement with someone else in your team, on campaign strategy for example. How did you resolve this disagreement?

This one is a bit more clear on what your interviewer is trying to find out: How do you handle conflict in the workplace, whether it’s with a subordinate, colleague or a superior?

Example: “On a previous paid social campaign I worked on, we held a brainstorming session on campaign strategy. Myself and a colleague disagreed on which platforms and channels would be best use of the limited budget we were working with. We both argued our case and had valid arguments. So we decided to run A/B tests on both channels, to find out which was better. This led to the most efficient use of the budget, and gave us the greatest ROAS.”

What digital marketing tools, software, platforms or channels do you have experience with?

While a lot of this will be on your CV, your interviewer may still ask this question to get an idea of the full range of your technical skill set. This lets them know if you’re right for the position, and if there is any extra training you may require.

Example: “As my specialty is in content marketing, I have extensive experience in SEMrush that I use for keyword research, competitor analysis, and content gap analysis. For technical SEO I also use SEMrush and Screaming Frog for Site and Backlink audits. For social media I used Hootsuite for scheduling posts and developing reports on engagement and effectiveness of social media campaigns.

Can you tell us about your most successful campaign to date. Why was it so successful?

This question is designed not for you to show how you measure success for your campaigns. What were the goals of the campaign? Did the results you achieve align with what you expected to see? And did you learn anything from it that you could use to recreate this success?

Example: “My most successful campaign to date was a paid social campaign for a client who was looking to launch a brand new product. We used the audience research they had already conducted in their development process to create adverts that targeted their ideal audience’s pain points. Because we had this head start, we managed to beat their initial target and beat their revenue goals by 130%.

How do you know when a campaign you’re working on is not successful? And what did you do after recognising this?

Questions like this are designed to let your interviewer know about a time a campaign or your work failed to meet the desired expectations, and how you reacted to it. It’s important you show professional growth and detail what you learned from your failure.

Example: “I worked on the paid search section of a large, multi-channel campaign for an international client. The results weren’t as good as I predicted to see, and the client wasn’t impressed. After I reviewed the adverts that were being run, I realised that the different departments’ adverts weren’t aligned in their message, or with the landing pages on the client’s site. After I tweaked the landing pages and adverts to broadcast a more consistent message across the different channels, I saw an increase in the ROAS and clients were happier. This demonstrated to me the importance of communicating effectively with other departments, especially on a multi-channel campaign.”

Researching the common digital marketing interview questions is a great way to prepare yourself. But it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to prepare yourself for every conceivable question you’ll face in your digital marketing interview. 

Which is why techniques like the STAR interview technique are 

Using the STAR Interview Response Technique

Focus on your achievements, and structure your answers using the STAR interview technique. STAR stands for Situation – Task – Action – Result, and is a useful method to answer those difficult, situational questions that interviewers love to ask. 

Situation

Setting the scene about a specific instance of your experience that relates your answer to the interviewer’s question.

Example: “In my first role I was responsible for taking control of a company’s content writing and organic traffic. They had been posting irregular blogs that were gaining low amounts of traffic.

Task

Next you need to describe your responsibilities in the situation. What was your responsibilities?

Example: “As I was now responsible for the content marketing of the business, it was my job to research and write blogs and social media posts that would generate traffic for the website.”

Action

Here you should go into more detail, offering an in-depth description of the actions you took to complete your task. What was your plan of action, and how did you execute it to find success?

Example: “I created audience persona research by speaking to customers; finding out their problems and how best our products could solve them. I then combined these audience personas with keyword research to identify keywords to target and articles to write. I then created a content plan and began writing regular blogs for the clients website.”

Result

This is one of the most important areas, as it shows the impact of your work, what you achieved and what you learned.

Example: “By conducting extensive research and planning out content beforehand, I was able to build up a pipeline of quality content that satisfied customer needs and increased traffic to the businesses site by 300% in the first year.”

For a more in-depth guide on how to use the STAR technique, see the video below to better prepare yourself for your digital marketing interview questions.

Digital Marketing Interview Question Tips

We support the candidates we work with through the full length of their job search process. This means helping prepare our candidates with the questions to expect, as well as digital marketing specific and general interview tips. 

If you’re interviewing at a digital agency, there are a few things that your interviewer will be looking for. 

• They want someone they can trust to work closely with clients, to own those relationships and represent the company. 
• And to hopefully grow those accounts, create new business opportunities and bring in more revenue. 

Naming the clients you’ve worked on can impress an interviewer. But what will impress them more, is the results of the work you did. So prepare yourself to talk about the work you’ve done as well as how you increased revenue for your agency. This could be upselling, suggestions to lower costs, cross selling, or new business acquisition.

Similarly for an in-house role, they will be more concerned about how your work impacted their bottom line. How have you increased their revenue? How have you reduced costs? 

Increasing the traffic by X amount is great to show your skill, but what impact did you have on the revenue for the business? And it’s a great time to mention any large projects that you worked on, site migrations or successful campaigns.

General Interview Tips For Success

• Don’t sugarcoat your failures. Everyone has had campaigns that weren’t as successful as could be or clients that weren’t happy. Your interviewers will have too. But your interviewer wants to see what you learned from your failures. 
• If it’s a video or phone interview make sure you’ve got somewhere quiet to work with. Somwhere with a plain background where you can focus with no distractions.
• And download and sign up to any video conference software (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet etc.) before the interview. The last thing you want is to keep your interviewers waiting.
• Obviously for your interview you want to dress smart. But not too smart. Unless you’re interviewing for a senior role or at a corporate company, we would advise going with smart-casual. 
• And lastly, remember that you’re in that interview because you deserve to be there. The interviewer already likes the look of your CV and wants to learn more about you. So be confident and communicate clearly.

One of the best ways to prepare for your digital marketing interview is to work with a recruiter.

Here at Herd, our digital recruitment consultants coach the candidates we work with through every step of the interview process, and can offer advice on exactly what their clients want to hear. They can also offer insight into why previous potential candidates had failed to secure the job, making sure you don’t make the same mistake.

Of course, despite your best efforts, sometimes all the preparation in the world isn’t enough. Maybe there’s someone more qualified for the job. Or maybe they choose someone from within the business for the position. 

As digital recruitment experts, our advice is to make sure you’re aware of all the options available. A great place to start is by having a look at our open vacancies here, to see if we have any positions that sound right for you.