If you are preparing to interview for your first marketing job, you may wonder what your interviewer will ask. That’s why Stukent collected interview questions from hiring and marketing managers all over the country — their insights may help you ace your interview and land your first job!
Hiring managers want to see examples of your passion, your creativity, and your experience. Our experts say they ask aspiring marketers questions like, “What are five things you can do with duct tape?” or “What changes do you see in the marketing landscape over the next few years?” Plus, our experts will tell you why they ask the questions they do.
Want to see more? Read on to discover 12 questions you may hear during a marketing interview!
- What are five things you can do with duct tape?
- What was your most successful campaign?
- How do you handle a new product’s launch?
- How do you center your storytelling on the product?
- How do you stay up-to-date with marketing trends?
- How would you handle a tricky marketing situation?
- What should we tell the world?
- What is the most challenging incident in your career?
- How do you respond to negative customer feedback?
- How can you improve our marketing strategy?
- What are your key indicators in developing marketing strategies?
- What changes do you see in the marketing landscape over the next few years?
1. What Are Five Things You Can Do with Duct Tape?
My favorite part of an in-person interview is when I hand a candidate a roll of duct tape and ask, “What are five things you can do with this roll of duct tape?”
Marketers have the responsibility of talking about a product or service 52 times a year if they’re doing weekly social media posts or blog articles. A good marketer needs to find different ways to talk about that product or service in a way that’s fresh and meaningful to a customer. My duct tape interview question is meant to measure a candidate’s ability to be creative and innovative when it comes to marketing any product or service. If a candidate can’t think of five things to do with a universally usable product like duct tape, then they may be challenged to market something more difficult, like credit repair or B2B software.
Brett Farmiloe, Terkel
2. What Was Your Most Successful Campaign?
One of the best and most telling questions is to ask them to describe your most successful campaign. As a follow-up [question], ask them why it was effective and what role they played in the campaign. This question will give them the floor to describe how they approach a project, analyze success, and [showcase] their strengths. Well-thought-out questions are crucial to gaining insights into candidates.
Sumeer Kaur, Lashkaraa
3. How Do You Handle a New Product’s Launch?
[With this question,] the focus shifts to your workflow and how you put your identified talents into practice. This is your chance to shine. Make sure to emphasize how you approach a campaign from conception to post-event debriefing, as well as your long-term marketing goals. Use detailed examples from your previous experiences whenever possible. Mention any accomplishments you’ve had, such as when you’ve effectively improved your processes and any logic guiding you through the process. Mention the portions of the process you enjoy the most and the areas where you are trying to gain more experience. This will give your interviewer a better understanding of your objectives. This is also an excellent opportunity to consider whether this position will allow you to excel in the areas you enjoy and develop the talents you want to improve.Salvador Ordorica, The Spanish Group
4. How Do You Center Your Storytelling on the Product?
“How do you place a product at the center of your storytelling?” This is an important question to ask when hiring a marketing professional. Storytelling is a crucial part of bringing any product to market. Products are often inanimate or [are] an abstract service. [Products and services] cannot speak for themselves, so marketers need to do the storytelling.
It is key for marketers to tell an engaging story to consumers without understating the product. Good marketers have the ability to capture an audience’s attention while placing the product at the center of a center. It is important to ask how an individual places the product at the center of their storytelling when considering them for a marketing position.
Liza Kirsh, DYMAPAK
5. How Do You Stay Up-to-Date with Marketing Trends?
I ask this question to gauge how passionate and intentional they are about growing as a marketer. How much self-directed learning do they do? What you’re looking for in their answer is a sense of excitement. Are they able to easily rattle off a bunch of newsletters they follow, experts they follow on social media, communities they’re a part of, and events they’ve attended? Do they have to stretch to come up with a few blogs they remember reading? Or does most of their learning come from their current employer?
The actual content of their answer is less important than how excited they are about the question.
Eric Doty, Butter
6. How Would You Handle a Tricky Marketing Situation?
I usually ask the candidates how they would handle a tricky marketing situation. The best way to do this is to give them a scenario and ask them to describe how they would handle it. [The situation] can be anything from an online sale that isn’t going through to a customer who has taken their time deciding on their purchase, or even a direct-mail campaign that just isn’t working out. I find that the answers are usually surprising and sometimes hilarious! From these answers, I can usually tell if the candidate is a quick thinker or an experienced problem solver.
Arthur Worsley, The Art Of Living
7. What Should We Tell the World?
“What do you see as the most important thing for the public to know about us?” Asking this question serves multiple purposes: first, you’ll gain an understanding of the candidate’s company knowledge. Second, you’ll discover whether or not you concur with the potential hire’s ideas. Third — and most importantly — it’s beneficial for all hires to be in alignment with your company’s ideals and mission, especially those who might market said mission to the public!
Erin Banta, Pepper
8. What Is the Most Challenging Incident in Your Career?
“What was the most challenging work-related incident that they have faced till now? How did they overcome the challenge or what did they learn from it?” These questions summarize how much people have learned from their past experiences and how they apply critical thinking. … [These questions] help me assess the candidate’s knowledge and decide whether they can make hard decisions. This is often the make-or-break question in a lot of interviews, and I expect genuine answers, even if the challenges are not complex or unique.
Swapnil Pate, Puppy Data
9. How Do You Respond to Negative Customer Feedback?
Ask them how they would respond to negative customer feedback. Candidates have to be willing to address negative reviews. How they answer the question demonstrates how well they know our customer base and brand mission. Marketing is often proactive, as it increases brand awareness, but excellent marketers know how to respond to challenges and improve their approach based on feedback.
Alexandra Fennell, Attn: Grace
10. How Can You Improve Our Marketing Strategy?
This question helps us identify how familiar the candidate is with our company and the way we do things. [We get to know more about] their vision, experience, and what they can offer to our company. It also gives them a chance to spot where our problems are, highlight any bottlenecks, and offer possible solutions or directions they would like to take.
As a marketer, it is important that candidates show interest, do their research, have a vision for our company, and help us understand how our company can benefit from their marketing experience.
Nicole Thelin, Low Income Relief
11. What Are Your Key Indicators in Developing Marketing Strategies?
This is a go-to question I ask to determine a marketing professional’s competency for the job. I like to know what goals they have previously set for their clients and whether it’s sales revenue, customer engagement, or brand awareness. They should share how they reached those goals and monitored the success of each metric. Their answers will demonstrate their professional know-how and the specific skills they have for marketing success.
Max Hauer, Goflow
12. What Changes Do You See in The Marketing Landscape Over The Next Few Years?
I’ll always ask “What changes do you see in the marketing landscape over the next few years, and what implications do you think these will have on our marketing strategy?”
In addition to being a nice, broad question, it also gives the candidate the opportunity to demonstrate three things: their understanding of the current marketing landscape (which is a great barometer for how up-to-date their knowledge and understanding is); their understanding of how marketing is evolving (which reveals how well they stay abreast of new developments and opportunities); that they have understood our needs and priorities as a business (which gives insight into how well they have researched our organization specifically).
I’ve always found this question to be very revealing, and our best marketing hires have always had insightful and interesting answers to it.
Monika Kohutova, Pearl Scan
If someone asked you these questions during an interview, how would you respond? Practice makes perfect, and considering your answers to these questions can prepare you to feel more confident in an interview. Good luck with you job search!
For more resources for job seekers, check out the “12 Tips on How to Stand Out in a Competitive Job Market as a College Graduate” post.