Interview Question Guide

Digital Marketing Specialist

A Digital Marketing Specialist promotes an organization’s brand, products and services through developing and implementing marketing programs within appropriate technology platforms. They conduct market research and analyze trends in both the needs of the consumer market and advertising consumption to inform the organization’s marketing strategy. Digital Marketing Specialists are responsible for activities across the online marketing funnel including SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, PPC, SEM, marketing, corporate communications among others. Through collaboration with sales and design teams, Digital Marketing Specialists create and maintain a profitable message about the organization as well as a strong connection with their audience. Performing this role requires not only a proficiency in digital marketing practices and processes but also excellent organizational skills, strong attention to detail and communication skills.

Core skills for Digital Marketing Specialists

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Content Creation

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Social Media

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Creativity

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Critical Thinking

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Organizational Skills

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SEO

How to effectively interview Digital Marketing Specialists

While it might seem difficult to figure out whether a candidate will succeed as a Digital Marketing Specialist in your company, a well-developed set of interview questions that tap into the core skills required to perform in a Digital Marketing Specialist role will go a long way in helping you decide. 

But where do you start? How do you develop a set of great interview questions? 

The best interview questions come directly from a job analysis. A job analysis is an evidence-based method that focuses on assessing key features of a particular role. These features describe both the job itself (i.e., tasks, responsibilities, and performance objectives), and the characteristics required of someone to perform successfully in the job (e.g., knowledge, skills, and abilities). A job analysis forms the basis of many HR practices such as compensation, performance management, and - you guessed it - how to interview and hire candidates. 

At Hireguide, we’ve done the job analysis work for you. We’ve used the method to identify a core set of skills associated with the Digital Marketing Specialist role, and we’ve developed and validated a list of behavioral and situational questions with answer guides that tap directly into those core skills. And that’s not all. We’ve compiled these questions and created a Digital Marketing Specialist Interview Template for you that integrates other interviewing best practices. Skills-based interviews will not only help you make higher quality and evidence-based hiring decisions, but research also shows they enhance fairness and reduce bias in your hiring process. 

Example questions to ask

Question 1

With so much content and information online, what are your strategies in creating engaging content that attracts users and drives lead conversion?

Answer Tips

  • Discusses how to understand what customers need/want (e.g. keyword research)
  • Discusses creating genuinely helpful, relevant and interesting content
  • Discusses always adding something unique to a topic - not just repeating others
  • Discusses creating compelling headlines that intrigue the target audience
  • Discusses making the content visually enticing and easy to read

Question 2

Tell me about a time you led/participated in a marketing campaign and demonstrated your skills in social media management.

Answer Tips

  • Clearly describes the scenario and their role in the campaign
  • Shows knowledge of managing different channels (e.g. Facebook versus Instagram)
  • Covers content strategies (analyzes audience, tailors content, monitors, etc.)
  • Recognizes the advantages/characteristics of different social media platforms
  • Exhibits an awareness of the unique characteristics of the target audience

Question 3

In your opinion, what are the most important signals to search engines (such as Google) when ranking content? What would you suggest to our company to improve our SEO strategies?

Answer Tips

  • Lists having a technically sound site, rich content and quality backlinks
  • Discusses the major algorithm updates (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Bert, etc.)
  • Discusses black hat tactics to avoid (keyword stuffing, dodgy backlinks, etc.)
  • Provides valuable insights into how the company could utilize SEO strategies
  • Shows up-to-date knowledge of current ranking factors

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