Marketing Advice That Matters
As an interviewer, you need to ask questions that allow you to uncover the strengths and weakness of the candidate you are interviewing. You are not going to achieve your objective by asking rudimentary questions. To help you achieve your recruiting goals, we have compiled a list of the top ten toughest marketing interview questions to test your marketing talent.
1. Which Marketing Method Is Best- Education-Based Marketing or Selling Based Marketing?
There is a fine line between sales and marketing and this question would help you identify if the candidate is from marketing or sales domain. The right answer to this question is education-based marketing.
Education based marketing gives the customers what they want – advice and information. This helps them take the right purchase decision. Selling based marketing is more likely to fail as it is designed with the sole purpose of selling.
2. How Would You Ensure the Money Used in a Marketing Campaign Is Not Wasted on Targeting the Wrong Audience?
The candidate should ask questions to get a clear idea about the target audience. After you define your target audience, the candidate should be able to mention different ways to reach the target audience. Some ideal ways to reach the target audience can be PPC, social advertising, direct mail, display ads in trade publications, feature articles, and even tv and radio spots.
3. Have You Worked in Sales?
If the candidate has worked in Sales, it is a plus point. Only a person who has worked in sales would know how people make buying decisions that would ultimately help in creating effective marketing strategies.
4. Do You like to Work Alone or in a Team?
This question is aimed to know more about the personality and the preferred method of completing a task. There is no right answer for this question and you need to evaluate the answer on a case-by-case scenario basis. Different situations may require the marketer to work alone while some situations may need efforts from all members of the team.
5. How Do You Measure Marketing Success?
This is one of the marketing interview questions that give you an opportunity to discuss tools that are useful in the day-to-day job duties. For example, for online marketing, you can ask the candidate if he/she is familiar with Google Analytics and with metric acronyms like CPA, CPC, and CTR.
6. What Is Your Biggest Marketing Failure?
Majority of marketing candidates face failure at some point in their career but many would not be willing to talk about it. Some marketing failures come due to personality conflicts while some come due to lack of experience.
Only genuine candidates would accept failures or show the readiness to take responsibility for it. Try to find out the reasons behind failures, what went wrong, what the candidate did to put things in place.
7. If Your Marketing Campaign Does Not Work, What Could Be the Reasons Behind It?
This can be a follow-up question for candidates who tell they have not met failures in their marketing careers. The answer to this question will help you determine whether the candidate would take responsibility for his efforts or put blame on someone else.
8. What Do You Know About the Role You Are Applying For?
Each marketing role is different, and its success is measured differently. The candidate should have complete knowledge about the job profile and the responsibilities related to it. You need to ensure the candidate can live up to your expectations.
9. Which social media channels do you have experience with?
Find out if the candidate has proven experience in social media marketing on popular channels Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you are looking for something with a younger demographic, look for candidates that have had success with platforms like Reddit or Snapchat.
10. What Kind of Management Style Do You Prefer?
Some marketers prefer hands-on-style with a lot of direction while some like to be given their space to work. You need to look for a candidate who knows how to stay composed, professional, and diplomatic in different situations.
These are some of the toughest marketing interview questions that would help you get more visibility of the candidate’s skills and personality and help you select the best candidate for your next marketing role.
Whether you run an established business or a startup, marketing is the most important function of your business. You want to have the best marketing team that can attract customers and increase your sales. The success of your company depends largely on the quality of your marketing team and its ability to attract new customers, and retain old ones. However, you may not have the time, resources, or the expertise to pick the right marketing team for your business. If you need quality marketing professionals, approaching professional recruiters such as marketing staffing agencies is your best option.
As full time recruiters, marketing staffing companies help businesses by providing them the best of the marketing professionals from around the country. They have experienced industry veterans onboard who can find, and vet the top talents and offer them to your business.
With the help of marketing recruitment companies, you can find quality talent at short notice and on flexible terms that helps you save money, time, and efforts on recruitment. However, you will have to make sure you work with the right agency that has the experience and expertise to help you hire the perfect marketing team.
Tips to choosing the right marketing staffing agency for your business:
• Business requirements: Before you go shopping for a marketing staffing agency, you need to have a clear understanding of your business requirements. You need to find answers to questions such as, what level of marketing expertise your business/ project requires or if your business requires permanent staff, contract hires or temporary to permanent hires.
• Research the recruitment industry: Once you have a clear understanding of your business requirements you need to understand how the recruitment industry, especially how marketing staffing agencies work. Having an overview of the industry and its working style helps you save time by avoiding companies that are not reputable.
• Check the agency expertise: Once you have shortlisted the probable agencies to approach for your recruitment needs, you need to check if the agencies offer talents for your line of business. Some agencies offer staff for any business, while some specialize in providing talents to only a specific industry, or specialized skills. If you are looking for professionals with special skills or your business requires the services of specialists you need to approach an agency that offers specialists.
• Services offered: Make sure the agency offers the kind of staff you need. Your current project may require contract hire, so make sure the agency offers staff on contract hire basis. It is also important that you work with an agency that can also manage your future requirements of any nature. In the future, you may require permanent or temporary to permanent staff, so make sure the agency offers flexible staffing options.
• Pricing: Pricing is a very important factor in making buying decisions. Similarly, when shopping around for recruitment services, prices these agencies charge is an important factor to consider. You need to select an agency that offers quality staffing solutions to your business at competitive prices.
In addition to the above factors, you also need to check if the agency offers value added services such as onboarding, background checks, etc., if they do, do they charge an additional fee.
A good content is the winner everywhere. Well thought-of and well-written content is inevitable for the success of your organization. This matters even more when you are into publishing. As a publisher, you may not have the necessary resources who can help you in developing the content for your next work. A content development company can come to your aid in such an instance. When outsourcing to publishing agencies that provides content development services, here are a few things to look out for.
What kind of content do they develop?
As a publisher, you would need to work with different kinds of content – books, journals, test assessments, reports, websites, DVDs, or a combination of all of these. The company that you outsource the work to, has to be comfortable and competent in the format of the content that you are looking to develop. An agency that is well-versed in handling all kinds of content needs is definitely a blessing, and can lead to a fruitful, long-term relationship.
What stages of content development are they involved in?
The publishing task needs the content or manuscript to move through different stages before it can actually be published. These could be the early writing or editorial process, the pre-production, production, and the final product. A good content development company is able to handle not one, but all of these stages without difficulties. They liaise with you, as well the writer(s), the editorial team, and the other members involved, to move the work seamlessly through all stages. They fix planning meetings to establish production plans for the upcoming publication. They work with the authors and the editorial team on content improvements, and establish a workflow that gives you the best publishing results. The developmental editors evaluate the manuscript, suggest improvements to the writing, and create an editorial style for the new publication. Content developers conduct manuscript surveys, and compile the results into a final report that helps fine-tune the copy. Once all stages are complete, they generate a complete manuscript for production, ensuring all elements for manuscript submission are included.
What is their experience?
A good content development company is definitely not a newbie in the business. They have to their credit, years of experience not just in content development, but also in copyediting, editorial proofreading, and maybe even publishing. They serve as the ideal resource for all aspects of the publishing process.
What other tasks do they help with?
While the actual task of such an agency is to develop copy and manuscripts, they may also step in to help with other tasks in the publishing process. These could be:
Content development companies can be a big boon to publishers, especially those who lack sufficient talent or infrastructure to get along with their new publishing project. Such agencies comprise of teams with highly qualified and experienced people, who can not only create copies and manuscripts, but also help in managing and running the project end to end.
