What digital marketing interview questions should you be asking when you want to hire a digital marketer? You already know how critical your marketing team is. They can make or break your business. Yet, finding and hiring top talent is challenging, especially with so much competition from leading companies.
Making a bad hire for your marketing team is a mistake you can’t afford. According to recruitment statistics, a bad hire can cost up to five times the candidate’s salary.
That’s why, as a hiring manager, you must take the hiring process for this role seriously ranging from interviews to onboarding.
We understand that hiring the right marketer isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve put together these digital marketing interview questions and answers to help you make the best hire.
Ready to explore the top digital marketing interview questions?
Before we go in.
Remember that the best digital marketers are not the ones qualified to just do the job. You should also look forward to hiring people who will fit into your company culture: people passionate about digital marketing and who can help the company achieve its goals.
Check out digital marketing jobs in Nigeria
If you want to hire a great digital marketing team member, your approach needs to be different.
Hiring a digital salesperson is quite different from hiring for other positions. One strategy we’ve adopted when hiring digital marketers is to interview candidates based on two broad categories:
Role Fit: Here, we assess their competence by asking digital marketing-related interview questions, case interview questions, and more.
Cultural Fit: Here, we ask traditional interview questions, behavioural interview questions, and other questions to check their critical thinking and see if they align with the company’s culture and values.
In addition to these competency-based questions, we also include case-style questions that allow candidates to demonstrate how they approach and solve problems.
This is one of the most important questions to ask your potential digital marketer. By asking this question, you’ll have the opportunity to gauge the candidate’s ability to use tools that are crucial for the day-to-day operations of the business. This will also help you understand which metrics they consider most important to track and monitor.
Additionally, this question will reveal your prospective hire’s software expertise and their familiarity with other tools that may be relevant for the role.
The candidate should be able to list some common digital marketing software and explain their relevance while answering this question. Examples of such tools include:
HubSpot CRM + Sales Pro
ActiveCampaign
Marketo
Act-On
GetResponse
Sample Answer:
“Aside from using Google Analytics for web traffic analysis, I also use other tools like HubSpot CRM + Sales Pro, Active Campaign, Marketo, Act-on, and GetResponse. I use other tools to approach my marketing from different angles.”
This is an important question to ask a candidate, especially if you want to grow the visibility of your website. This question will help you assess whether the candidate understands what keyword streaming is all about.
Your prospective hire should be able to give a response like this:
“Keyword streaming is about analyzing relevant keywords considering the audience of a website. It involves evaluating a particular keyword for a website based on its target audience to generate organic traffic and leads through those keywords. Keyword streaming is helpful for search engine optimisation.”
From this response, you can see that the candidate was able to explain what keyword research is and highlight the importance of keyword streaming in conducting keyword research. This is the type of response you should expect from a prospective hire.
Asking this question will help you understand the candidate’s strategies for achieving results, as well as how those strategies can be incorporated into your business to enhance your marketing efforts.
This question will also help you gauge the candidate’s research abilities and how they make judgments. It will give you insight into whether the candidate’s ideas align with accepted standards.
The candidate’s answer should explain how they identify keywords to rank for and why they believe ranking for those keywords is important in the first place.
You should expect a response like this from your prospective hire:
“To determine the keyword I want to rank for, first of all, I understand my niche and audience. Having a good understanding of that, I use some tools like Uber suggest to look for keywords that I would love to rank for.
I look for keywords that have high search volumes because it means that many people are searching using that keyword.
I look for keywords that have high paid difficulty; which means that the keyword is valuable that a lot of people are competing for the paid ad spots. It also means that the increased traffic you get from this keyword may like lead to an increase in revenue.
I also look out for keywords that have a low SEO difficulty score; this means that the keyword can rank easily.
Once my keyword meets these two requirements, it means that it will be easy for me to rank top 20 from web search.”
Asking this question will help you know if the candidate is process or result-oriented. Before you can measure performance, you must have a goal you set to achieve with a particular campaign. This question will help you understand how the candidate sets goals and what success means to them.
This question will also help you know if your KPI for the role matches that of the candidate.
The candidate’s response should be something like this:
“I start measuring my performance by setting goals which align with the company's business objective. After I have set goals I would love to achieve, I will go ahead and do the following:
I usually create a time frame for myself so that I can track the result. Then I would create a measurement template that would compare the initial result with what you want to achieve. I check the growth of the overall website traffic, from where it used to be to where it is after my campaign. I also check the conversion rate. I always set a time frame for my KPI using OKR, because it helps me measure my performance easily.”
As a hiring manager, you should look forward to hiring someone passionate about digital marketing.
This question will help you know if the candidate is a passionate digital marketer or not. There is no particular kind of response to this question, you should look forward to seeing the candidate’s enthusiasm and passion for digital marketing.
A good response may look like this:
“I have always loved to teach people and help people get the information that they may be searching for. As I began to grow in my career, I discovered that digital marketing is a skill that can help me make information known to people, especially in this 21st century.
The fact that I can help people discover things that they are looking for is one thing that attracted me to digital marketing.”
This question will help you understand the challenges that the candidate have experienced, and if that kind of challenge shows up you would know how the candidate would handle it.
This question will also help you know if the candidate is prepared for other challenges that may arise in the cause of his task as a digital marketer.
A good answer would sound close to this;
“One challenge I encountered when I started digital marketing was making my post rank top on search engine. When I started, I knew that it was important to push my content to get traffic, but after a while I noticed that my post had good traffic, but I could not find them easily.
After a while, I understood that I had to concentrate on improving the domain authority of my website to rank better on search engine.”
When you are asking a candidate this question, you should look out for the strong points and weak points of the candidate.
This question will also help you know the rate of the candidate’s expertise in digital marketing.
A prospective hire’s answer should sound like this:
“Well, I will rate myself an eight because I value strong technical digital capabilities, but I know I have a lot of things that I would need to learn about digital marketing. My strongest digital marketing skills are in SEO and Social media marketing.”
This is one of the most important question you should ask a candidate. The candidate’s response to this question will help you know if the candidate has a good understanding of inbound marketing.
This question will also help you understand if the candidate is a good fit for your business especially if you want to concentrate on inbound marketing that will help you sell information that your audience will find useful.
You should expect this kind of answer from a good candidate;
“Inbound marketing is a business strategy that utilizes different marketing channels (content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media and more) to create brand awareness. Inbound marketing is focused on creating valuable content and experience that are tailored to your customers.
While outbound marketing may interrupt your audience with content they may not need, inbound marketing creates a connection that your audience are looking for. It also provides solutions to problems that your audience are searching for.”
This is one of the basic questiosn you should ask your prospective hire especially when you are recruiting for an entry level position.
An entry level digital marketer should at least understand what white hat SEO means. If the reputation of your company means so much to you, then you should consider hiring a digital marketer that understands the importance of white cate SEO to your brand.
This is how a good response should look like;
“In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, white hat SEO refers to the utilization of optimization strategies and techniques that focus on human audience and completely follows search engine rules and policies.
A website that is optimized for search engine, but concentrates on organic ranking is considered to be optimized using white hat SEO.
Examples of white hat SEO techniques includes using keyword analysis, back linking, link building, and content writing for human readers. White hat SEO practice is also referred to as ethical SEO.”
This question is one of the basic questions that you should ask a digital marketing candidate. The candidate’s response to this question will help you know if the candidate even understands the basics of digital marketing.
A good response should be within this frame;
“Googlebot is a web crawling software. Search bot is also known as spider or web crawler that gathers the web page information used to supply google search engine result pages (SERPS).
Googlebot collects documents from the web to build google search index. Since the web crawler gathers documents, the software discovers new pages and updates to existing pages.”
This is also a basic question to ask a beginner. This question will help you understand the candidate’s depth of digital marketing.
You should expect to get this response from a good candidate:
“Keywords are ideas, words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. They are also called search queries. If you merge everything on your web page down to simple words or phrases, then those words and phrases are regarded as your keywords.”
You should ask this question to determine whether the candidate understands what Google’s algorithm is, what it’s used for, and how it can impact your business. A digital marketer should be up to date on Google algorithms and the key ranking metrics.
A good response might sound like this:
“Google algorithms are complex systems used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking signals to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).”
This is a question that a digital marketer should be very familiar with. They should know about the Google Penguin algorithm, how it works, and its purpose.
A prospective hire’s response should sound something like this:
“Google Penguin is a set of algorithm updates initiated by Google to improve the quality of its search results for users. The main purpose of the Google Penguin update is to prevent various types of search engine spam, also known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, from achieving higher search rankings.”
This question will help you understand if the candidate has a good understanding of keyword in SEO. This question can also serve as a basic question to test the candidate’s digital marketing ability.
The candidate’s response should be something like this:
“Well, there is no one important place that I place keywords, but I place keywords in a number of ways of places that are important. I place keywords in the following places: Title Tag, URL, H1 Tag, Body Text, Image Name and Alt Attribute.”
With this question, you can determine if the candidate understands errors and the factors that may be responsible for them.
This question can also serve as a competency question to help you evaluate the candidate’s skills.
The candidate should be able to explain soft 404 errors in terms like this:
“A soft 404 error occurs when a web request returns a successful response code (200), but search engines like Google and Bing determine that the reply doesn’t contain the expected content. This often happens when there is an empty page with a tag.”
This question will help you determine if the candidate understands the fundamental aspects of digital marketing. The candidate should know what a sitemap is and how it’s used.
A good candidate’s response would be something like this:
“A sitemap is a file that lists the web pages of your site to inform search engines about the organization of your site’s content. Search engines read this file to crawl the site more intelligently. A sitemap can improve the crawling of a site, especially if it’s a large site with a lot of content. This is also known as an XML sitemap.”
This question will help you assess whether the candidate understands the basics of digital marketing and web strategies. The candidate should also be able to explain what the “hreflang attribute is and why it’s important.
A good sample response to look for would be:
“Hreflang is an HTML link or link tag attribute that tells search engines the relationship between pages in different languages on your website. Search engines use this attribute to serve the correct language URLs in their search results.”
This question will help you determine how well the candidate understands sitemaps and how they use them.
The candidate should be able to give you a response like this:
“When I want to create a sitemap, I basically follow this process:
a. I review the structure of the web pages to understand the overall content and layout.
b. I code the URLs of the pages, formatting each URL with XML tags so that each page corresponds to its proper code.
c. After coding the URLs, I validate them to ensure there are no errors in the sitemap.
d. I add the sitemap to the root folder and update the robots.txt file, which helps search engines discover the sitemap.
e. Finally, I submit the sitemap to search engines to ensure they can crawl and index the pages correctly.”
This is another basic question that you should ask a prospective digital marketer. The candidate should be able to explain what a canonical tag is.
A good candidate’s response would be something like this:
“A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the original copy of a page. It helps prevent problems caused by identical or duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs. Canonical tags basically tell search engines which version of a particular URL you want to appear in search results.”
This is another basic question that you should ask an entry-level digital marketer. Anyone who is serious about building a career in digital marketing should understand how URLs work. This question will help you assess the candidate’s understanding of URLs and redirection.
A good candidate’s response would be something like this:
“A permanent redirect is also called a 301 redirect. It’s a way to permanently redirect users and search engines from one URL to another. A 301 redirect sends site visitors and search engines to a URL that is different from the one they originally typed in their browser or selected from a search engine results page.
These redirects also help consolidate various URLs under a single authority, so that search engines can rank all of the addresses based on the site’s domain authority from inbound links.”
Just like the previous question, this question will also help you know to what level the candidate understands how URLs work.
This question also checks the candidates understanding or URLs and its overall effects on SEO.
The candidate should be able to give you a simple and direct response like this:
“a. A 301 redirect is used to permanently redirect users and search engines from one URL to another URL. 301 redirect is better for search engine because it transfers the inbound links from the redirected domain to a new one, which helps the website maintain its search rankings.
b. A 302 redirect is preferable in some few situations. When a web content needs to be moved temporarily e.g. If the site is undergoing maintenance and users need to be directed to a different domain where they can get their content. The 302 redirect will still help you serve and retain your customers while you may be trying to fix some things on the site.”
This question also forms the fundamentals of digital marketing. It is important for you to ask this question, so that you can understand the level of the candidate’s understanding of SEO fundamentals.
This question will help you set the basis for you to employ an entry-level or a digital marketing starter.
The candidate should be able to give a precise answer like this:
“Robot.txt tag is a text file that webmasters use to instruct search engine bots also known as crawlers, spiders, or robots on how to crawl and index web pages. A robot.txt file is placed in the top-level directory so that robots can assess instructions right away.
To communicate commands to different types of search crawlers, a robot.txt file has to follow specific standards featured in the Robots exclusion protocol.”
This question will help you gauge the candidate’s understanding of how Google’s web crawler works, as well as their grasp of basic web concepts like the robots.txt file.
A good candidate’s response might sound like this:
“When a page is disallowed using the robots.txt file, Google will likely remove that page from its index. However, using the robots.txt ‘disallow’ directive does not guarantee that a page will not appear in search results. Google may still crawl the page if it has external information, like incoming links that are relevant.
It’s important to understand that disallowing a page using the robots.txt file may not completely prevent Google from crawling the page, because Google still needs to crawl the page in order to see and obey the tag.”
This question will help you discover a candidate’s ability to use key digital marketing tools. This question will also help you assess a candidate’s technical abilities.
A candidate should be able to give you a clear definition of Google search console and its uses. Take a look at this sample answer:
“Google search console is one of the free services that is offered by Google that helps people monitor, maintain and check for issues on their site’s presence in Google search results.
Google search console helps people understand and improve how Google sees their site. “
The following are the importance of Google search console:
a. Helps view search traffic data of your site
b. It helps site owners confirm if Google can find and crawl their site
c. Helps site owners see other sites that link to their site
d. Help site owners fix indexing problems
e. Helps site owners troubleshoot issues for mobile usability and other search issues
This question will help you understand the candidate’s ability to think critically. This question will also help you analyze the candidate’s understanding of search bots.
The candidate’s explanation should be built around something like this:
“When a new website is set up, there are bots everywhere finding sites, and if GA is not set up properly, then you may see ‘fake traffic’. These traffic are not from prospective users, they are from bots.”
This question also forms a part of the basic questions that would assess a candidate’s understanding of digital marketing.
The candidate’s response should be something like this:
“It is popular for people to use robot.txt tag disallow: / to prevent a web page from being crawled, but this does not work all the time. The X-Robots-Tag or that meta robots tags are more effective.”
27. Your manager called you and told you traffic to the website has dropped by over 70% overnight. What would you do?
This question will help you understand the candidate’s critical thinking and problem solving ability. When you are recruiting a digital marketer, you should recruit someone that can think things through and provide a solution as soon as possible.
The candidate’s response should be something like this:
“If I notice that the traffic of my website has drop by 70% over night, then I know that it is a sharp drop. When I notice a sharp drop, these are the things that I do immediately:
a. I will use the google analytics tool to check the cause of the drop and look at the traffic
b. Then I will discover my traffic sources
c. Check if I am suffering from a penalty from google
d. I will take note of my new users and returning users to see if I am really suffering from a penalty if my content or web structure is not good enough
e. I will take a look at the time frame to see the best kind of solution I will need to adopt to solve the problem.
f. I will also make good use of Google Analytics web master’s tool to bring my site back to glory.”
Before launching or optimizing any ad campaign, it’s important to understand how to test different versions of your ads to see which performs better. This skill is crucial for improving click-through rates, conversions, and overall campaign ROI.
A junior digital marketer should be able to explain how to set up and analyze A/B tests effectively.
This is an example of a strong response:
“A/B testing in advertising involves creating two or more variations of an ad, changing only one element at a time such as the headline, image, call-to-action, or audience segment to identify which version performs better. This can be done by splitting the audience randomly to see which ad generates more clicks, conversions, or engagement. Tools like Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager provide built-in features to run these tests and measure results. By using A/B testing, marketers can make data-driven decisions that optimize ad performance and budget allocation.”
Publishing quality content is just the first step. Knowing how to effectively distribute and promote that content is key to driving traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Anyone working in digital marketing should understand multiple channels and techniques for content promotion.
Here’s how a good answer might sound:
“Once content is live, promoting it involves sharing across relevant social media platforms, engaging with communities and influencers in your niche, and using email marketing campaigns to reach your subscribers. Additionally, paid promotion such as boosted posts or targeted ads can increase visibility. Other strategies include guest posting, participating in forums, and optimizing content for search engines to attract organic traffic. Successful content promotion combines consistent outreach and leveraging multiple channels to maximize reach.”
Targeting the right audience is essential for content marketing success since it maximizes engagement and conversion rates while minimizing wasted effort.
Entry-level marketers should be able to describe methods for identifying and reaching their ideal audience.
A candidate who knows what they are doing will answer like this:
“To target the right audience for content, marketers first analyze the demographics, interests, and behaviours of their ideal customers. Tools like Google Analytics and social media insights help gather this data. Based on these insights, content can be tailored to address the audience’s needs and distributed through channels they frequent. Using precise targeting options in paid advertising platforms, such as location, age, interests, and keywords, further refines audience reach. This focused approach ensures content resonates with those most likely to engage and convert.”
We understand that bringing a digital marketer on board may not be as easy as it sounds, which is why we’ve provided all this information to help with your next hire.
As we mentioned earlier, hiring a digital marketer is not just about finding someone to do the job you need them to do. It’s about finding someone who is passionate about the role and the company: someone who can fit into your company culture and help the company achieve its goals.
This Top 100 interview questions and answers will definitely help you hire not just a good digital marketer, but a digital marketer that will fit into your company culture, and an all-round good fit for your business.
Looking for a guide to help with hiring for a different role? Check out our guide on how to hire a web developer.
Are there digital marketing interview questions you didn’t see here but would like to learn more about? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
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