While good digital recruitment agencies will bring in the right digital marketing candidates, asking the best questions will reveal work habits, experience and personality of the right hire for your B2B tech business.
But due to the complexity involved in today’s digital marketing roles, knowing which questions to ask a B2B digital marketer to ask can be a challenge.
From performance to SEO, through to marketing automation and web dev, there are so many different elements to a digital marketing role today.
Ultimately, your interviews need to assess a digital marketing manager’s ability to strategically plan campaigns based on your business goals, customer pain points, and budgets. And have the focus on tracking performance and the impact on sales revenue.
To give a little helping hand, we’ve written this article to walk you through the 10 best digital marketing manager interview questions AND answers – to help assess these core competencies.
Let’s dive in 🏊♂️
As always, the first question is a bit more of an icebreaker. Their passion for the industry is what you want to tease out here.
Because things change so rapidly in marketing, particularly digital marketing, you need someone that lives and breathes it. Ideally you want someone that likes to educate themselves, keeps an eye on LinkedIn feeds, reads industry blogs, takes up the latest courses and watches out for Google or LinkedIn algorithm updates.
Digital marketers just cannot afford to fall behind the times.
This is another nice simple introductory question for your interviewee to put them at ease.
Here, the candidate can easily list the channels they feel comfortable managing. There’s a wide list to choose from: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), link building, email marketing, PPC, and paid social media.
Due to the growing complexity and remit for today’s B2B digital marketer, it’s impossible to be a specialist across all these tactics so you would expect them to lean on external support for some areas. PPC tends to be one that’s outsourced.
This question allows you to subtly focus on the critical skills you need to grow your B2B tech business.
📕What does a Digital Marketing Manager do?
At the end of the day, revenue is the key metric of marketing success.
Look out for how well they communicate their example.
Aside from revenue, do they talk about metrics across the sales funnel? You can ask further questions to understand how it was executed – what their role was within the campaign, and what other people did.
The bottom line is, did it actually move the needle? How much revenue did it generate? And how much pipeline converted?
Here, you’re likely to hear buzzwords like: user journey (UX), website visitors, bounce rates, SEO, and conversion rate optimisation.
These are all good signs! It means your candidate is analytical.
The key thing you’re looking for with this question is to understand their process and the steps they’d follow to improve your website.
They’ll likely mention these top ways to increase website traffic:
They may not understand every tactic in depth, so that’s why we recommend focusing on how they approach the overall project.
💡Bonus tip: While some things can be easily outsourced, think about how important each element of digital marketing is for your business and then see if the candidate ticks that box.
This is a hot topic right now, quite rightly, so we are going to give this one a little more attention…
Demand generation is a critical B2B marketing strategy that aligns perfectly with today’s B2B buyers. You might have heard this term, but I’ve seen several differing views of what it is.
So let’s start by clarifying what it is 👇
| What is demand generation 🤷♀️Demand generation is a strategy that identifies prospects with an interest and nurtures them towards a sale. For example, they could show an interest in the use of ‘AI in credit risk assessments’. You can then send them more content on that topic, easing them towards a sale by providing more helpful content. This approach is so successful because it focuses on what the audience is interested in and focuses your budget towards a strategy that is proven to deliver sales revenue. |
With this question, you can gauge whether they understand the true meaning of the term and how experienced they are with demand generation techniques, any tools and measures of success.
To do this, you want to encourage the candidate to talk through the stages of demand generation campaigns. How they helped influence the sale. How they partnered with other marketers and the sales teams.
You’re likely to hear buzzwords such as funnels, MQLs, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs and pipeline growth.
📕Here are five demand gen tactics that increase annual recurring revenue.
This is a slightly more strategic question, so pay attention to whether they jump straight into tactics or if they focus on strategy.
Ideally, they would focus initially on understanding the customer, pain points, and the value proposition before talking about go-to-market tactics.
Also, see if they mention testing and experimentation. Do they start small, iterate, and scale? This shows they have a growth mindset and are able to invest where they’re seeing results.
In today’s climate budgets are tight. So you need to be confident that your team will spend the budget well and deliver ROI.
We’ve mentioned some of the tactics already, so here we want to focus on monitoring performance.
As well as allocating budget appropriately, look out for how well they know what’s working and what isn’t. Do they talk about investing in something existing or starting something new? This shows you how creative they are.
💡Bonus tip: As a follow-up question, you could ask if they had to spend budget on something new, what would they do that you don’t currently?
B2B digital marketers should be data driven. But are they able to discuss the right sort of metrics? Aside from the usual vanity metrics – for example likes and shares on social media – do they mention KPIs such as pipeline and revenue?
Here’s a list of some of the metrics you really want your new hire to be tracking:
Depending on what you need, it’s important to see if this person is familiar with tools like Google Analytics, automation, keyword research tools etc. Digital markets are often adept at using tools such as Google Analytics, SEMRush or AhRefs for monitoring overall website performance.
In addition to this, there are specific tools for each digital marketing campaign activity – covering everything from social media through to direct email campaigns.
An understanding of the performance of the entire digital marketing mix is what you’re aiming for.
📕Here’s an overview of some of the top 20 digital marketing tools.
Similar to the very first question, this question really reveals how ‘on the pulse’ your candidate is. As we’ve mentioned, due to the rapidly changing digital marketing landscape, this is essential.
Let’s delve into this more 👇
Ask them about how they are considering Google’s recent Helpful Content Update (more on this here), and how to adapt to a cookie-less future, plus keeping up with data sharing and privacy policies.
As you can see, there is an art to asking the best digital marketing interview questions. Just remember to plan well in advance and stick to one question at a time. You’ll soon start to see the value in asking the right questions.
Need more help? Take a look at these podcasts for all you need to know about digital marketing.
Ready to hire? Dive straight in and book a call with our specialist digital marketing recruiters – we focus on supporting B2B tech companies.
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