Looking to hire a top quality content marketer into your B2B business? Then help is at hand.
We’ve assembled 23 B2B marketing experts to help you assess and recruit the best candidate into your company.
We asked each one of them…
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
Content marketing is now a prominent tactic to help B2B companies generate inbound leads, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of businesses hiring for these specialists.
Yet content marketing is a varied discipline. Writing, creativity, analysis, project management, outreach, promotion, stakeholder management… there’s a multitude of skills needed to master it.
So, if you want to make sure your next content marketing hire moves the needle, then read on!
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How do you deliver content that you know will appeal to your audience? ‘
The reason I ask this is because content marketing starts with understanding the customer journey and what content they want to hear or consume at that moment in time.
That may require knowledge and understanding of how to do research and how to ask the right kind of questions to make sure you get back the results that you need.
After that, excellent communication, journalistic and graphical skills (including animation and video) are all vital for helping to turn that knowledge into compelling content.
Finally, you need analytics skills to be sure that your content was indeed consumed by your audience in the way it was intended.
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How would you write a new outreach template for a campaign you already have running?’
Cold outreach is one of the most challenging things you have to overcome as a B2B content marketer and if your not able to create interesting outreach templates your going to have a hard time.
It’s always interesting to see how different people approach outreach templates in different ways – but you’ll quickly see who has a deep understanding of outreach and human psychology versus people that just tweak templates.
Related Post – Hiring Guide; How to Hire a Content Marketer
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What’s the difference between good and great content (in a B2B scenario)?’
Ross Chapman is CMO of Arkk SolutionsWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How can our content marketing be truly great? Written answer please – return as soon you can.’
I’m looking for some critical ingredients in their answer.
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Please tell me about an integrated marketing campaign you led that did not succeed? What happened, what did you learn and how did you apply those learnings when leading the next campaign?’
Alex Tachalova is Founder of Digital Olympus and regular contributor to Moz, Search Engine Journal and Entrepreneur What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘If you got this job, tell me exactly how you’ll be promoting a piece of content and how you’re going to measure its performance.’
I’ll focus on interviewing a potential employee about content promotional strategies since that’s where the majority of content marketers are failing.
As for me, without a well-delivered content promotion plan, it’s quite pointless to produce any type of content.
It doesn’t matter whether you deliver an average post or a really insightful case study. Without promoting them, they’ll both just be a few more content pages that don’t generate new users.
In fact, pages that don’t really rank well in Google affects your site’s general SEO performance.
So, I highly recommend thinking twice before adding a new post if you have no idea how to promote it in the right way.
I truly believe that successful content promotion ends up with a solid flow of links. Links are the fuel that allows your content pages to rank well in SERPs.
Of course, content promotion involves not only acquiring links but also making your post visible across SMM platforms, and it might even be featured in your partners’ emails.
Catherine Maskell is Managing Director of the Content Marketing Association What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘In respect to content marketing, what do you think B2B could learn from B2C?’
What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Given our target audience, our objectives and budget, how would you optimise the mix of content, form factors and channels? ‘
And here is my question “unfold”:
– Our objectives = e.g. awareness vs demand generation etc.
– By content I mean the “content nature”, e.g. businesses, technical, etc.
– Form factors = e.g. video, podcast, white paper etc.
– Most importantly, with “how optimise”, I would expect/like to hear criteria and a logic that the candidate will use… I am not expecting a full plan of course.
Heidi Taylor is a B2B marketing consultant, speaker and author of B2B Marketing Strategy: Differentiate, Develop and Deliver Lasting Customer EngagementWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
“Can you tell me how you define ‘content marketing’?”
Nick Roberts is Head Of Marketing at Global App TestingWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Talk me through the piece of B2B content you’re most proud of.’
I then use this as a base to probe much much deeper to examine exactly what they did on the campaign, who was involved, how did they measure results, and what were their learnings.
I then turn this around and do the exact same thing on their worst piece of content.
Because as content marketers it’s important we measure the success of what we produce and constantly learn from what went well and what could have been improved.
Harry Rollason is Director of Marketing at Conversocial What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Between videos, ebooks, blog articles, podcasts, webinars, SlideShare, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest … there’s a lot of potential content our team should produce for inbound marketing. How do we do it all?’
Louise Robertson is Global Marketing Director of LocalzWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Can you talk me through a news article or white-paper you created, then how you reworked this into a multichannel campaign and how you tailored it for different media? (Email campaign structure, hooks, headlines, call to actions, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, landing page, Facebook).’
Vincent Rousselet is VP of the ITSMA What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What is the piece of content you created that you wish had never been published? Why? What have you done about that since?’
Tracey Cash is Head of Marketing at EndavaWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What do you think makes a good piece of content and why?’
Richard Ashley is Marketing Director at Content GuruWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What do you do to consistently develop new content ideas?’
Tom Pressley is VP International Marketing at Everbridge What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘Tell me about the last integrated campaign you ran?’
And I’d expect the answer to cover these areas – data, content, execution, measurement.
Then I’d dig in to each area in turn but for content specific roles ask additionally how they integrate their campaigns across multiple media. Content lies at the heart of this.
Sally Ockwell is Marketing Director at Zyxel What’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How would you go about understanding whether some content you produced or commissioned was a success and performed?’
Alex King is CMO of FixfloWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How do you use content to drive revenue?’
Beth Redpath is VP of Marketing at mTabWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What is the most important part of a piece of content?’
Matthew Creswick is Group Marketing Director at The B2B Marketing LabWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘How would you help us to get to rank one on Google for our most important keyword?’
Gideon Pridor is VP Marketing at TravelperkWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What should be the resource split between content production vs. promotion?’
Answer: 20% production to 80% promotion.
Jay Singh is Head of Marketing and Growth at ResponseiQWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What methods and processes would you use to make sure prospects don’t just visit once and leave without identifying themselves?’
With B2B products and in particular SaaS solutions, prospects aren’t always ready to buy or start a trial on their first website visit.
So I want to see how content marketers tackle this issue.
Amir Jirbandey is Head of Growth Marketing at PaddleWhat’s your ONE killer interview question to assess someone’s B2B content marketing skills?
‘What’s the process you go through in order to put together a new editorial guideline and content framework for a company you’ve just joined?’
In a recent round for hiring such a person, we turned this question into a 30-minute exercise which was quite enlightening.
Well, if you’re currently hiring or about to start on that journey then our experts have given you some great questions to ask content marketers.
We’d always recommend a good mix of interview questions to make sure you assess a candidate accurately and to sell the opportunity to them.
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