According to Philip Kotler,
“Marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.”
In simple words, it is the art of identifying and understanding your customers, creating products or services in accordance with your customers’ needs, selling those to the customers, and then providing after-sales services in order to build a network. Marketing is a broader concept than just buying and selling goods and services. Unlike buying and selling, marketing is much more customer-oriented as customers are the key to any business to be successful.
Marketing is one of the most important aspects of business management and this is why getting through a marketing interview could be a difficult task as employers could be a little hard on you in order to test your skills.
This article will give you an idea of the kinds of questions that can be asked during a marketing interview. You will be given a list of 21 questions to make it easy for you to prepare to face the employer and his questions to earn that marketing position.
So, without wasting a time lets dive in to the article.
Marketing Interview Questions and Answers
1. Tell us about yourself?
Answer: Every employer starts an interview by knowing about you as a person. No matter what kind of interview you are a part of, the interviewer is always going to ask you to express yourself or to introduce yourself.
2. Why did you choose marketing as your specialization?
Answer: The employer asks this question to know what brought you there to apply for a marketing position.
You could answer this question by expressing your passion for marketing. Say, I had always been excited and passionate about this niche. And I enjoy the process of convincing a customer into buying something. I think I am a good fit for this specialization.
3. What is the goal of Marketing?
Answer: The ultimate goal of marketing is influencing a customer into buying what you have to sell. It’s about driving profitable customer action.
4. What do you understand by traditional marketing?
Answer: The interviewer asks this question to check your basic knowledge about the two terms to get an idea of how updated you are coming from a marketing background.
Potential Answer to this question could be, “According to me, Traditional Marketing could be explained like, earlier the marketing was done through traditional and conventional sources like basic newspapers, television and radio commercials, pamphlets, posters, brochures, billboards, and even normal text notifications.
It was like marketing but marketing-off-the-internet. Through these offline mediums were the customers reached. These methods of marketing are used even now, we can call it evergreen methods of marketing as people tend to read newspapers, find posters and pamphlets inside them and listen to the radio and check their text messages even in the modern world.”
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5. What according to you is Digital Marketing?
Answer: “Digital Marketing is nothing but marketing done digitally through the internet and these days, the internet rules”. Popular digital marketing techniques include:
- Mail Marketing, Bulk Mailing.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (Unpaid)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) (Paid)
- Social Media Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Clickable ads
6. As a Marketer, who do you sell your products to?
Answer: “Customers are key to any business.” Marketing is all about reaching customers and getting them to buy your products or services from you. As a marketer my aim is to sell the services and goods you provide to potential customers keeping my target audience in mind.
7. How would you reach your target audience?
Answer: There can be multiple ways in which the target audience can be reached. Some of these activities like Advertising, Sales Promotions, PR activities, Digital Marketing, Packaging and Labelling, and Social Media Marketing collectively helps in creating a wide range of customers.
8. Explain your strategy for selling a product in short?
Answer: “My strategy is simple: Attract and Influence customers into buying.”
9. As a Marketing Manager, Describe your leadership style.
When the interviewer asks this question, he wants to know the pattern of your work, is it authoritative, charismatic, supportive, or democratic. He wants to know how you make people work for you, how you implement plans, how you motivate your personnel, etc.
Answer: “My leadership style is a mixture of authoritative and supportive. I master delegation skills, demonstrating to employees what needs to be done and I know how to make people work for me. I am a supportive leader as I always prefer to communicate effectively with my subordinates in order to delegate them a task that they best suited for.”
10. How would you measure a marketing campaign’s success?
Answer: “I fixed a metrics standard before starting a campaign and also used analytics for the same. To measure that metrics surveys would run and then the patterns would be studied.”
11. How do you react when the marketing campaigns or projects fail and you spent weeks creating that campaign? What actions do you take?
Answer: “If a campaign failed, I would not lose my calm and If I spent a week creating and working on that campaign there are chances that my campaign is the best fit but just not for the right group of customers, I would try and take that campaign to a different group of customers as the campaign sure is filled with quality content. I would research again and I would try that my subordinates do not get demotivated in the journey.
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And If that campaign also really fails, it can be discouraging but I would take my time to assess where I went wrong with the project and what points can I improve it in.”
12. Do you have any experience in working in this field?
Answer: “Mention the internship programs and jobs that you had been a part of.”
13. Are you familiar with our company?
Answer: To answer this question, it would be better if you do in-depth research about the company which you are going for an interview.
14. What makes a business stand out?
Answer: “The thing which will make your business stand out will be the USP (Unique selling point) that you have to offer to your customers.”
15. What do you mean by USP?
Answer: “It is a unique attribute and feature about your business which make your product differ from its competitors so that consumers prefer your product to competitors. It helps in establishing a brand name of your company in the market.”
16. What do you want to learn about marketing in your time with us?
Answer: Answer this question by showing your expectations from the marketing organization. About how do you see yourself grow and what skills do you want to learn and so on.
17. If presented with a new product, how would you sell it?
Answer:
- First, I would identify my target audience and test the product on a small group of customers.
- I would use marketing p’s of place and promotion to make the audience familiar with my product and hence by advertising it on all levels I would influence customers into buying the product.
18. What is your expertise- Business to Business or Business to Customer?
Answer: Answer this question in accordance with the job profile you have applied for. And Convince the employer that you will be suitable for both the areas of expertise and you to have the skills for both.
19. Name 4Cs of Marketing.
Answer: “Consumer, Cost, Convenience and Communication.”
20. What benefits will we get, if we take our business online?
Answer: “If we take our business online, we could take advantage of following benefits:
- New Customers
- Selling your products straight from your website or application.
- Targeted advertising to your customers.
- More knowledge about what your customers love through online feedback.
- Using analytics to power your sales.
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21. What marketing strategies, according to you, work well for expanding businesses at all levels?
Answer: “Taking business online through social media and websites is key to expand business in the current scenario where everything is online from buying to selling. Social media is an excellent tool to increase our customer base.
As Joe Chernov said,
Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.
We could also focus on Product Diversification to enter new areas of the market to expand our business and take our business to different geographic and demographic sections of the market.”
Points To Remember Before Going to Marketing Interview
- Always remember to research about the company you applied for.
- Make sure you introduce your best version in front if the employer by showing your creative self.
- Be confident and communicate in a effective manner.
- Always dress professionally for the interview as you are marketing yourself in the interview.
Download the list of questions in .PDF format, to practice with them later, or to use them on your interview template (if you want to crack Interview):
Conclusion
The question types in a marketing interview would be from different categories like some questions could be skill-based, some situational, while some could be interpersonal marketing questions. Hence, this article was a mixture of all three categories. I hope this article helps you ace your interview. Do share this article, comment on what you liked about this article below, and nail that marketing interview.
All the best!
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Sandeep Bhandari is the founder of PrepMyCareer.com website.
I am a full-time professional blogger, a digital marketer, and a trainer. I love anything related to the Web, and I try to learn new technologies every day.
All the team management, content creation, and monetization tasks are handled by me. Together with the team at PrepMyCareer, the aim is to provide useful and engaging content to our readers.