Businesses today are deploying Digital Marketing tactics to generate leads and to reach the target audience digitally at the same time building an online reputation for their brand or product. Thus, require next-generation talent augmented with Digital Marketing skills to tackle the competition. It is undeniable that Digital Marketing has opened ample employment opportunities and it is also aligned with the gig economy system that has evolved amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the story doesn’t end up here. Procuring a position in this domain is challenging in itself. At the same time, it has become challenging for every job seeker to prepare for digital marketing interview.
When you Google for “job opportunities in digital marketing” or “digital marketing job interview”, you come across various content pieces and articles like “How to crack Digital Marketing interview” or “Questions asked in Digital Marketing Interview”, and indeed, these are very important to consume to have a brief idea of your pathway forward. However, these articles or questions only make sense when you know the pros and cons of the domain and have an absolute interest in pursuing it.
But remember, as a digital marketer, you have to be someone with the executive skillset, even a Marketing Manager or a Marketing Head working for a tech company or e-commerce startup in today’s time, does all the executive-level tasks whilst managing the whole marketing team. Moreover, the booming gig economy system, thanks to COVID-19 has made employment remote and short-term – having both pros and cons for itself. Another aspect of the gig economy is, people with executive skills are always welcome.
So if you are someone new to the digital marketing domain and planning forward your career in the same, you ought to read these tips on ‘how to crack a digital marketing job interview’.
Steps to crack Digital Marketing Interview?
Before learning how to crack digital marketing interview, I would like to give you a round of a little stats.
- According Forbes, 82 percent of the consumers conduct research online before making purchase decision.
- HubSpot says, 57 percent marketers believe that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative.
- SmartInsights reports, 48 percent of consumers start mobile research with a search engine.
Consequently, a career in digital marketing ensures benefits. But it is impossible to join a digital marketing company without grasping the concepts of digital marketing. This simple yet comprehensive guide will help you prepare and crack digital marketing interview of any company.
1. Understand the in-depth meaning of Digital Marketing
Everybody knows, Digital Marketing is the concept of marketing products or services through online channels. These channels comprises of Social Media, Email, Blogs, etc. But that’s not all. The interviewer may not ask you the meaning of digital marketing straightaway.
The interview may ask you questions like:
- Why are you seeking a profile in Digital Marketing?
- Do you have any exceptional knowledge about Digital Marketing?
- How you will sustain in this competitive digital marketing domain?
You can answer such type of questions only if you have hands-on experience in digital marketing. Let’s hop on to the next step to begin.
2. Synchronize exceptional knowledge of Digital Marketing
It is a competitive domain and hence you’ll be facing fierce competition, as you progress further in your career as a digital marketer. Thus, a USP is required, as you are selling your skills only. Digital Marketing is really vast and includes a number of concepts, the major ones are Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Email Marketing, and Search Engine Marketing (PPC). But, the interviewer is expecting a lot more than this. Let’s start by grasping a few techniques of respective digital channels.
2.1. Social Media Marketing
Even a kid knows that Social Media Marketing involves promoting services or products through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. But knowing the meaning isn’t enough to impress the interviewer. You need to have a little distinctive knowledge. For example:
- Including hashtags in tweets is insanely common. But do you know that including more than 2 hashtags in a tweet is vague and it limits the potential reach of your tweet?
- Sharing content on LinkedIn is also a very common way to get attention from relevant people, but do you know that sharing content in LinkedIn Groups does an outstanding job. You now even have a new LinkedIn feature called ‘LinkedIn Showcase page’ that acts as a sub-page of your main LinkedIn business page. Individual LinkedIn showcase pages can be created for respective products a business has to offer.
- Many beginners also have no idea about ‘LinkedIn Publishing’ that enables tremendous reach of your content to relevant people. Cross-linking your website content or blogs with your LinkedIn posts is also a great approach.
And these were just a few just to give you an example that there are certain good social media marketing tips still available amid the harsh algorithms laid down by the major social media networks.
2.2. Search Engine Optimization
Building backlinks to your content is important to rank well on Google. But you need to know the best practices of SEO. A few of them are like:
- Submitting or syndicating your content to online bookmarking sites and networks like Reddit, Flipboard, Quora Spaces, Pinterest and more.
- Internal linking of website content.
- Choosing the most searched keywords for website content.
- Utilising the Google Search Console to check which are the keywords you are ranking for and which keywords you need improvement with.
2.3. Email Marketing
Sending promotional emails to your subscribers isn’t everything included in Digital Marketing. Your interviewer wants to know how effectively you do it. A few best techniques are like:
- Building the email list by exporting email addresses from email account, Linkedin account etc.
- Segmenting email list based on profiles like: existing customers, potential customers, and subscribers to target them respectively.
- Creating concise content that defines the benefits and features of the product or service to the users.
- Using analytics to track the email delivery status, open rate, click through rate, bounce-rate etc.
2.4. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing involves creating ads to redirect people on the landing page. And you need to have practical experience in creating and running search ad campaigns.
3. Learn to work with Digital Marketing Tools
Learning to crack digital marketing interview isn’t complete without possessing capacity to work with digital marketing tools of your specialization. Listed below are some tools of respective branches of Digital Marketing which are commonly used and much required.
Mailchimp
The most popular email marketing platform that offers 3 different plans. As a beginner, it is recommended to start with the free plan. You can send up to 1200 promotional emails to over 2000 email addresses monthly. You can signup for the free plan and upgrade your account at the latter stage.
HootSuite
A great social listening tool that helps you manage all your social media profiles at one place. You can share your content on all social media channels, reply to the user comments and track performance. The good news is, you can signup for the free plan of HootSuite to get started.
Google Analytics
The free tool provided by Google to analyze your website traffic. But it involves a small learning curve to become an expert of the tool. But don’t worry! you can learn Google Analytics comprehensively by just registering for the official Google academy courses free of cost.
Google Keyword Planner
The renowned keyword research tool that helps identify keywords to make your content reachable. All you need to do is just signup to Google Keyword Planner using your Google account.
SEMrush
Another great tool that helps identify keywords and related keywords is SEMrush. To get the real benefit, you have to create a free account. After that, you will also be able to identify your chief competitors and get data about the back-links.
4. Read a Lot
Read digital marketing blogs as much as you can. There are numerous digital marketing blogs available, the leading ones are Hubspot, Digital Marketing Institute and Content Marketing Institute. Work on your attention span, this will prepare you to read thoroughly and learn the most out of every article. This will also keep you updated with the latest digital marketing news. At the time of interview, you will feel more confident to share the updates and knowledge with the interviewer.
Reading helps you stay yourself armored with the trending topics and concepts, for example: ‘How COVID-19 has impacted the marketing landscape’, ‘How digital marketing is your best bet in times of gig economy system’ and many more like these.
5. Get connected and build your network
Connect with authors of your favorite digital marketing blogs via platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter in order to share queries and get advice from them. It is also advised to retweet the tweets of your ideal bloggers and thought leaders to get attention. This will ultimately serve you in becoming a thought leader yourself. You can also make use of the leading Q&A platform Quora to ask your queries or even contribute content to the queries related to your expertise.
You might be asking, how this can help? Let me give you a constructive answer to this. When you connect with people, you get the chance to share your content and updates with them. At the same time, you get engagement for what you share. Any recruiter hiring for digital marketing jobs is much concerned about the influence that he or she is building online. Moreover, any candidate who is networked with people is more aware of the updates and recent cases of the industry.
So! Are you ready to crack Digital Marketing Interview?
The tips explained above will give you a bird’s eye view of the pre-requisites of Digital Marketing job profile. Instead of searching and mugging up digital marketing interview questions, invest time in learning the concepts. As you attain mastery in the Digital Marketing domain, you ultimately start to get yourself prepared for the Digital Marketing job profile, such as a digital marketing executive or manager and so on.
