Marketing Manager

There is enormous accountability for marketing managers to ensure that the marketing operation is efficient and cost-effective and to show how marketing spend translates into growth and profitability for the company. In such a highly competitive market standing out from other organizations is an ongoing challenge.

Additionally there is the pressure to keep up with technology and how to use it optimally for marketing activity. Relate your personal experience of the challenges you have encountered and discuss how you handled them.

It is important that you are able to recognize why a plan went wrong and to learn from the experience.

Your analytical and problem solving skills are under scrutiny. Campaigns often fail due to poor research and groundwork, inappropriate objectives or ineffective communication.

Your ability to evaluate a situation, problem or opportunity and understand the action that needs to be taken is key to success as a marketing manager. Gaining a clear perspective is necessary before deciding on the focus of your innovation.

In your marketing manager interview answer show how cultural factors, social factors, personal and psychological factors all impact on consumer behavior. Provide an example of a marketing campaign or project you developed and how you utilized these four key factors to develop and optimize your project.

Objectives of promotion:

☛ Awareness

☛ Knowledge

☛ Liking and desire

☛ Purchase

Key marketing manager competencies that this question explores include accurate research and analytical skills, the ability to develop realistic and workable objectives and the ability to initiate and monitor strategies and activities that support these objectives.

Efficient utilization of resources reflects sound judgment, planning and organizational skills. Use this question as an opportunity to highlight your strengths as a marketing manager.

Focus on your planning and organizing skills to get the best return on the marketing budget. Detail what controls were put in place to track and stay on top of expenditure and how plans were adjusted when necessary. Discuss your ability to react quickly and accurately to meet new demands and constraints.

Focus on your ability to co-ordinate and delegate activities in an efficient and practical way. Detail how you defined and divided project roles and responsibilities, kept personality clashes and conflict to a minimum and monitored and fed back to the project team.

Benefits of direct marketing:

☛ Cost effectiveness - The costs of paying to the intermediaries is eliminated due to their absence.

☛ Alternative uses: apart from selling, direct marketing can be used to test new markets, offer rewards to customers, or even for market segmentation.

☛ The results of direct marketing are easier to measure as we know how many people have been directly contacted in the first place.

☛ Relationship building: it helps in building a rapport with the customers as a direct relationship is established with them and they can avail authentic information about a product or service without any manipulations.

In answering this marketing manager interview question, focus on your skills in online marketing including search engine tactics and optimization, click-through advertising, writing for the Web using keywords, designing for customer usability, utilization of social media and tracking success of the online campaign.

Methods of direct marketing:

☛ Direct mail: This is the most common means of direct marketing.Under this direct postal mails are sent to the consumers' address.

☛ Telephone marketing: Via call centers products are also sold over telephone. It is also known as telemarketing.

☛ Catalog marketing: Print,video or electronic catalogs maybe sent to customers.

☛ Online marketing: The organization's products are marketed on the virtual medium through company websites and emails.