Manager Digital Marketing

This is a slightly mean but actually very manageable question about search engine optimisation (SEO), designed to trip up charlatans. If knowledge of SEO is on the job description, don't be satisfied with waffle about keywords and page rank.

This question refers to two big changes to the workings of the Google search algorithm in the last year or so. These are the 'Panda' and 'Penguin' updates. So this question will tease out whether they keep up-to-date with search engine optimisation (SEO).

In short, Panda aimed to reward sites with quality content, and to punish sites with low quality and duplicate content. The Penguin update aimed to tackle sites that manipulate search engines to rank more highly than they deserve to be ranked. This includes tactics like stuffing pages with keywords, or obtaining links from disreputable websites in an attempt to pretend that a website is seen as useful.

You want to hire someone who's both qualified and has the desire to do the work. Otherwise, why would they work for you instead of the company next door?

Part of their answer will lie in their body language and enthusiasm. The other part will lie in how concrete their answer is. Get at the details by asking a follow-up question, like: "Let's say you're at home, kicking around, and doing something related to marketing. What is it that you're doing?" Perhaps they're reading their five favorite marketing sites, or analyzing traffic patterns of websites for fun, or writing in their personal blog, or optimizing their LinkedIn profile. Whatever it is, you want to be sure they're deeply passionate about the subject matter you'd hire them for.

With this question, the employer is testing you to see how much ambition you have and to see how much you’ve thought about where your career is going to go. Now, we’ve addressed this one on our Blog before but in regards to digital marketing, if you really want this particular role, I’d urge you to think about the role you’re being interviewed for and how you might be able to progress within that particular company before you give you answer.

It’s OK to be ambitious – but you also need to be realistic too. If you’re interviewing for a digital marketing executive role, you could say you’d like to be a digital marketing manager either in-house or in an agency – which will show the employer you’re keen to progress and take on extra responsibility – possibly at their business. On the other hand, if you’re applying for a digital marketing manager vacancy, you could say you see yourself in a Head of Digital role – or running your own digital marketing agency. Although the latter might put a few employers off, it shows you’re keen to be successful and not just stagnate in one role.

I would need to hear about the determining goal of the campaign (brand awareness, leads, social media followers, etc) and then planning the campaign around the desired result. Candidate will need to talk about TRACKING and using analytics (Google or otherwise) to get as much data as possible. Tell me how they're going to track it. Adding URL parameters and the like. The key to digital marketing is having as much data as possible in order to be able to leverage that data to make actionable insights. The more they can tell me about how they're going to gather the data and the ways they can look at the data to see what worked, what didn't, and where things could be improved the more likely it'd be they would get the job.

Now obviously this one will only be relevant to graduates but it does get asked, particularly if you have a degree which isn’t necessarily directly related to marketing or digital marketing. In this instance, consider what core skills you needed to complete your degree and dissertation and how these can be transferred to the digital marketing industry. For instance, if you have a Journalism degree, you could talk about how your degree has equipped you with knowledge of how to approach outreach – and how to structure an article/report properly.

Similarly, if you have a degree in Economics or Maths, you might want to talk about how your degree has benefited you when you’ve had to manage budgets and calculate daily spend allowances for PPC campaigns.

With this question, the employer wants to know what skills and knowledge you picked up at university that could benefit their business in the long run.

When an employer asks you this question, they want to know how you deal with challenges and roadblocks and – potentially even how you deal with failure. Why? Because challenges are guaranteed to crop up in every role – and the employer wants to make sure you’re not going to crumble and struggle to cope when they do.

Think carefully about the challenges you’ve encountered in your career and what the outcome of these challenges have been. In this instance, it’s OK to mention a challenge which resulted in failure – as long as you can say what you’ve learnt from it and how you’ve used that knowledge to affect the success of a future campaign.

For example, you could talk about a site you’ve worked on that was hit with a Google Penguin update – and how you had to work hard to clean up the site’s link profile in order to recover rankings and Google’s trust. In this case, you could say that you learnt that Google’s constantly changing its algorithms, you learnt what makes a good/bad link and the importance of sticking with a project from start to finish and you learnt the importance of keeping a clean backlink profile.

Hopefully you'll have some idea about what could be improved with your digital presence before the interview. If you don't have any expertise in house, I'd recommend jumping on to a platform like Sparked and asking the volunteers there for their opinion before the interview. The community there is very helpful with challenges like this, and will give you some good ammunition.

There are lots of things that could be wrong with your digital presence. Perhaps the website displays horribly on tablets, maybe the twitter presence is more marketing spam than useful, engaging material. Perhaps the branding is sloppy, the accessibility is imperfect, or the tone is all wrong. Maybe the digital communications are focusing on the wrong things.

Whilst the substance of the answer to this question is important, also evaluate how it is articulated. Is this someone who will be able to diplomatically deal with stakeholders across the organisation?

Does it feel like they'd focus on the core issues, or get lost in vanity projects or sideshows?