23 Top Digital Marketing Interview Questions and Answers

Start preparing for your next interview with this comprehensive list of basic, intermediate, and advanced digital marketing interview questions. Rehearse answers, identify knowledge gaps, and build your confidence — whether you’re moving into the industry or you’re a seasoned professional.

Digital Marketing Interview Questions and Answers

To determine your skill at digital marketing, an interviewer will ask you questions about the marketing process. Sometimes, they’ll be experts in digital marketing too. But other times, they may not know a lot about digital marketing — they may be more interested in how you think.

Either way, you need to be able to answer these questions with competence and confidence. Because digital marketing does change, these digital marketing interview questions may not always have an objective answer. You may find that you have to say “I believe that’s recently changed,” or “there are a lot of philosophies on that.”

Brushing up in advance helps you form your own opinions and updates your knowledge to the current industry standards.

Basic Digital Marketing Interview Questions

These entry-level digital marketing interview questions are frequently asked of individuals who are just getting into digital marketing. For an entry-level position, you’ll need to have a basic knowledge of digital marketing, what it does, and how it works.

1. What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is any form of online marketing intended to improve brand awareness, connect with customers, or push a customer toward commitment. Digital marketing has significant breadth; it can range from search engine optimization to social media marketing. As the digital world continues to grow larger, digital marketing also becomes more important.

2. What is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

Inbound marketing refers to individuals coming “in” to the system; they already had a problem and they found you. “Outbound” marketing refers to connecting directly to potential customers.

Examples of inbound marketing include SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Examples of outbound marketing include cold calling, email marketing, and PPC ads.

Inbound marketing is easier to “win”; inbound leads are more likely to commit. But outbound marketing is easier to “achieve”; it’s easier to get outbound leads, even if they’re less likely to commit.

3. What are the different types of digital marketing? Define them.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is the act of improving and optimizing a website and its content so that it shows up for relevant search queries as high as possible on search engines such as Google and Bing.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Search engine marketing is a form of paid advertising that places ads on relevant pages of a search engine, such as Google.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing refers to a digital marketing strategy in which companies produce valuable content with the hope of building authority and building their brand.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing is any type of email sent out, whether it’s a newsletter, an email blast, or a triggered email that tells you that your cart is full.
• Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing refers to marketing, either paid or free, that occurs through a social media account. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook can all contain social media marketing.
• E-commerce Marketing: E-Commerce marketing is specific to e-commerce storefronts, such as plug-ins that show products that the customer might be interested in (‘related items’).

4. What are keywords in SEO and why are they important?

Keywords tell a search engine what a website is about. You could write an entire page on plumbing but if you never mentioned the word “plumbing,” Google wouldn’t know what your industry is.

In the early days of the internet, websites could rank high just by putting in keywords as frequently as possible. Today, keywords need to be interspersed with high-quality content.

The Complete Digital Marketing Course - 12 Courses in 1

5. What are long-tail keywords?

Long-tail keywords are generally defined as keywords of four words or more in length. But that’s debatable. What’s more important is that long-tail keywords are more niche, specific keywords derived from broader keywords.

“Cats” would be a keyword. “Long-haired cats” might even be a keyword. But “breeds of long-haired cats” would be considered a long-tail keyword. Long-tail keywords are easier to win and more specific to the audience.

At the same time, “appraise ancient coins” could be considered a long-tail keyword even though it’s not four words or more in length because it’s so specific — which is where the debate comes in.

6. What’s the difference between black hat and white hat SEO?

Black hat SEO involves techniques that are generally frowned upon, such as building ten sites and linking them all to each other. White hat SEO involves the techniques that Google itself prefers; following the restrictions and schema to create a truly great website with good content.

Google will go out of its way to identify Black hat SEO techniques and react to them. But White-hat/Black hat does reside in a gray area. What about media companies that all interlink their sites? Usually, that’s fine because they have significant external page authority. If they only had interlinks, then it would be suspicious.

Because it resides in a gray area, the best thing that marketers can do is to just follow best practices — try to produce high-quality content without any “tricky” strategies. In general, if you’re trying to “rush” your digital marketing, you’re probably engaging in some Black hat SEO.

7. What is on-page vs off-page optimization?

On-page optimization is optimization that occurs on your own websites such as keyword saturation and link-building.

Off-page optimization is optimization that occurs off your website, such as backlinks from other popular sites. Both are important to ensure that your pages rank highly. Usually, off-page optimization follows from good on-page optimization; you start getting backlinks by producing high-quality content.

8. What is Google AdWords and why is it important?

Google AdWords is one of the most popular methods of PPC advertising. The Google AdWords network spans millions of sites. Ads on the Google Adwords network can be shown on these third-party sites and also on the search engine results page. Either way, it generates a lot of exposure.

Importantly, Google AdWords makes the process of building ads easy — with an easy-to-read campaign dashboard that shows all your major stats.

9. What is Facebook Marketing and why is it important?

Facebook Marketing has been an important component of paid advertising for a long time because you can target individuals very effectively based on things like hobbies, income, and even marital status. But this may be going away as fewer people are opting in to targeted advertising and more people are concerned about privacy.

Intermediate Digital Marketing Manager Interview Questions

These are questions you would be expected to know the answer to if you’ve been in the industry for one or two years. These questions will be based less on technicals and fundamentals and more on the overall philosophy of digital marketing.

10. How would you increase traffic to a website?

Here’s an example: Start with an audit report of the website’s technical SEO and the keywords that it’s currently ranking on. Do a competitor analysis to see how the competition is doing, what the competition is doing, and how you could improve on their tactics. Look at the keywords that you want to rank for, explore long-tail keywords, and develop a new strategy based on the information that you have so far.

11. What are some of the most important digital marketing tools? Describe them.

• Moz: Moz site scores are an easy way to determine how trustworthy your domain currently is. The more trustworthy your domain is, the more likely it is to rank highly. But you aren’t going to rank high unless you’re producing good content.
• Alexa Ranking: Alexa ranks websites in relation to each other and is another great way to determine whether your website is trending up or downward. In digital marketing, apart from your very direct competition, you are usually in competition with your own prior performance.
• Google Analytics: Google Analytics can be inserted into any page to provide deep information about page views and other insights, such as how long people are staying on a page.
• Google Trends: Google Trends can give you information on what people are currently searching for. This is an excellent tool for those who are working on SEO.
• Google Keyword Planner: This is another SEO tool, this time a tool that can help you determine which keywords you should chase.
• Kissmetrics: Kissmetrics provides marketing and analysis information that can help you determine where to put your advertising dollars and how your advertising campaigns are doing.
• SEMrush: One of the most popular SEO and SEM solutions, SEMrush will help you fine-tune your website’s SEO strategies while also developing reliable SEM strategies.
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an excellent keyword research tool that can give you more information about the keywords that you should be competing for.
• Buffer App: Buffer is one of many social media management tools that are designed to make the process of creating a great social media campaign much easier. Buffer App will let you schedule out your social media posts so you can do all your management at once.
• MailChimp: For email marketing, MailChimp is by far the most popular tool. MailChimp will make it possible for you to create newsletters, large-scale email blasts, and more.

These are only some of the popular digital marketing tools out there, but they are some of the most common that you’ll run into. Any time you see a digital marketing tool in a job listing, consider taking a look at it before your interview. Many have free trials that will let you experience at least some of their features.

Learn more about SEMrush

12. How would you improve conversion rates?

Clients do still look at conversion rates, but often as part of a broader awareness campaign.

To improve conversion rates, consider producing more content across the top, middle, and end funnel positions, to draw in customers at every part of the buyer’s journey.

Use A/B testing to test out different landing pages and ads, look at your highest-converting pages, and align your pages with the buyer’s intent.

Look at lower-performing pages to identify some quick wins: Why are people bouncing? Is the site not giving them the information they need?

13. What is the difference between direct marketing and branding?

Direct marketing is intended to get the customer to commit an action. It’s not always committing to a purchase; it could be something as early as signing up for a newsletter.

Branding, meanwhile, is designed to make the customer aware of your brand and to help the customer understand the intricacies of your mission, goals, and values. People might purchase a product, but they will follow a brand.

14. What are the limitations of online marketing?

Online marketing is very competitive and it’s constantly getting more competitive. Furthermore, online marketing is often seen as inherently invasive, and more and more people are starting to ignore online marketing; installing ad blockers, spam filters, and more. This antagonistic relationship can make it hard to build trust.

Online marketing has some very real limitations, but this is what is pushing marketers toward more organic methods of gaining traffic. Social media accounts and search engine optimization are both ways that marketing can be used to provide answers to questions that people have, rather than preemptively trying to solve a problem that might not exist.

When possible, marketers today want inbound leads; they want people to come to them to solve a problem that they have.

15. How can you effectively use social media for marketing?

There are a lot of answers to this question, but two of the most important are: consistency and authenticity. In social media, you have to be very consistent to build a following. You also have to be authentic; people don’t want to be “marketed to” in social media venues. They want to have a conversation.

16. What is content marketing and why is it important?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on building interesting or unique content. This content draws people in that are part of the same audience that would commit to a product, which could be a physical product, a digital product, or a service.

Content marketing is an important part of inbound marketing and SEO — by building content marketing, companies can continually generate leads.

17. What is a Google Snippet? What is Google schema?

Google’s rich results provide things called Google Snippets, which can show up as small snippets outside of the regular search results, at the very top of the page. Here’s what you see when you look up “digital marketing”:

Winning a Google snippet can be extraordinarily effective for SEO marketing. To improve the chances, you can insert a Google schema such as an FAQ schema into your page.

An FAQ schema looks like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Where are you located?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "<p>We're located in the historical district of Paseo, at the intersection of Broadway and Smith. Our hours are from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM from Monday through Friday. Please call ahead for an appointment!</p>"
}]
}

</script>

If someone searched for “[your business] + location,” this FAQ schema would likely pop up.

18. What are the four C’s of digital marketing?

The four C’s of digital marketing refer to Clarity, Credibility, Consistency, and Competitiveness.

When it comes to digital marketing, the market is already very saturated. People see ads constantly. They really want an individual or a company that they can trust.

The four C’s of digital marketing provide guidelines that an advertiser can ask themselves about each time they create a new campaign.

Is it clear and easy to understand? Is it credible, even if they are aware that it’s advertising? Is it consistent with our branding? Is it as good or better than our competitors?

19. What is a problem when analyzing data from multiple channels?

This is one of the most important digital marketing analyst interview questions; so much so that if you aren’t asked it, you might want to find another way to offer up the answer.

In general, analyzing data from multiple channels rarely works without intervention because different channels will record their data differently. One channel could record each hit as a “visit,” whereas another channel could record only each unique hit as a “visit.” Trying to run comparisons on this type of data will only mislead you.

To that end, there are now analysis tools that can take information in from multiple channels and normalize that data. But without these tools, you’re not likely to glean important or actionable insights.

Advanced Digital Marketing Specialist Interview Questions

Advanced digital marketing analyst interview questions tend to be more about how your mind thinks. At this level of your career, you’ve already proven that you know quite a lot about the fundamentals and the technicals of digital marketing. But what an interviewer will want to hear about is your philosophy and whether it meshes well with theirs.

20. What do you think the future of digital marketing is?

This question is intended to test your insights into the digital marketing arena. Of course, no one actually knows how digital marketing is going to pan out in the future or what changes Google will make. But they can see the larger trends.

A significant portion of the internet is going mobile; mobile marketing is becoming more important. At the same time, it’s becoming harder to track users because users are being allowed to opt out. The Metaverse is likely to provide new and exciting opportunities for digital marketing. At the same time, individuals are becoming more jaded to the entire process of marketing and less likely to buy in.

So, digital marketing is going to have to continue to become more honest, more earnest, and more personal.

21. How much should you invest in PPC and SEM?

When asked this question, the interviewer generally wants to figure out how you determine when you’ve invested “enough.” Usually, this requires calculating an inflection point, identifying when you’re receiving diminishing returns, and calculating your ROAS (return on advertising spend) and ROI (return on investment).

In other words, you invest until you see that you’re getting reduced results each time; you’ve reached a saturation point.

22. Do you think digital marketing will replace in-person marketing?

It would be optimistic, to say the least. Digital marketing is not going to replace in-person marketing, but it is going to become more inextricably linked to everyone’s day-to-day lives, perhaps to the extent that there may be a very gray line between the two. Already, many flyers and advertisements point directly to a website URL. Digital marketing and real-life marketing are becoming inextricably linked, but neither is likely to replace the other.

23. How would you build a following on a social media account?

Social media is an incredibly hard nut to crack and it isn’t a bad thing to acknowledge this. Those with decades of experience in marketing and online marketing have been unable to do so.

When it comes to social media, there are a few factors that tend to be important. Consistency is key, as is good faith. If a brand appears to be there to solely promote their own products, then the community can turn on them very quickly. Consistent posting and consistent content are the way to win the game.

Apart from this, you may want to discuss creative tactics (such as the sarcastic replies of Wendy's Twitter account), or any social media accounts that you happen to love.

What Happens When You Don’t Know the Answer?

Unless you’re interviewing for a high-level executive position, this is going to happen. No one expects everyone to know every answer to all digital marketing interview questions and answers.

A beginner believes that they know nothing. Experienced professional believes they know everything. An expert knows exactly how much they don’t know. When it comes to online marketing interview questions, there isn’t always a right answer.

So, if you don’t know the answer to a question, don’t fake it; tell them how you would find that answer. Say, “I actually don’t know a lot about [x], but I would look it up in [favorite online marketing blog].” If you find yourself stumbling during the interview, send a follow-up email when you get home: “I thought about [topic] and did a little research, and now I think [conclusion].”

Especially when it comes to entry-level digital marketing interview questions, the interviewer knows you don’t know everything. They’re trying to ascertain how much knowledge you have and how willing you are to explore it.

How to Ace a Digital Marketing Interview

If you’re about to start interviewing for digital marketing positions, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances:

• Start reading digital marketing blogs today, such as Neil Patel.
• Familiarize yourself with digital marketing technology, like SEMrush.
• Practice interview questions for digital marketing manager positions.
• Get acquainted with the different positions in digital marketing.
• Practice interviews with friends and family.

All these will prepare you for digital marketing interviews. But keep in mind that each interview (and each position) is going to be different. Because digital marketing moves so fast, you might even find that some of the information from the interviewers are dated.

Conclusion

It’s time to learn more about digital marketing. Digital marketing tools, certifications, and practice questions can all help you ace that next interview. Consider taking a digital marketing class or getting a digital marketing certification from venues such as HubSpot or Google; they’re well-recognized brands within the digital marketing industry.

A digital marketing interview is your first step toward an exciting and rewarding digital marketing career. The more you learn beforehand, the better. And since digital marketing is constantly evolving, you’ll need to always be keeping up to date with the latest strategies that come out. A career in digital marketing is exciting and always changing. Good luck with your interview!

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