Preparing for your marketing interview
Whilst research is key it is also important to be able to sell your experience in detail.
1. Read through the job description and write against each task a detailed example (doesn’t matter how basic or the level of experience) It is important that you can talk through an example if the question is asked.
2. Get familiar with the terms used, so you can match how you talk about your skills and experience using those keywords.
3. List all the packages that you have used and write a few examples of how you use these.
4. Think about the different marketing channels that you have used. Have you been involved in developing these or increasing followers/audience interest/participation?
5. What method do you use to track your marketing campaigns?
6. Do you have an example where the response was slow and what did you do to improve this?
7. Do you have experience with marketing analytics or post-campaign reporting?
8. What areas of marketing would you like to develop (remember to bear in mind this role) So don’t say something like I want to be a specialist in SEO as this is not the route of this role.
The second thing you need to do when preparing for an interview is study the company.
This means:
Explore your company’s official website
Read the news
Find out who their competition is
Browse through their official LinkedIn page and socials
Research the people who work there (including your interviewer(s) and potential co-workers).
Do a marketing audit.
So now that you’ve digitally stalked your company and learned a bit about it, I want you to take the sleuthing a step further by doing a marketing audit.
What’s a marketing audit?
A marketing audit as described by Kotler and Keller (1989) is a “comprehensive, systematic, independent, and periodic examination of a company’s—or business unit’s—marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities to determine problem areas and opportunities and recommend a plan of action to improve the company’s marketing performance.”
Things you should look for in a marketing audit
With a marketing audit, you’re looking to see if there’s any suggestion or contribution that you can make to fill that gap that you see in their processes and systems.
Some high-level things you should look at during your audit include:
types of posts published by the company
platforms used
their website
their emails
their lead generation systems
their content types
Once you’ve done your marketing audit you should be able to answer the following:
what is the company good at?
what are their successes?
what are the gaps in their processes and systems?
Remember to share your insights with your interviewer(s) as it’ll give you bonus marks. But, if you end up running out of time, you can always leave it for after you’re hired, and you still want to impress the team.