Four Interview Questions to Hire the Perfect Marketing Professional

Marketing is an integral part of managing a business and involves understanding and satisfying customer needs. A marketing professional should be able to identify which products customers are likely to buy and at what price ranges. They must know how to package and distribute the products, and how to advertise the products for maximum coverage and consumer attention. For this, it is essential to have market research and analysis skills, and these skills should be a basic requirement in candidates you want to hire for marketing positions.

Hiring the right marketing candidate is very important since hiring mistakes can cost your business quite a lot in real expenses as well as in missed opportunities. So, it is essential to ask the right questions to determine if a candidate will be a perfect fit for your business.

Here are four interview questions for marketing position that you should ask:

How would you differentiate our products from those of our closest competitors in the marketplace?

This question is an important one as the answer will tell you how motivated the candidate is. Are they seeking any marketing job that comes their way or are they genuinely interested in working for your organization? The best candidates will have taken the time to research your business and will know what types of products or services you offer. They will have some inkling about your past and current marketing campaigns. If they have done their homework well, they will know who your competitors are. They will also know how their products are faring in the marketplace as compared to yours.

They must be able to elaborate on their research findings. Not necessarily in depth – that knowledge may come only after they’ve worked with your business for a while – but enough to demonstrate their thinking and reasoning capabilities.  

What do you know about marketing campaigns and what makes them successful?

Here, you want to observe how familiar the candidate is with different marketing methods. They must explain which marketing methods, in their opinion, are more likely to spell the success of a marketing campaign and the reasons for this. They should demonstrate how to use marketing analytics tools to collect marketing campaign data, quantify it, and derive information from it to report success metrics. They must be able to explain how to harness various media platforms to reach a broad customer base, and how to measure customer awareness.

You also want to know if the candidate considers customer needs and cares whether they can meet them. A successful campaign, after all, is not just about business profits. It is an encouraging sign if the marketing candidate keeps up with industry trends and knows how to take them into account to draw up marketing campaigns.

Did you ever conduct a marketing campaign that didn’t turn out to be a success?

You can’t win every battle, and, so it follows, not every marketing campaign can be successful. It can be tough to deal with, but to continue working in the marketing field, candidates must learn to get over such failures.

It will help to hear something along the lines of how the candidate felt discouraged, a natural feeling in this situation, but was able to overcome it. You don’t want a cookie-cutter answer, but you do want to know if they can analyze what went wrong and why. They should be able to tell you which part of the campaign was done right, and what they learned through it about their target customers. You want them to convince you that they can incorporate what they have learned into your marketing initiatives.

How do you manage situations where team members have radically different ideas about marketing a product?

The goal is to get some insight into how well the candidates can communicate with colleagues and co-workers from diverse backgrounds. Can they consider ideas from different perspectives and acknowledge those variances? Are they able to bridge the differences and come to an agreement on how to market the product? By asking these four interview questions for a marketing position, you can get a solid idea about what the candidates are like and whether they will be an asset for your organization.