Although the current state of employment is a job-seeker’s market, that doesn’t mean you can walk into any high-profile company and effortlessly land a plum digital marketing job with no effort. But rest assured, there is a small army of other digital marketing professionals with the same idea. So you need to be prepared.
If you can ace your digital marketing interview, you’re on your way to that career. To help you make that great first impression, we’re presenting over two dozen interview questions for digital marketing. In addition, we have broken down the interview questions into handy categories, such as general knowledge and in-depth questions, and provided the answers as well.
Of course, there are far more than 25 questions an interviewer can ask, and there’s no guarantee that your interview will include all these questions. But this list of questions and answers comes from a pool of the most likely ones to be asked.
Let’s start with some easy, fundamental interview questions for a digital marketing position.
General Digital Marketing Interview Questions
Here is a sampling of the top general interview questions for digital marketing in 2023. Of course, we’re dealing with digital marketing basics here.
1) How would you define digital marketing, and what are its ultimate goals?
A: Digital marketing is a form of brand marketing conducted through the Internet. It includes various techniques like SEM, SEO, and link building.
2) How would you break down digital marketing? What are its different forms?
A: Here are the different aspects of digital marketing:
a) Content Marketing
b) Email Marketing
c) Ecommerce Marketing
d) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
e) Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
f) Social Media Marketing
Digital marketing’s ultimate goals are:
a) Boosting brand awareness
b) Increasing the size of a company’s sales funnel
c) Increasing revenue
d) Reaching the desired target audience
3)What are the three ingredients of digital marketing?
A: The three ingredients are:
a) Traffic
b) Insights
c) Sales
4)I’m responsible for increasing traffic to my company’s site. Please give me suggestions for how to do this.
A: Here are the most effective and often-used methods of driving traffic to your site:
a) Content marketing
b) Content optimization
c) Display advertising
d) Email marketing
e) Guest blogging
f) Internal links
g) Paid searches
h) Posting content on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. This method could include content such as videos and animation
i) Seeking referral traffic
j) SEO activities
k) Targeting long-tail keywords
l) Writing succinct but engaging headlines
5)What are the two broad categories of digital marketing?
A: There are two main digital marketing categories.
a) Inbound Marketing. This technique uses social media, digital content, webinars, or e-mail newsletters to boost the number of clicks on links and inform the user about the company and its goods and services.
b) Outbound Marketing. This category includes making cold calls, sending e-mails, placing ads online, or using other digital media to reach potential customers.
6)SEOs are a prevalent form of digital marketing. Tell me about SEOs. Furthermore, explain the SEO categories.
A: SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of boosting the quality and quantity of website traffic by raising the company’s website visibility to people using a web search engine such as Google. SEO is the strategy of getting traffic from editorial, organic, or natural search results found on search engines by ensuring that the organization’s website places high on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP).
Digital marketers typically break SEO down into three categories:
a) Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO exploits search engine algorithms’ different weaknesses to get higher SERP rankings. Unfortunately, black Hat SEO doesn’t play by the rules and doesn’t act in concert with the rules established by search engines. Some Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, link spam, hidden text, and hidden links. Although these techniques typically give the company some quick success, it tends to be short-lived and invites the search engine platform itself to enact punitive measures.
b) White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO is the most popular SEO technique. It utilizes methods and techniques to improve a site’s search engine rankings consistent with accepted search engine guidelines. White hat SEO uses tools like link acquisition, publishing high-quality content, website HTML optimization, and restructuring.
c) Grey Hat SEO. Grey Hat SEO is a transitional state, a combination of both styles, and typically describes transforming from black SEO techniques to white or from white SEO techniques to black.
7) What are keywords in the world of digital marketing, and where can you place keywords for SERP rank optimization?
A: Keywords in digital marketing are words that a person enters into a search engine (e.g., Bing, Google) to find specific information. Effective keywords are a vital part of any SEO strategy. Good keywords place your website higher on the search engine result page, offering your organization better exposure, especially since studies show that users seldom click beyond the first SERP. Digital marketers place keywords in places like:
a) Body text
b) Headlines
c) Meta tags
d) Web page content
e) Website URL
f) Website Titles
8) What is Pay Per Click advertising, and what are the two ways to determine Pay Per Click?
A: Pay Per Click, also known as PPC or Cost Per Click, is a digital marketing technique used to direct increased traffic to websites. Advertisers pay the publisher whenever the ad gets clicked, typically the website owner or host. So, PPC is the amount an advertiser spends to get their advertisements clicked.
Advertisers use two different methods to determine PPC fees. In flat-rate PPC, the publisher and advertiser agree on a fixed amount paid for each click. The publisher usually has a rate card for PPC plans that vary depending on different areas of their website.
In bid-based PPC, the advertiser competes with other advertisers in private auctions hosted by the publisher. The advertiser tells the publisher the maximum bid amount they are willing to pay.
Note: Discover the top digital marketing books that can enhance your knowledge and skills in the field of online advertising and promotion.
Intermediate Digital Marketing Interview Questions
Now let’s move into some interview questions for digital marketing that are more difficult and typically require the candidate to have decent background experience in digital marketing.
This section also focuses on digital marketing specialist interview questions.
1) List some digital marketing tools you have either worked with or know about.
A: While each candidate’s answer differs depending on their experience, here’s a list of the most popular tools.
a) AdExpresso
b) Ahrefs
c) Alexa Ranking
d) Buffer App
e) Buzzsumo
f) Crazy Egg Heatmaps
g) Digital Point Keyword Tracker
h) Favicon Generator
i) Google Analytics
j) Google Keyword Planner
k) Google Trends
l) Hasoffers
m) Keyword Discovery
n) Kissmetrics
o) MailChimp
p) Moz
q) RankWatch
r) Semrush
s) SubmitExpress Link Popularity
t) Unbounce
u) XML Sitemap Generator
2) We mentioned Pay Per Click before, but we were hoping you could explain the best ways to approach PPC.
A: There are several effective methods of creating a better PPC campaign.
a) Expand the reach by adding more PPC keywords
b) Improve the campaign’s relevancy by adding negative keywords
c) Divide ads into smaller segments to boost the Click Through Rate (CTR)
d) Refine the website’s landing pages to conform better to search query results
e) Review non-performing keywords
3) Negative keywords? What are those?
A: Negative keywords are used to prevent ads from showing to people who are actively conducting searches unrelated to the products and services the company provides. They act as a filter to ensure that the company’s ads won’t be displayed if they use certain words.
4) Speaking of PPC keywords, what are the characteristics of an effective one?
A: Effective PPC keywords must be:
a) Relevant. Digital marketers should list out targeted keywords.
b) Exhaustive. PPC keywords should not only be derived from popular keywords but also include long-tail keywords.
c) Expansive. The list of PPC keywords must perpetually grow and adapt since PPC is iterative.
5) Come to think of it, what’s a long-tail keyword?
A: Long-tail keywords are search queries that get fewer searches. They are typically longer and more specific than “head” keywords, so they often have a higher conversion rate.
For example, “running” is a head keyword because it gets 500K monthly searches. But the long-tail keyword “can running improve your cardiovascular system” only gets 1,000 searches per month. So, while long-tail keywords get fewer results, their specificity makes them more relevant to the user and, thus, more likely to result in a conversion. It’s a trade-off.
6) What’s a responsive web design?
A: Responsive web design uses a combination of images, flexible layouts, grids, and CSS media queries to make web pages perform well on different devices, such as mobile phones, desktops, and tablets. It guarantees that every user has a great viewing experience, no matter what device they use to access the company’s website.
7) Explain the difference between branding and direct marketing.
A: When advertisers use branding, they use tools such as display target ads, YouTube ads, custom ads, and remarketing to expose their brand to applications and websites with a higher audience reach. But with direct marketing, advertisers establish communication with the target audience through e-mails, pamphlets, text messaging, flyers, catalogs, etc.
So, branding builds awareness and is comparatively passive, while direct marketing reaches out to customers directly and is more active.
8) Explain the difference between SEM and SEO.
A: SEM is search engine marketing, which involves buying a space on a search engine result page, while SEO makes a website appear in a higher position on a search engine result page.
9) Online marketing is great, but it has its limitations. Name them.
A: Digital marketing’s three primary limitations are:
a) There’s a lot of competition. Digital marketing is cost-effective and gets results, so everyone’s doing it.
b) It can overwhelm the marketer. The digital marketing field contains so much information and a staggering variety of tools, processes, and other resources that it’s easy to become confused and overwhelmed.
c) The analytics are only as effective as the user. The good news is that there are volumes of actionable data for the digital marketer. The bad news is that its effectiveness is limited to how well the digital marketing analyst interprets the data.
10) Name the four C’s of Digital Marketing.
A: The four C’s are:
a) Customer. Who is seeing your message?
b) Content. What message does the customer see?
c) Context. Why does the customer see this message?
d) Conversation. What happens between you and your customer?
Note: Looking for a comprehensive digital marketing job description? Check out our website for everything you need to know about the roles and responsibilities of a digital marketer.
Advanced Digital Marketing Interview Questions
Our final section of interview questions for digital marketing deals with issues that require even more experience and specialization. The topics you find here are often included in digital marketing analyst interview questions.
11) What’s the difference between No-follow and Do-follow links in SEO?
A: No-follow links tell search engine bots that the hyperlink shouldn’t influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine index. No-follow links reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam and increase the quality of search engine results.
Do-follow links let search engines follow them and access the business’s website, providing the link with juice and a backlink.
12) What constitutes a bad link?
A: Here are the characteristics commonly found in bad links:
a) Links from sites unrelated to your site
b) Links derived from link exchanges
c) Paid links
d) Spammy links from articles and blogs
e) Links from low-traffic and low-page-rank sites
f) Links from sites not found in the Google index
g) Links from the same anchor texts found on multiple sites
13) Search engines frequently penalize websites for SEO infractions. What steps can you take to ensure this doesn’t happen?
A: Here’s what digital marketers can do to avoid committing SEO sins and consequently getting punished by pushing the website’s link far down the SERP.
a) Avoid poison words like link, cheap, free, or terms found in so-called adult content
b) Don’t link to sites with bad page ranks
c) Don’t steal text or images from other sites
d) Don’t redirect users to another page via refresh meta-tags, and don’t immediately send users to another page even before they can click on the web page’s link
14) What’s an AMP?
A: AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a project from Google and Twitter to make faster mobile pages. AMP is an open-source library that helps developers build lightweight, fast-loading web pages. AMPs help marketers and publishers create web pages optimized for mobile devices, can be supported with different platforms and is compatible with all browsers.
15) What are the primary Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for social media reporting?
A: These are the most popular KPIs used in social media reporting:
a) Active followers
b) Brand mentions Reach
c) Conversions
d) Engagement
e) Leads
f) Likes
g) Shares
h) Traffic data
16) How do you measure a channel’s ROI?
A: You calculate a marketing campaign’s ROI of a marketing campaign by integrating it into the overall business line calculation. So, you must subtract the marketing costs from the product line’s sales growth, then divide by the marketing cost, like so:
(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI
17) What is Google AdWords?
A: Google AdWords is an online advertising service created by Google to help digital marketers instantly reach their potential customers. The Google Adwords service focuses on keywords. Businesses use AdWords to display ads on the Google site and its advertising network. Google AdWords is also the most famous Pay-Per-Click advertising system in use today. AdWords makes it easy for businesses to set up an advertising budget and the fees to be paid when people click on the company’s ads.
Are You Interested in Digital Marketing Certification?
Are you a digital marketing professional needing upskilling or someone who wants to change their career to digital marketing? You can ensure that you can answer interview questions for digital marketing after completing the bootcamp delivered by Simplilearn in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts offers this intense six-month digital marketing bootcamp that equips you for the challenges of today’s digital marketing scene. In addition, the online bootcamp shows you how to assemble a compelling, creative digital marketing campaign that boosts customer engagement and brings in new customers.
You may also pick up valuable information to help handle the more challenging digital marketing specialist interview questions like the ones listed above.
And after you finish the digital marketing training program, you get your certificate from UMass Amherst and Simplilearn and an offer of membership in the prestigious UMass Amherst Alumni Association.
According to Indeed.com, digital marketers working in the United States earn an average annual salary of $60,434. Typical marketing professional salaries range from $36,313 minimum to $100,579 maximum. Remember, though, that these salary ranges are constantly changing and subject to variables like the size and type of company hiring, individual employee experience, and supply and demand for digital marketers in the city’s job market.
Digital marketing has become the primary means of reaching new audiences and building customer loyalty. If you want a fantastic career in marketing in 2023, you need the best digital marketing skills in your toolbox. Sign up for this digital bootcamp today and get the skills that will get you noticed!
