Best interview questions for a Marketing Manager

Marketing Manager Interview Questions

This position is best suited to a candidate with at least a few years experience in a Marketing role, some leadership skills would be beneficial as well as interpersonal skills. You should be looking for someone who:

Has an ability to drive innovation
Is creative but also analytical to help with budgeting and pricing strategies.
They should have great communication skills and not be put off by giving presentations to groups of people.
A great leader who can motivate the team is a huge advantage.

Interviewing a Marketing Manager

Do you need a new Marketing Manager in your team? With our Marketing Manager interview questions, you’ll be prepared quickly and easily.

Please note: Our interview questions are suggestions for the earlier stages of the application process and for candidates with average work experience. They are therefore a little more general.

How to open the job interview

Interviews naturally breed nerves, so the first part of your interview should aim to make the candidate feel comfortable speaking with you, you’ll get much more information out of them and a better sense of the person they are if they feel like they can trust the environment they are in.

To do this you can ask some fun and interesting questions linked to the role, they should be open-ended and encourage conversation.

Job Description available

See our Marketing Manager Job Description here

For the interview

A positive opener to start

What do you enjoy most about your job?

What has been your journey so far?

Behavioral Questions

In your opinion, what is the goal of marketing?
Should give a good understanding of general marketing knowledge and practices with their own opinions and strategies.
What makes you passionate about your work?
What are your long term career goals and what would you like to achieve?
Both of these questions above are designed to show you how passionate the candidate is about their jobs and if they have goals for the future.
What is your understanding of our product and our target market so far?
It’s not essential that they know a lot about your company, but it helps their position if they have done some research first.
What do you think distinguishes good managers from great ones?
Gives an idea of their own management style and how they interact with teammates.

Soft Skills

How would you describe your leadership style?
What types of people and teams do you work best with?
How developed would you say your presentation skills are? Would you be put off by explaining complex issues simply in front of an audience?
Could you talk about a time when you had to work with a group of creative people who all had different opinions? How did you help keep the project on track?
All of these questions are designed to get a good idea of the general way the candidate works both individually and within a team as well as interpersonal skills such as presentation and communication skills.

Hard Skills

How would you assess the effectiveness of a marketing strategy?
A marketing manager should be able to talk extensively about strategies and the best ones to use in certain situations.
How do you boost a company’s visibility in the market?
A good candidate will show a good understanding of creating communities, using social media and advertisement campaigns
Could you tell me about a time that you created a content strategy before? What were the outcomes?
Marketing strategies work as the skeleton for your marketing manager, they should have good previous experience with creating these.
How would you measure the success of your campaigns? What KPIs would you focus on?
This is an important hard skill for the candidate to have, they should have a good grasp of many KPIs.
How do you focus on target audiences? How do you find those audiences and how do you decide the best marketing channels to reach them?
A marketing manager should be able to answer this fairly easily, they should know where to find their audience and how to work on personas.

Operational / Situational Questions

If we receive an overly negative review on social media how would you deal with that?
Looking for a good communicator and experience dealing with customers or advising a team on how to deal with the situation.
Could you tell me about a time that you marketed a product successfully? What was your strategy and roadmap?
Should give a good sense of the scope of a marketing campaign in general and how they can develop a roadmap.
If you are tasked to create a new branding campaign for a product that hasn’t been performing well, how would you deal with it and what would your process be?
This question is more focused on branding, they should have some creative ideas.
Have you had to work on a campaign before with a tight budget? What did you have to prioritise?
A more analytical question with how they have dealt with constrictions in the past, they should be able to prioritise tasks effectively.