30+ Marketing Interview Questions to Ask

Updated March 7, 2024

Whether you are in-house for a major corporation or a small business, marketing is an essential part of promoting the company, products, and services—and growing the business!

A streamlined and successful marketing interview process is crucial to adding new talent to your team. The type of marketing interview questions to ask will depend on the role you’re trying to fill and the needs of your business.

But asking the right questions will help you determine the best candidate for your business needs. That includes evaluating soft skills, assessing technical skills, and learning how potential candidates function in different scenarios. And if you haven’t interviewed for your team in a while or you’re adding marketing to the mix for the first time, it may feel a little intimidating to know where to even start. We’ll lay out some of the questions you can ask candidates to evaluate both hard skills and soft skills.

Marketing Interview Questions

How marketing works has evolved significantly over the last decade with the rise of digital media. With these changes, marketing has several niches, including:

Content marketing
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)

Within these niches are also different roles ranging from account or brand managers, marketing managers, and creative directors to copywriters, graphic designers, analysts, and coordinators.

Day-to-day, these marketing professionals may:

Develop and implement marketing strategies
Create campaigns and content
Write and send out email marketing campaigns
Create and manage a company’s website
Monitor analytics such as website traffic or social media engagement

Here are a few marketing industry-specific questions help you assess the candidate’s qualifications and decide if their talents and skills align with your needs:

What marketing platforms, tools, and software do you use regularly?
Do you consider yourself more of a creative or an analytical person?
How have you presented metrics, results, and KPIs to leadership or clients in the past?
What has been your greatest success in marketing projects so far?
When have you had a marketing failure or misalignment with leadership or client needs? How did you resolve it, and what did you learn?
How do you motivate your marketing team to do their best?
What do you think is the biggest challenge in marketing today, and how are you learning to meet and address it?
What do you think is the next major trend in marketing?
What are you most excited about for the future of marketing?

Basic questions to ask in an interview

There’s value in learning about a candidate’s educational and professional experiences and long-term career goals. Of course, you can learn previous experience and education from a resume. But the interview process is an extension of a person’s resume, and the conversation paints a better picture of the candidate and what they can offer the company.

Some basic questions to ask in a marketing interview include:

Tell me more about your professional experience up to now.
What motivates you in your day-to-day professional life?
What are your responsibilities in your current role?
What do you know about this position, and why do you want to work for this company?
Why are you looking to leave your current company?
How will your skills and experience fit with this position?
What professional skills would you like to develop or grow?
What are your long-term career goals
How much do you know about our company mission, vision, and values? how do you align with them?

Interview questions to help you evaluate soft skills

Like any role, soft skills—such as communication, organization, and time management—are essential to fulfilling a marketing position. Asking the right interview questions gauges a candidate’s soft skills. Doing so will help you learn how they manage their time, communicate with colleagues, and stay organized day-to-day.

Here are some marketing interview questions you can ask to evaluate soft skills:

How do you manage the pressures of meeting tight deadlines?
How do you motivate your team?
How do you stay creative when under pressure? How do you keep your creative cup full?
How do prioritize and organize your day?
What helps you manage multiple projects and campaigns simultaneously?
Describe how you communicate new or complex ideas to clients, leaders, or colleagues.
How often have you interacted with or presented ideas to clients? How did that go?
How do you manage relationships between your team and stakeholders?
Describe an instance when you failed to achieve a goal and how you handled it.
How do you respond to positive AND negative feedback from clients, managers, or peers?

Marketing interview questions to assess hard skills

When hiring a new employee, you should be confident in their ability to fulfill the role’s duties. Consider asking these questions to evaluate their hard skills and marketing-specific knowledge:

What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on so far?
What marketing trends do you find most interesting?
How do you develop and track the success or engagement of a strategy?
What marketing tools, software, channels, and programs do you have experience with? What new ones do you hope to learn?
Tell me about a specific product or service that you’ve advertised or promoted.
What skills do you think have helped your success as a marketing professional?
What are you proudest of in your professional career?

Situational interview questions to ask marketing candidates

Another great way to assess the competencies of a prospective candidate is to ask how they would handle situations in the role. Some marketing interview questions to ask include:

How do you stay up to date on the current marketing trends?
What metrics have you used to understand why a project or campaign was successful in the past?
How have you handled the launch of a new product’s marketing campaign? What was your go to market strategy?
How do you handle working collaboratively across teams?
What would you do if a project was almost complete and the priorities change? How do you remain flexible to the needs of the business?
Describe an instance when you worked on a project with a tight budget or short deadline, but still met expectations.

Hire a Marketing Professional with Insight Global

The marketing industry is huge, and asking a balanced series of questions can help you assess the skills and expertise of prospective employees to find the right fit for your role. Insight Global can help you find the best candidates, and you can utilize questions from the list above to thoroughly evaluate candidates today!