After optimizing your resume, building a strong marketing portfolio, sending in applications, writing cold emails, and doing phone and technical screens, you have finally made it to the onsite interview! This is likely your last (albeit big) step before you land your dream job.
How can you make sure that you nail the onsite and turn that interview into an offer? We created a list of 73 marketing interview questions, including questions from top tech companies, so you can prepare for your onsite and ace it with confidence.
Marketing interview questions
- General marketing
- Project management
- Product marketing
- Strategy
- Data
- Paid media
- Organic
- Optimization
General marketing interview questions
- Adobe question – How do you envision the future of digital experiences?
- Airbnb question – How would you estimate Airbnb revenue in a new city we are targeting?
- Sage question – What are the differences in SMB and large enterprise marketing?
- Facebook question – Describe the difference between an inner join and an outer join.
Project management
- CA Technologies question – Give an example of a time when you were responsible for ensuring work outputs met a certain target or goal. How did you track and document your work? What did you do if you were unable to meet your target or goal?
- Health Catalyst question – How would you address documentation standardization?
Product marketing interview questions
- Salesforce question – How would you reposition a product or brand to better capture a market?
- Microsoft question – If you were to market the Microsoft Surface to students, how would you do that, and how would do it better than the competitors?
- Facebook question – Pick a physical product that you really like in the real world. Articulate the value proposition for me. What segments does it target? What’s an example ad campaign you might come up with to market it?
- Coursera question – What other marketing channels of customer acquisition can you think of that Coursera does not use yet?
- Amazon question – If you have a product that isn’t selling, what are 10+ examples of ways to promote it?
- Salesforce question – What is one product that has a great marketing campaign but that you feel in value is not actually that good?
- Dropbox question – Talk about a time you have done product roadmapping before.
- Box question – Analyze why one product is less profitable than the other and how to bring that product to profitability (case study).
- Facebook question – Pick a product on Facebook. Please describe the logical data model for related fact and dimension tables, the aggregation tables you’d want to build for analytics, and the dashboard you’d build to monitor the product.
- Apple question – Tell us about the competitive landscape for Apple Watch.
- eBay question – How would you get existing members to become more active?
- Dell question – Do you have any creative ideas around solutions-based offerings to small and medium business type customers based on the product portfolio of the company?
- Expedia question – How would you convince a hotel property to partner with Expedia?
- Asana question – How would you go about prioritizing the part of the user journey to focus your marketing efforts on, in order to have the greatest impact?
- Dell question – What type of marketing tactics are used to develop channel partners?
- Facebook question – How would you optimize the “forgot password” process so more users can use log in and use Facebook?
- Dropbox question – How would you go about acquiring new enterprise users for Dropbox?
Strategy
- Uber question – How would you create marketing strategies based on different countries/cultures?
- Software AG question – What are your strategies and tactics for lead generation?
- Robinhood question – If you were to run a TV ad campaign, how would you test the efficiency of these ads compared to digital ad spend?
- Outreach question – How would you strategize a social media campaign around an upcoming event?
- SAP question – How would you create a marketing campaign for B2B differently from B2C?
- IBM question – What is the difference between B2C and B2B marketing?
- Compass question – What are three things that are most important for creating a marketing plan?
- Accenture question – Identify 3 companies in the retail industry and describe how they have changed their marketing approaches recently.
- SolarWinds question – How would you define demand generation and lead generation?
- Dropbox question – How would you go about acquiring new enterprise users for Dropbox?
- Cisco question – Do you prefer quantitative or qualitative marketing?
- Microsoft question – What is one strategy you’ve developed to increase engagement on social media?
- Salesforce question – What is omni-channel marketing?
- DocuSign question – How do you validate your assumptions when developing marketing strategy
- HubSpot question – What is inbound marketing?
- LinkedIn question – What is the best decision tree for the ‘people you may know’ feature?
- Autodesk question – What are some social media campaigns for other brands that you admire and why do you admire them?
- Expedia question – What would you do if performance was dropping on a campaign?
- Compass question – An agent has an upcoming listing, and has always used word of mouth to help market themselves. What are a few things you would recommend to this agent, and how would you approach the process?
- Uber question – How would you target Uber to an older crowd?
- Cisco question – Do you prefer quantitative or qualitative marketing?
Data
- Toast question – How do you approach marketing from a data/analytics perspective?
- Nvidia question – What kind of key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use for tracking and measuring?
- Groupon question – How do you calculate significance for email conversion rate?
- Amazon question – Tell me about the last time you used data to inform your decision making. How did you acquire the data? If you had to make that decision again, what would you do differently? What data would you like to use instead?
- Google question – How would you build a successful nurturing campaign? What metrics would you analyze as success factors? Which tools would you use?
- 23andMe question – How would you construct a marketing attribution model?
- Accenture question – What is CMP and how do we calculate?
- Facebook question – Design a database schema that can be used for ad hoc analysis of Facebook mobile apps.
- NCR question – What steps do you follow when completing a win/loss analysis?
- Micro Focus question – Specify how you measure ROI for events.
- Spotify question – Why are different attribution models outside of last touch important.
- Dropbox question – How do you prioritize your ideas into action plans? How do you determine KPIs?
- Gusto question – Calculate customer lifetime value using unit economics.
- Uber question – How would you measure the impact of off-line marketing campaigns like radio?
- Amazon question – If you notice a drop in conversion rate on a product, what could be the cause of this?
Paid media
- Robinhood question – If our cost of user acquisition is very high on a paid advertising channel, how would you bring it down?
- Red Ventures question – Determine the maximum amount that we could afford to pay to have a potential customer reach one of our websites.
- ADP question – What is a typical budget for PPC? How would you run a PPC campaign?
- Coursera question – What optimization techniques have you used when running Google Adwords campaigns?
- Airbnb question – Explain to me what a quality score is.
- 23andMe question – What do you think are the possible reasons for cost-per-click to increase or decrease?
- Uber question – What are the most important metrics in PPC and why?
Organic
- TripAdvisor question – How would you optimize search engine rank when expanding into a new market in Sweden?
- Intuit question – Talk about personalized search results and its impact on SEO.
- Dell question – Explain how you do competitive analysis.
Optimization
- Uber question – Design an email A/B test or multivariate test to re-engage drivers who have no activity in the last 14 days.
- Kabbage question – How do you use A/B testing in loyalty messaging?
- Booking.com question – What do you think about the conversion rates at a huge low in metasearch traffic?
- Cisco question – Tell me about a time you improved marketing ROI.
Our mentors meet with so many smart marketers who still find that they have difficulty with their onsite technical interviews. So, we also wanted to provide some tips for you to keep in mind to nail your onsite interview.
- Don’t jump right in, instead, start with clarifying questions
Sometimes, interviewers make a question intentionally vague. Always take about 15-30 seconds to think about clarifying questions, like “Who is the target audience?” or “Have you done a similar campaign in the past?”
- Proactively show positive signal
Take the time to show that you know what you’re doing by providing 30 second “tidbits” of knowledge, which reduces the silences. If you give background information as you go, you have the opportunity to show the interviewer what you know.
- Keep context in the forefront
Context statements let the interviewer know that you know what you are doing. By providing the reasoning before doing something, you can change how you are interpreted for the better.
- Know how to get help
Most of the time, it’s ok to ask for help. But, it’s important to know that some interviewers really hate the word, “hint.” A better approach would be to say, “my assumptions are X and Y, I’m thinking of doing Z. But I’m struggling with solving [problem].” You can also ask collaborative questions like,
- I was wondering if you had any thoughts.
- Do you think I’m going down the right direction?
- Do you think my assumptions are incorrect?
With these marketing interview questions & tips in your back pocket, you should be more than prepared for your next technical onsite interview.
Pathrise is a career accelerator that works with students and professionals 1-on-1 so they can land their dream job in tech. With these tips and guidance, we’ve seen interview scores double from our fellows in the program.
If you want to work with any of our mentors 1-on-1 to get help with your marketing interviews or with any other aspect of the job search, become a Pathrise fellow.
Apply today.
Check out our other Interview Questions to prep for your next interview:
