Hiring a Marketer Manager? Use these interview questions ✔️

Hiring a revenue-driven marketer can be (very) tricky.

Whether it’s your first time hiring a marketer, or you’ve done it a few times around – finding that marketer that has the chops to scale your business can be hard.

It pains me to say it, but there are only a handful of “commercially savvy” and “revenue-driven” marketers out there, so be careful with who you hire.

Once you’ve nailed your job description, here are a few interview questions to help you find the RIGHT marketer for your business.

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General ice breakers

Questions:

• What questions do you have for me?
• What are your career goals 1, 3, and 5 years from now?
• What about this role makes it interesting for you?
  

What you’re looking for:

• Use this time to actively “talk them out of the role”. Be extremely transparent about the good, bad, and the ugly of the role – and assess whether it aligns with their overall career aspirations.
• Make it about THEM choosing the best role for their career, not YOU choosing the best candidate for this role.

ROI specific questions

Questions:

• How do you calculate marketing ROI?
• For the last business you worked at, what was the marketing ROI of your efforts?
• Give me an example of a recent B2B business you’ve worked with, and the results achieved.

What you’re looking for:

• Look for short, sharp revenue-driven answers.
• Eg: I spent 50k, generated $1M in pipeline, and closed $500k in marketing sourced revenue.

Channel specific questions

Questions:

• If a paid media campaign is underperforming, what would you do?
• What are the top factors for success with Facebook campaigns? 
• Talk me through your more successful accomplishments on Facebook campaigns.
• If you came across a Facebook campaign that’s underperforming, describe the step-by-step process you’d take to turn it around.
• What would you do differently to make LinkedIn campaigns work?
• Describe how you would go about writing blogs, with the goal of ranking on page 1. From content ideation to writing it & beyond – how would you go about doing this?

What you’re looking for:

• Do they understand the principle of conversion copy?
• Do they “get” conversion-driven design?
• Do they proactively – without probing – talk about the above, and share specific examples of how they leveraged this to improve campaign outcomes?
• Are they talking about revenue outcomes (vs just CPC, CTR, traffic &  other metrics)
• Which specific channel are they good at? Very few are good at platform
• Do they mention the importance of branding, and it’s correlation with lead gen?

Collaboration/critical thinking questions

Questions:

• How do you ensure sales & marketing are aligned with their goals?
• You’ve generated 3x the number of leads expected, yet sales are unhappy with the volume and quality of leads. How would you tackle this?
• The founder comes to you and says “I want leads, here’s 50k to spend on Adwords”. What do you do?

What you’re looking for:

• How often did the candidate have strategic discussions with sales?
• What experience do they have “managing” the sales team, and holding them accountable?
• Can they stand their ground, and use data to prove their point with sales?
• How proactive were they in ensuring there was sales & marketing alignment?
• Did they do anything to help ensure every lead was followed up to it’s fullest potential?

Self Rating questions

Questions:

• SEO self rating out of 10
• Google ads self rating out of 10
• Meta self rating out of 10
• Linkedin self rating out of 10
• Events self rating out of 10
• Content Marketing self rating out of 10
• Hubspot (if applicable) self rating out of 10
  • Sales CRM
  • Marketing CRM
  • Service CRM

What you’re looking for:

• Short, sharp answers
• Self-awareness & honesty on where they will need support