1. Tell us what is the typical salary of a communications specialist?
A typical entry-level salary for a communications specialist is around $45,000 with senior communications specialists earning a median salary of $75,000 and directors earning anywhere from $75,000 – $120,000, depending on location and experience.
2. Can you please explain how do you use social media as a tool for customer service?
This is an opportunity for the professional to demonstrate both their strategic thinking as well as their judgment and soft skills. A good social media specialist should be able to work with your CS team to make sure that they're providing support that's helpful and on-brand, and also recognize when it's better to take the conversation off social media.
3. Can you explain me what makes a piece of social media content successful?
A social media strategy is only as good as the content it produces. To be successful, a social media strategist needs more than a flair for click-worthy headlines (though that certainly helps). They need an eye for relevant, shareable content. If they've managed a blog before, ask them to share some examples of articles they consider successful.
4. Explain me what tools do you use to manage your channels?
Good social media managers won't just blast content onto their channels. They will have a deliberate strategy behind their campaigns and use professional tools to monitor their effectiveness. Dashboards like Hootsuite and Sprout Social give social media specialists the ability to both manage channels and perform basic analytics from one interface.
5. Explain me what does a communications specialist do?
In addition to working on internal communications strategies and branding programs, communications specialists also act as the public face of the brand. Working either with PR specialists or on their own, they are responsible for responding to media requests, crafting press releases and even managing events on behalf of the company.
6. Where do you see yourself in five years as Education Marketing Specialist?
Many early-career employees won't expect to work at the same company for five years. So it's OK to be vague. The most important element is to show drive and development. You can say, “I plan to lead a team of marketers that tells compelling stories about a product I'm passionate about.”
7. Tell me what are the benefits of working in communications?
Although this job definitely has its share of challenges, it also has a lot of benefits. These include establishing great relationships with the public and the media, liaising with thought leaders in one or more fields and and organizing high-profile events that are likely to generate attention for the company. This is a great way to gain exposure to various areas of the communications and media industries, while building a solid reputation and a strong professional network.
8. Explain me about a marketing project that you brought in on time and under budget?
Focus on your planning and organising skills to get the best return on the marketing budget.Detail what controls were put in place to track and stay on top of expenditure and how planswere adjusted when necessary. Discuss your ability to react quickly and accurately to meet newdemands and constraints.
9. Tell us when is it better not to engage on social media?
Again, it comes down to judgment. It might be tempting to respond to every negative comment on social media, but a good social media specialist will know how to distinguish between legitimate customer complaints and people who are just looking for attention.
10. Tell me suppose our CEO wants you to evaluate our blog. What would you say?
Before giving you an answer, the best candidates will come back and ask you about the blog's metrics, how many leads and customers it generates, what the goals are for it, how much you're investing in it, and so on. This is also a great way to test whether they actually prepared for the interview by reading your blog.
11. Explain me about a time your communication skills improved a situation?
I was working in the engineering department of a large manufacturing company and we were running behind on timelines for a project. So, I arranged and led a conference call to explain the reasons for our delay to the client. It was a case of managing their expectations, which resulted in us over-delivering for the project. As a result, the client was much more understanding and decided to pursue another commercial opportunity with our company.
I would take the opportunity as a representative of the brand to address the customer in a respectful and holistic way, assuring them that our brand feels accountable to making the customer happy and discussing how we can best accomplish that in the customer's future interactions with our brand.
13. Explain me what are the challenges of working in communications?
Being a communications specialist certainly does come with its share of challenges. These include having to perform “damage control” in any instance where the company gets bad publicity, being able to ensure consistent messaging across all communications materials and generally being able to balance all of the different tasks involved. In addition to these challenges, communications specialists are also sometimes called upon to handle problems with the organization or with external third parties and they must ensure that they keep their cool while always representing the company in the best possible light.
14. Tell us what would you do in your first 90 days here?
Pore over the company's website, your interviewer's and the CEO's LinkedIn posts, and news about the company's initiatives. Then come up with three steps you'd take once you're in the door to help them achieve a goal your team is likely working toward. You can say, “I'd start by fully acquainting myself with the marketing team and all of the adjacent teams I'd work with, like design and accounting; diving deep on our target client segments and getting in front of as many clients as possible; and working with the growing research team to identify future markets.”
15. Explain me how did you overcome a significant challenge at school or at work?
Pluck three jobs from your resume and for each one, prepare an example of a challenging situation you overcame through problem-solving. The setting matters less than the step-by-step process you undertook; you likely overcame difficulties not only at full-time jobs, but when you were the president of a college club, you volunteered at an animal shelter or you were an intern. Prepare a few examples so you can fall back on them if your interviewer asks this question multiple ways.
16. Tell us a time you identified a new approach to a workplace problem?
In my last accountancy role, I noticed that the way we did our monthly purchase ledger was very long-winded and took too much of everyone's time. Given that there was a long gap between transactions being logged, it also introduced financial errors. I decided to implement a new procedure, which made individual staff accountable for entering their own transactions, which they were asked to do once a week. This new process both reduced the amount of errors balancing the books, and freed up more time in the finance department, all within the first month.
17. Can you tell me why do you love marketing?
Or, "Which aspects of our business are you passionate about?" You want to hire someone who's both qualified and has the desire to do the work. Otherwise, why would they work for you instead of the company next door?
Part of their answer will lie in their body language and enthusiasm. The other part will lie in how concrete their answer is. Get at the details by asking a follow-up question, like: "Let's say you're at home, kicking around, and doing something related to marketing. What is it that you're doing?" Perhaps they're reading their five favorite marketing sites, or analyzing traffic patterns of websites for fun, or writing in their personal blog, or optimizing their LinkedIn profile. Whatever it is, you want to be sure they're deeply passionate about the subject matter you'd hire them for.
18. Explain me what's the main relationship between marketing and sales?
The relationship between Marketing and Sales is known for its unrest (Sales wants better leads from Marketing, and Marketing wants Sales to close more, faster).
"Marketers are the lead generators and salespeople are the lead closers" isn't necessarily wrong, but the candidate who ends his/her answer here might not be someone who can align both departments around a single, unified approach.
The best answers describe the responsibilities that Sales and Marketing have to each other, and the duties each commits to as part of this partnership. They have a plan for forging consensus on what makes leads marketing-qualified versus sales-qualified, creating a shared Service Level Agreement with agreed-upon metrics, and using content at different points in the marketing and sales funnel to turn strangers into customers.
I came into a team that had a brand that had released a faulty product and accumulated negative associations with customers. We rebranded by creating a bright and cheery new logo that signaled the change in the product. We acknowledged to customers that the product had had issues and was being reformulated, and we communicated throughout the rebrand. Customers gave us a chance, spread their satisfaction with friends and the new brand became successful.
20. Role-specific Education Marketing Specialist Job Interview Questions:
☛ What marketing metrics do you regularly track? How do you organize and parse the data? (e.g. in spreadsheets)
☛ What are the biggest challenges in our industry for the next five years?
☛ What statistical analysis software have you used?
☛ Describe the process of product positioning.
☛ What metrics indicate that a campaign failed? How would you use those findings to inform your next campaign?
21. Behavioral Education Marketing Specialist Job Interview Questions:
☛ Describe your most successful marketing campaign so far. What was your role and how did you work together with other teams to achieve your goals?
☛ Have you ever participated in an advertising project that failed? If so, what went wrong and what did you do differently next time?
☛ Which do you prefer: creating a report or giving a presentation to explain marketing results? Why?
☛ How do you explain to a manager or client that a campaign didn't bring the results they wanted?
22. Basic Education Marketing Specialist Job Interview Questions:
☛ What strategies would you suggest to increase our market share?
☛ Between emails, social media and radio ads, which would you choose to attract our target audience, and how?
☛ What methods would you use to gather customer feedback?
☛ What digital channels would you choose to promote a new product we're launching?
23. What are your biggest strengths and weaknesses as Education Marketing Specialist?
Think about your true strengths and weaknesses, and prepare one in advance for each. Employers across industries will value strengths that relate to your communication skills or your ability to solve problems. Choose one that's specific, like “I'm comfortable in front of a crowd,” “I manage stress well,” or “I build rapport with others quickly,”.
Your weakness might be that you're impatient, you're not a strong number cruncher or you don't ask for help well. But steer clear of weaknesses that cast doubt on whether you're a team
I'm really excited about the prospect of creating an experiential marketing campaign, where we can activate the brand in the wild, where our customers are. I've researched a variety of marketing activations, such as one where a vegetable company brought branded trucks to a festival and served vegetable snacks to health-conscious consumers.
25. Explain me what brands do you like or follow on social media and why?
This is another casual but useful question, as it can tell you both about a candidate's personal interests and how they perceive marketing content on social media. The best answers go further than which companies a candidate likes buying from -- they indicate why he or she trusts certain companies, what about their content strategy appeals to the candidate, and what specifically about those companies the candidate looks up to (and maybe wants to emulate in their own work).
If you need a candidate to elaborate, follow up by asking them to describe a post from a brand they like or follow, and what made that post so memorable to them.
26. Tell me an example of a situation where you had to deal with a conflict?
I was working the reception desk in my current role when an irate client came in. He was frustrated that my boss couldn't make an important meeting at the last minute. I listened to his concerns, got him a seat and a drink and set about trying to put some kind of resolution in place. Away from the reception desk, I found out that the managing director had been called away on an urgent personal matter. By speaking to colleagues, I was able to source a head of department who had been partially involved in the project to take the meeting in his place. The client was relieved, and personally thanked me after the meeting, as well as apologising for his heated words when he first arrived. The client is still with us today.
27. Tell me a couple of examples of social media experiments you'd like to run with our business?
There is no single solution when it comes to social media. Trends change, communities evolve. A good social media specialist is constantly looking for new ways to engage with their audience. They should also know how to use the results of their experiments to inform future campaigns.
I worked on a team with several people who came from very different backgrounds and disagreed on many things. The way I worked to bridge this gap was by defining what our product was together and focusing on the product rather than on our personal differences. By focusing that way, we were able to work together.
29. Tell me what have you done to improve marketing specialist knowledge in the last year?
Every should learn from his mistake. I always try to consult my mistakes with my kith and kin especially with elderly and experienced person.
I enrolled myself into a course useful for the next version of our current project. I attended seminars on personal development and managerial skills improvement.
You want a professional who is deliberate and thoughtful. They should be able to articulate what they think is working well and what isn't. If you have a strategy in place, they should be able to offer ways to build on it. If you don't have one, they should be able to offer ideas that align with your business goals.
A brand I marketed did not experience strong engagement online from customers. In research done after the campaign, we learned that our sense of who the customer was inaccurate, and the true customer should be targeted differently. We adjusted our marketing language and targeted differently via ads and outreach and experienced greater success the next time.
32. Explain me what's an example of a lead-generating campaign you'd be excited to work on here?
Not every marketing campaign you run generates the same type or quality of leads. This is what makes this question so interesting. It's a chance for you to see how a marketing candidate thinks about the buyer's journey and what that journey should look like in your company.
If you do pose this question to a candidate, don't expect him or her to know exactly how your business generates its leads. The ideal answer simply demonstrates an awareness of your customer and perhaps some on-the-spot brainstorming the candidate might be asked to participate in while on the job.
Expect follow-up questions from the interviewee, too, especially if you pose this question to a more experienced candidate. For example, they might ask how qualified the leads should be, or how leads are scored as a result of this hypothetical campaign. The specific parameters matter less than the follow-up question itself -- a positive sign of an analytical marketer.
33. Explain me an example of a marketing campaign that did not work out as you had planned?
It is important that you are able to recognise why a plan went wrong and to learn from theexperience. Campaigns often fail due to poor research and groundwork, poor planning and follow through of objectives and goals or ineffective communication. Be open about why thecampaign failed, take accountability and focus on what you learnt.
34. Explain me a situation when you had to overcome a number of obstacles to achieve an objective?
While working as a project manager, I needed to submit a report by a certain deadline, otherwise we wouldn't be eligible for new funding. However, some information from key stakeholders was delayed or missing completely, and the person who needed to sign off the report was off work. I created a shortlist, flagging areas which were missing information, and systematically went through my contacts for each department – flagging the urgency of the information and the implications of not receiving it in time. I also ran through the latest updates to the report over the phone with the person who needed to approve it to get sign-off. With my perseverance, I was just about able to submit the report on time, and not only did we receive the funding but the entire department was also thrilled.
This question should give you a sense of how thoughtful the professional is and how well they know major social media channels. The real answer is that it depends on what your business goals are and where your community is. The job of a social media specialist is to find and grow that community using strategies tailored to each platform, whether that's promoting a blog article on Facebook, using Twitter to field customer service requests, or sharing relevant content on Tumblr.