Marketing Basic Questions For The Interview Freshers. Being a fresher in the industry and facing your first ever round of interviews is like having butterflies in your stomach. Though being qualified in the field of Marketing, it is natural for you to be somewhat anxious about the interview round with the recruiter. An employer looks for certain qualities in a candidate such as interpersonal skills, knowledge of the field, decision-making abilities, confidence, honesty, etc. Therefore, as a candidate, it is essential for you to showcase your talents and abilities in order to ace the personal interview. For you to be prepared for your interview, let us take a look at some of the frequently asked marketing interview questions for freshers.
- Tell me about yourself.
- Elucidate your educational qualifications.
- What do you know about our organization?
- Wherefrom did you learn about this position?
- What are your passions and what drives you to succeed?
- Why did you choose Marketing as a career?
- Tell me about your style of leadership.
- What is Marketing?
- How is Marketing different from sales?
- Describe the 4 Ps of Marketing.
- Tell me about the goals of marketing, in your own words.
- Sell me this product (hypothetical question)
- Out of all our products, which of them appeals to you the most and why?
- Describe your own marketing strategies.
- What are market shares?
- What does AIDA stand for?
- Can you differentiate between the marketing strategies of Coke and Pepsi?
- What do you know about B2B and B2C? Which of them would you go for?
- Describe a customer trend going on right now in our industry.
- In your own words, tell me about PLC (Product Life Cycle)
- In an unfortunate case of project failure, how would you respond?
- Given certain budgetary constraints, how will you get through with a project?
- Describe an incidence or scenario wherein you were successfully able to persuade a stubborn person if any.
- How would you sell our products to the customers?
- Imagine a customer all angry and complaining about the product to you. How will you tackle the situation?
- Tell me about the difference between interruption marketing and permission marketing?
- Name some marketing tools and software.
- Why should we hire you?
- Where would you see yourself in the next 5-10 years?
What is Marketing?
Ans: Marketing is the process of determining consumer demand for a product or service, motivating its sale, and distributing it into ultimate consumption at a profit.
What is marketing management?
Ans: It is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, services, and ideas to create exchanges with target groups that satisfy the customer and organizational objectives.
What are the key functional aspects of Marketing Management?
Ans :
1. Analysis: This involves understanding the customer needs and identifying the target market.
2. Planning: This involves designing the marketing programs and tactics to promote products in the targeted market.
3. Implementation: Implementing the plan.
4. Control: This involves the use of both qualitative and quantitative techniques including budgetary control, control of marketing mix, etc to evaluate the progress of the implemented plan.
What is a product?
Ans: “Product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use or consumption ” (Kotler)
What is service?
Ans: Kotler and Bloom defined service as “ any act or performance that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product “
What are the 4 Ps of marketing OR what is a marketing mix?
Ans: 1. Price 2. Product 3. Place 4. Promotion
What are the 4 Cs of marketing?
Ans :
1. Customer needs and wants
2. Cost to the customer
3. Convenience
4. Communication
What are the 7 Ps of Service Marketing?
Ans :
1. Product (i.e. service)
2. Price
3. Promotion
4. Place
5. People ( Employees involved in delivering service to customers)
6. Physical Evidence
7. Process
What is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
Ans :
Maslow categorized customer’s needs into 5 types
1. Physiological needs: food, drink, sleep
2. Safety needs protection from threatening situations and economic security.
3. Social needs: friendship, affection, and sense of belonging
4. Esteem needs: self-respect, recognition, status, and success
5. Self – actualization: self–fulfillment.
What is a product life cycle?
Ans :
Product life can be divided into 4 stages
1. Introduction: Period of initial low sales and slow pick up in the market. Eg: net banking and mobile banking.
2. Growth: Sales grow rapidly due to fast increasing market acceptance resulting in substantial improvement in profits. Eg: RTGS and NEFT.
3. Maturity: A slowdown in sales growth rate leading to the peaking of sales, due to the potential buyers having been fully tapped.
4. Decline: Sales at this stage experience a declining rate of growth and profits erode. Eg: Demand Draft.
What are the two costs which have to be considered while pricing bank products?
Ans: 1. Interest Cost 2. Service Cost
What are the distribution channels involved in banking services?
Ans:
1. Bank Branch
2. Telephone Banking and Call Centers
3. Automated Teller Machines
4. Virtual Branches and Automated Video Banking.
What is the Banking Codes Standards Board of India (BCSBI)?
Ans.
- Banking Codes Standards Board of India (BCSBI)
- The Reserve Bank of India established BCSBI in 2007 to ensure that the common consumer of financial services from the banking industry gets what he/she has been promised. The Board operates as an independent and autonomous body. Membership of BCSBI is voluntary and open to scheduled banks.
- From 2015, performance ratings of Banks on customer services will be put in the public domain by the Banking Codes Standards Board of India (BCSBI).
BCSBI is rating banks on customer services on 5 parameters:
- Information dissemination
- Transparency
- Customer-centricity
- Grievance redressal system
- Customer feedback
BCSBI rated 48 banks for customer service of which only 5 scored high ratings; 25 were rated above average; 17 average; and one below average. The ratings will be made public in 2015. However, banks are not allowed to use these ratings to solicit business.
Code of Bank’s Commitment to Customers
The Code of Bank’s Commitment to Customers is a Code of Customer Rights, which sets minimum standards of banking practices that member banks have to comply with when they deal with individual customers. The Code provides protection to customers and explains the manner in which banks are supposed to deal with customers in their day-to-day operations.
Marketing Interview Questions for Freshers with Answer Overviews
Here are some more or related interview questions with model answers for you to practice-
- What can be the best approach to enhance the traffic of your website?
- If you are presented with this or a similar question, list down ways for the same such as making the user experience more engaging, performing on-page and off-page SEO, targeting long-tail keywords, building referral traffic, etc.
- Describe five elements of camping marketing.
- To this question, you can mention features because of which a marketing campaign performs well such as the catchy call to action message, value proposition, delivery method, target, follow up, etc.
- According to you what are the limitations of online marketing?
- Amongst all the marketing interview questions for freshers, this one is the trickiest. As per your knowledge and current trends, you can also list down the likely limitations-
- It takes time to generate results, online marketing requires more investment of money, takes time to develop trust over the audience, there are chances of cyber attack, and so on.
- Are you familiar with some PPC tools?
- PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click and some of its popular tools are-
- Campaign watch, Search monitor, Ahrefs, SEMrush, iSpionage, SimilarWe, Wordtracker, etc/.
- What will be your approach to enhance the content reach of the organization?
To this question, you can explain always down the ways using which you will be targeting more audiences. Some of the common measures to do the same are email broadcasting, influencer marketing, social media promotions, backlink strategy, Forum, and Quora Answer posting.
According to you what is word of mouth? And if required how will you maximize the word of mouth marketing?
Whether large scale or small scale business, it is essential to adapt strategies of the word of mouth marketing that helps them reach out to a greater audience. Exploring clients’ preferences, providing excellent customer services, asking for feedback and referrals, providing links to social media, etc are some of the ways leading to word-of-mouth marketing.
What sort of publications and blogs do you like to follow?
By asking this question, the interviewer is interested in knowing about your preferences so that they can comprehend your knowledge and preferences in the domain of marketing.
8. What are some of the useful digital marketing tools?
A whole range of free digital marketing tools is available. They help in streamlining the management of a website. These include:
-Keyword Planner
-Google Analytics
-Rank Watch
-Alexa
-Moz Learning Center
-Hootsuite
-BuzzSumo
9. What is a responsive website?
A responsive website is one that offers an optimal viewing experience to the user. It has easy navigation and reading. It is created using responsive web design. It is compatible with the popularly used web browsers as well as mobile devices.
10. What is Keyword Streaming?
A popular SEO methodology that is used to draw extraordinary traffic towards websites. In keyword streaming popular keywords are optimized further to maximize the reach.
11. How do you use social media for marketing?
Social media can be used to expose brands on social platforms. We can attract many users to our brand by posting engaging videos, images, and related posts. Another approach of social media marketing is also done by paid marketing. Although this process involves money it can yield excellent results.
12. What is Content Marketing?
A proper strategy to share and create valuable SEO-oriented content across various platforms is known as Content Marketing. It aligns consumers and businesses as good quality content has the capacity to attract and convert a visitor to a consumer.
13. What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is an estimate of Google. It is based on the relevance and quality of the keywords and PPC ads are evaluated on a score of 1 to 10. It defines the quality of keywords compared to Ads, Landing Page and Ad Text.
14. Do you know where should you place your keywords for better website ranking?
Keywords should be placed in a particular manner for better ranking on search engines.
-Meta Tag
-Title
-Heading and Subheadings
-Website URL
-Web Page Content
15. How do you go ahead with content promotion?
Tactics such as email broadcasting, backlink strategy, social media promotion, influencer marketing, and Quora answers can be used for content marketing.
16. Do you have any idea about AMP?
AMP is simply an abbreviation for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a joint project of Google and Twitter for making fast mobile pages.
17. Can you tell us the limitations of online marketing?
The limitations of online marketing are:
-It can encounter cyber attacks.
-It can be expensive.
-It takes a lot of time to build trust.
-A lot of time is taken to generate results.
Now that you are aware of the various marketing interview questions for freshers, simply answering the questions like a robot won’t do any good to you. Confused? Don’t worry, just read these cool tips and tricks for cracking the interview like a pro (even if you are a first-timer).
- Watch out your body language. Don’t fidget and scratch.
- Be prudent. Carry all the necessary documents, needed or not.
- Do your Homework. Research about the employer and the company. Go through their official websites as well as social media handles.
- Honesty is the best policy. Never exaggerate about yourself.
- Dress to impress. Wear formal clothes in neutral colors. Keep loud and bright colours at bay.
- Ask as many relevant questions as you can after the interview culminates.
- Never give vague answers to the questions during the interview.
- Always keep an updated copy of your resume.
- Be a good listener and never argue.
- Always be on time on the day of the interview. Never make your potential employers wait for you.
- Any moment you think of a story or anecdote, do mention it as it showcases your confidence and comfort.