Interviews are nerve-wracking. The good news is that, as a marketer, you have the tools to sell yourself. Think of a job interview as a crucial part of a marketing campaign for yourself. To successfully market yourself to a potential employer and ace your marketing job interview, keep the following in mind.
Know the Job Description
If you’re actively looking for a new job, the hundreds of job descriptions blur together quickly. Once you get an email or call to set up an interview, pull the job description from your records and examine it. The company believes you’re a potential fit for it, but you know your strengths and weaknesses. This is an opportunity to note your strengths and create a plan to tackle your weaknesses. You may not be an expert on a particular program that is included in the job description. Don’t panic. At the interview, admit that you are not extremely familiar with the program and demonstrate that you have the desire to learn. It’s even better if you have already shown the initiative to learn about the program ahead of time.
Familiarize Yourself With the Company
You’ve been invited for an interview. Based on the description, the interview appears to be for the perfect job. Ideally, you should have read over the company’s website before you applied for the job, but it’s possible you did a cursory glance or the company is a household name, so you didn’t feel it was necessary. Regardless, now is the time to thoroughly review the site. As you scroll and click between pages, make notes about products, aspects of the website you like, and elements that could be executed better. By the time you finish, you should be immersed in the company’s branding and be able to speak fluently about the products and services offered.
Learn About the Industry
Ask yourself these three questions:
1. Is the company you’re looking to work at focused on business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C)?
2. What are the industry standard marketing practices?
3. Who is the target demographic? What do they expect from advertising?
Once you have the answers to those three questions, you can dive deeper into the market. Gather all the information you can about the company, its goals, and the industry’s expectations to make sure you are able to give specific answers to interview questions. A potential employer will be impressed with your knowledge and the amount of research you did. It will show how much you want the job and are willing to work for it.
Research the Competitors
You’ve done your research. You’ve become an expert on your target company. You’ve done everything right so far. There’s one more step: research the competition. You don’t need to spend hours agonizing over competitors’ websites, but you do need to know direct competitors and their most popular offerings.
Knowing the job description, familiarizing yourself with the company, learning about the company’s industry, and finding the competitors will set you apart from other candidates and demonstrate that you are on your way to becoming the industry expert your potential employer needs on their staff.
Author: Allison Lips
