Questions to Ask a Marketer
Twenty questions for a coffee chat, a mentoring call, or an interview with a working marketer, covering which channels are paying off now, what has failed, how budgets are set, and how they know any of it worked.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What are you working on this quarter, and what would count as success?
Why ask it
Starts with something concrete they can answer without preparing. If the definition of success is a volume of activity rather than a number tied to customers or revenue, you have learned how their work is judged, which colors every later answer.
Which channel is actually bringing in customers at the moment?
Why ask it
Note the gap between where the effort goes and where the customers come from. Marketers who can answer this quickly usually have workable measurement; those who list every channel equally often cannot tell them apart.
What is the last thing you tried that did not work?
Why ask it
Someone running real experiments has a recent failure and can describe what they concluded from it. An inability to name one means either nothing is being tested or results are only reported when flattering.
How do you know your marketing is working, given how messy attribution is?
Why ask it
The honest answers involve triangulation: platform numbers, self-reported sources at signup, holdout tests, or simply what happens when spend is paused. Anyone who claims a single dashboard tells them the truth is quoting the dashboard rather than reading it.
How do you split effort between things that pay off this month and things that pay off next year?
Why ask it
This surfaces the constant tension between demand capture and building an audience. Listen for an actual proportion and who defends the long-term half when a quarter goes badly, since that is the part usually cut first.
How do you decide what not to do?
Why ask it
Marketing suffers from a long list of plausible activities. A useful answer includes a filter they apply, and often a channel they deliberately ignore despite pressure to be on it. No filter means the plan is whatever arrived most recently.
Which number does your leadership care about, and which do you think matters more?
Why ask it
The gap between those two is where most internal marketing arguments live. It also tells you whether they are being measured on something they can control, which predicts how long they will stay in the job.
Roughly what do you have to spend, and where does most of it go?
Why ask it
Advice is worthless without knowing the budget behind it. A tactic that works on a hundred thousand a month may be irrelevant at two thousand, and the split between media, tools, agencies, and people tells you what kind of operation this is.
How do you find out what customers actually say about the product?
Why ask it
You are looking for direct contact: calls, support tickets, sales recordings, reviews read in full. Marketers who only see aggregated survey scores tend to write copy that describes the company rather than the customer's problem.
What is the last customer conversation that changed your plan?
Why ask it
This separates research done for reassurance from research that has consequences. A specific example, with what changed as a result, is one of the strongest signals of a marketer worth learning from.
Who writes your copy, and how does it get approved?
Why ask it
Approval chains explain a great deal about why marketing sounds the way it does. If legal, a founder, or a committee touches every line, the constraint on quality is process rather than talent.
How much of your traffic depends on something you do not control?
Why ask it
Search rankings, a platform's feed, an app store, one large partner. Concentration here is the main structural risk in modern marketing, and hearing how they hedge it is more instructive than hearing about their best month.
What did you have to stop doing the last time the budget was cut?
Why ask it
Cuts reveal the real priority order, which rarely matches the plan. It also shows what they consider optional, and whether the first thing cut was the thing that took longest to build.
How do you work with sales, and where does that relationship break down?
Why ask it
In business-to-business work this is where most marketing effort is wasted: leads passed on and never called, or arguments about what counts as qualified. A marketer who says the relationship is fine has usually not asked sales.
Where do you land on brand spend versus performance spend?
Why ask it
One of the genuine open arguments in the field, so the reasoning matters more than the position. Watch whether they can describe how they would defend brand spend to a finance director, which is the actual test.
Which tools are worth what they cost, and which have you canceled?
Why ask it
The cancellations are the useful part, and they tend to be specific and slightly bitter. It also reveals whether their stack is chosen or inherited, and how much of the budget disappears into software before any media is bought.
How do you run a test when you do not have much traffic?
Why ask it
Most companies never reach the volumes that make clean split testing possible. Good answers involve bigger changes, longer runs, sequential comparison, or accepting judgment over significance. Anyone quoting textbook testing at low volume has not done it.
What worked once that you could not repeat?
Why ask it
Every marketer has a campaign or a post that succeeded for reasons partly outside their control. Being able to say so, rather than claiming a repeatable playbook, is a fair test of honesty about their own results.
What part of this job did nobody warn you about?
Why ask it
Usually the internal work: managing expectations, waiting for approvals, defending a budget, being blamed for a product problem. This is the most useful answer for anyone deciding whether to enter the field.
If you were starting again now, what would you learn first?
Why ask it
The answer dates their experience, which is useful information: someone whose first skill would be writing, analysis, or media buying is telling you what they think holds up. Push back gently if they only name the channel that made their own career.
Getting practical answers about marketing
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Establish the context before you take any advice
The same tactic can be excellent or useless depending on the business it ran in. Before you act on anything a marketer tells you, find out four things: whether they sell to businesses or consumers, the price and purchase frequency of what they sell, their monthly budget, and their team size. A playbook built on a long sales cycle with a sales team attached does not transfer to a low-cost consumer product, and advice from a marketer with an agency behind them rarely survives contact with a one-person operation.
How to ask
Ask about the last time, not the general case
How do you handle launches produces a framework. What happened on your last launch produces the truth, including the parts that went badly. Use the same move whenever an answer starts to sound like a conference talk.
Ask for the number and the denominator
A tripled conversion rate from a small base can mean two extra sales. Whenever you hear a percentage, ask what it was out of, and expect a good marketer to volunteer it before you have to.
Bring one specific problem, not your whole situation
If you are asking for their time, come with a single decision you are stuck on and the numbers around it. Open requests to look at everything get polite generalities, because that is all they can honestly offer in half an hour.
Reading the answers
- Named numbers, dates, and failed tests suggest they are close to the work
- Only impressions, reach, and engagement usually means results are not tied to revenue
- An unwillingness to say what a campaign cost makes any claim about return unverifiable
- Credit for growth that coincided with a funding round, a price change, or a product launch is worth probing
- Advice built entirely on one channel that worked years ago tends not to survive platform changes
Adjusting for the setting
A career conversation
Spend most of it on how the work is judged, what the day involves, and which skills they would learn first. Ask about the internal politics of the role, since that is what people leave over rather than the craft.
A recorded interview or podcast
Agree beforehand which figures they can say publicly, because most marketers cannot share revenue or spend without approval. Asking on air puts them in an awkward position and produces vaguer answers than a quiet check in advance.
Assessing someone you might hire
Focus on what they personally did as opposed to what their team's results were, and ask who else was involved in the campaign they are proudest of. Attribution problems inside a CV are as common as attribution problems in advertising.