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Objective: As part of our marketing plan for re:Invent, a major tradeshow in the IT industry, we have secured a booth in the main exhibit which comes with a set number badges for our team to attend and staff the booth. Your task is to make a plan for the management and execution of the event.
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Candidate Prep: You will be developing a budget-driven plan to maximize our outcomes and lead generation. With this goal in mind, think about what actions you would take ahead of and during the event. Please be prepared to discuss how you would set goals for lead collection and measure success.
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Objective: In this exercise, we will share a report our team developed on cloud service performance. Your task will be to develop a campaign to ensure the report's visibility.
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Candidate Prep: You will be choosing which strategies and channels to leverage to promote the report. Think about how you will measure your campaign's success, what resources you will need to execute, and how you would ensure that the guide remains useful over time.
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Objective: As the Events Marketing Manager, you will often be juggling both expected and unforeseen requests. Some of those tasks can be completed immediately and others require more planning. Understanding how to manage and invest time to maximize your output is a critical skill set in this role.
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Candidate Prep: You will be ranking a list of priorities in order of most urgent to least. Consider and be prepared to discuss your strategy for prioritization, what actions you might take as part of prioritization, and any relevant considerations.
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Objective: Hosting events is an integral part of our marketing strategy. Not only do events help us evangelize the product, they also allow us to engage with the open-sourced community in a more intimate setting.
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Candidate Prep: You will be organizing a meet-up for engineers and our Open-Source community to learn more about our technology. Please keep in mind what considerations you would consider critical to successfully executing a community event, how you would promote the event, and your timeline for event planning. Additionally, think about how you can make this event have a lasting impact upon its attendees and our objectives as a company.
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Objective: You will be tasked with extracting information from the interviewer (in this case, the Chief People Officer) and then will be asked to use this info to create an outline for a blog post. The topic of the post will be provided once onsite, but it will surround Cockroach Labs values, so please take a look at our careers page.
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Candidate Prep: The purpose of the exercise is to see how you work across teams. We will be leveraging the blog as a medium for this discussion. For this exercise, you should think about how to effectively structure content, serve as a partner to your colleagues to meet shared goals, and the frequency and methods you would use to promote the content you create.
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Objective: The content marketing team will be publishing a white paper (e-book) on network latency impact on application performance. You will walk your interviewer through the process from creating the paper through 30-days after it has been published.
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Candidate Prep: You will be developing a plan of action for outlining, writing, publishing, and ultimately promoting a white paper for the company. Ahead of this exercise, you should think about how you would ensure the paper's production on schedule, who should be involved in the process, and how you will promote it upon publication.
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Objective: As part of this exercise, we will share with you a draft of a blog post (provided onsite) that will run on our blog. Your task is to edit it and present your revisions as well as a publishing and promotion strategy.
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Candidate Prep: The Cockroach Labs Blog provides an under-the-hood look into the architecture, design decisions, and culture at CockroachDB. Editing and revising is a collaborative process. Many of the posts are written by engineers and edited by the Director of Marketing and peers with the goal of attracting readers, informing prospective users about our product features, and creating evangelists out of every member of our team. With this goal in mind, think about how you would edit material for promotional purposes. You should also be prepared to discuss how best to roll out a new post and make sure people see it.
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Objective: Your will select a multi-asset campaign from your portfolio to review with your interviewer. These could be multiple assets from an event, ad/sponsored campaign, digital and print assets from a launch, etc.
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Candidate Prep: Some examples of assets include: web page + booth + printed assets or; Ads + email + webpage + printed content or; Infographic + ads + guide. It is encouraged that you share a campaign that includes print, digital, and environmental media. If you do not have an example of this, no worries! Bring what you would like to share the most. Be prepared to explain the design decisions you made to connect multiple assets to a single campaign. What were your objectives throughout the campaign and what steps did you take to achieve them? Think about what your creative process and how you ensure your collaborators' success, as well.
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Objective: In this interview, we will ask you to demonstrate how you can take real product screens and extract the core visual elements that communicate their value to users. You will then be asked to produce three low-fidelity images to visually describe the product's functions.
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Candidate Prep: The interviewer will give you a real product screenshot. Your goal is to make this consumable on the web for prospective downloaders. You are encouraged to ask questions to better understand product functionality and synthesize it for an audience. Please note that you can use the medium with which you're most comfortable, so feel free to bring your computer or other device!
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Objective: You will have a conversation with the Chief Marketing Officer surrounding two core competencies needed for this role: 1) how you leverage your skills to maximize marketing effectiveness for highly technical solutions and remain consistently on brand and 2) How you deliver on-brand creative while ensuring a fast creative shipping environment.
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Candidate Prep: As a creative designer, you would serve as a primary voice and stakeholder for the Cockroach brand. As such, this role involves overseeing the design and execution of all digital, print, display, and collateral content. Being at a young B2B company, you will have to make smart decisions in a fast-moving creative environment. Given that CockroachDB is a highly technical product in a highly technical industry, we target two personas: developers and IT decision-makers (such as Chief Architects and CIOs). Getting these audiences' attention is particularly challenging-- they are jaded and marketing wary. Visual brand consistency is important to developing a solid brand ID with the limited promotional vehicles available. Think about how you approach design to meet the above-mentioned goals.
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Objective: Your task is to redesign the email and landing page for a campaign promoting Cockroach Labs content with an eye towards making clear calls to action and communicating efficiently to inspire engagement. Once onsite, you will be asked to explain your process and decisions while completing the take-home exercise. You will also be asked to bring an additional piece of work to share with the interviewer and discuss it.
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Candidate Prep: Driving lead activity is a critical element of marketing’s role within Cockroach Labs. Our content is a great asset for engaging our prospects and the community, but if they aren’t aware of new content, then its value is underleveraged. For this exercise, you should think about how to effectively direct your audience, layer content to convey its relevance, and ensure that your landing page supports engagement. Make sure to leverage the Cockroach Labs style guide to ensure brand consistency.
Once onsite, you should be prepared to discuss your creative process, what you hoped to achieve with your work, and how you went about accomplishing that goal. More generally, think about how you take designs from concept to reality and how you collaborate with others throughout the creative process to achieve success.
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Objective: You will be asked to summarize CockroachDB's three primary product positioning and competitive advantage points. Once onsite, you will be asked to whiteboard a competitive matrix reflecting your thoughts on our three primary competitors and how we best measure up against them.
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Candidate Prep: As a newer entrant to the database space, Cockroach has unique elements that can help define our key points of difference against entrenched database companies and other, newer entrants. We’d like to understand your ability to parse the differences and discuss your thoughts on how to position CockroachDB in the market. We will provide you with content and resources to help prepare you for this exercise.
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Objective: You will be asked to walk your interviewer through the steps of creating a full go-to-market campaign and discuss how you would prepare the Sales team to execute it.
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Candidate Prep: Sales enablement and finding the correct models to reach prospective customers are critical requirements for this role. In order to effectively target new customers, our marketing team must provide the sales team with necessary tools to spread our messaging. For this exercise, think about how you would tailor a go-to-market campaign to our primary audience, the industries Cockroach labs should be targeting, and how we should target them. You should also keep in mind any necessary considerations for campaign project management.
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Objective: For this exercise, we will provide you with a list of feature additions slated for CockroachDB's upcoming release. You will then be asked to strategize story development ahead of our next release and develop a collaboration plan to work with the product team on marketing activities in the future.
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Candidate Prep: For this exercise, you should think about how you develop storylines to engage users and generate excitement. You should also be prepared to discuss your plan for working with the product team to streamline product marketing efforts moving forward.
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Objective: You will be asked to walk your interviewer through how you would develop an integrated marketing strategy. Specifically, your plan will focus on systems, processes, and ideas on collateral you would create to move these efforts forward.
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Candidate Prep: You just brainstormed positioning ideas with your interviewer. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you came up with the perfect story and are ready to start producing content in the context of this positioning. Your strategy should be specifically focused on wide-adoption, not sales enablement. To prepare for this conversation, think about who you would target and how, developing a scalable marketing process, and how you would ensure that your campaign can be modified over time.
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Objective: You will be asked to assemble a multimedia, multichannel campaign for lead generation surrounding GDPR (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr.asp). The content you create in this portion will be used for the Marketing Content & Creative exercise below.
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Candidate Prep: For this exercise, it is a good idea to acquaint yourself with the most effective methods for marketing across a number of different channels. You should think about who you'll target and why, how you will ensure your campaign's success, what tools you will use throughout the campaign, and how you collaborate with key stakeholders in the marketing process.
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Objective: You will review the content from the campaign exercise with your interviewer and build an outline of a marketing campaign to generate leads and get prospects to the event.
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Candidate Prep: In this role, you will need to leverage existing content (blogs, whitepapers, videos, training) as content for campaigns for different channels and purposes (marketing emails, events, ads, etc.). Consider how you would differentiate content depending on the medium and adapt existing content to increase lead generation.
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Objective: You will give the interviewer an overview of marketing attribution and ROI models you’ve built in the past.
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Candidate Prep: In this role, you’d be working closely with our sales team to help build out new channels for lead generation and uncover which channels are most effective for lead generation - this includes word of mouth, email marketing, SEO, and conferences / trade shows. Once we’re utilizing new channels, it’s crucial to analyze what’s working and build attribution models. Please prepare for your interview with these goals and guidelines in mind.
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Objective: You will be asked to suggest 2-3 campaigns with specific content, channels, and rationale using our existing content to target Chief Architects for lead generation purposes.
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Candidate Prep: The Cockroach Labs marketing department has a strong content focus that has guided much of the marketing activity to date. We would now like to focus on the decision-making layer of our target audience, which means that we must reach Chief Architects and those in related positions. With these goals in mind, we ask that you be prepared to demonstrate how you would leverage our existing content to develop a variety of lead generation campaigns targeting Chief Architects. Vital considerations for this exercise are campaign structure and sequencing, strategies for measuring campaign performance, and quantifiable goal-setting.
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Objective: You will review our web traffic analytics with your interviewer and discuss ways that this data can be used and/or improved for marketing campaigns.
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Candidate Prep: To prepare for this exercise, think about how web analytics can be used to guide and improve marketing efforts. Keep in mind what tools and metrics you find powerful for tracking campaign performance and how these analytics could be leveraged to track the campaigns you've conceptualized throughout your interviews.