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In an ever-changing digital landscape, success in business can often depend on what you do (or don’t do) in terms of marketing your company online.

From SEO to content marketing and analytics, it can be overwhelming figuring out where to start — and, more importantly, what’s going to have the biggest impact on your business. To be effective at digital marketing, you’ll need a strategy.

What is Digital Strategy?

The term ‘strategy’ might seem intimidating, but building an effective digital strategy doesn’t need to be difficult. In simple terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to achieve a desired goal, or multiple goals. For example, your overarching goal might be to generate 25% more leads this year than you drove last year.

In short: Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that are going to help you achieve that goal using online marketing.

Now depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals and a lot of moving parts, but coming back to this simple way of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives.

Despite our simplification of the term ‘strategy’, there’s no doubt it can be difficult to get started actually building one. So, we’ve put together a series of seven building blocks to help you create an effective digital marketing strategy and set your business up for online success.

What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?

It’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here’s how to distinguish the two.

As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal.

For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.

It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy — it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy.

Now we’ve got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy.

How to Build a Comprehensive Digital Strategy

1) Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy — offline or online — you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them. (Need help? Start here with our free buyer persona kit.)

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience. It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.

But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether your product is high cost or low cost. Here are some starting points, but you’ll want to switch them up depending on your particular business.

Quantitative (or Demographic) Information

• Location. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to easily identify what location your website traffic is coming from.
• Age. Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant. It’s best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and customer database.
• Income. It’s best to gather sensitive information like personal income in persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share it via online forms.
• Job Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base, and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative (or Psychographic) Information

• Goals. Depending on the need your product or service was created to serve, you might already have a good idea of what goals your persona is looking to achieve. However, it’s best to cement your assumptions by speaking to customers, salespeople and customer service representatives.
• Challenges. Again, speak to customers, salespeople and customer service representatives to get an idea of the common problems your audience faces.
• Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and people who align with your target audience. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, it’s helpful to know if large segments of your audience are also into fitness and wellbeing, as that can help inform your future content creation and partnerships.
• Priorities. Speak to customers and people who align with your target audience to find out what’s most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, knowing that your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.

Take this information and create one or more rounded personas like HubSpot’s Marketing Mary, and ensure they’re at the core of your digital marketing strategy. If you need more detail, check out this comprehensive buyer persona guide with templates.

2) Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

As a marketer, your goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business. For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to measure it, and more importantly, actually be able to measure it (i.e., have the right digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goal(s), but it’s vital to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.

(HubSpot Customers: Reporting in HubSpot brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. Learn more here.)

3) Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate into your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. The owned, earned and paid media framework helps to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets or channels that you’re already using.

Owned Media

This refers to the digital assets literally owned by you. Whether that’s your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the things your business has complete control over.

Earned Media

Quite simply, earned media refers to the exposure you’ve earned through word-of-mouth. Whether that’s content you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered, earned media is the recognition you receive as a result. You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people sharing your content on social media, etc.

Paid Media

Paid media is very self-explanatory and refers to any vehicle or channel that you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas. This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other vehicle which you directly pay for in exchange for visibility.

Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy might incorporate elements of all three channels, all working together to help you reach your goal. For example, you might have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that’s been created to help you generate leads. To amplify the amount of leads that content generates, you might have made a real effort to make it shareable, meaning others are distributing it via their personal social media profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. This is the earned media component. To support the content’s success, you might have posted about the content to your Facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more people in your target audience.

That’s exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Of course, it’s not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media is very successful, you might not need to invest in paid. It’s all about evaluating the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what’s already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut.

4) Audit and plan your owned media.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content. Everything your brand says is your content, whether that’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, social media posts — it’s all considered content. Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand’s profile online. Whatever your goal, you’re going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

To build your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what content is going to help you reach your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year, it’s unlikely that your ‘About Us’ page is going to be included in your strategy (unless that page has been a lead generation machine in the past!)

In fact, it’s much more likely than an ebook that’s hidden behind a form on your website drives far more leads, and as a result is probably something you want to do more of.

Here’s a brief process to follow to work out what owned content you need to meet your digital marketing goals:

Audit your existing content

Make a list of your existing owned content and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals. If your goal is lead generation, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the last year. That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your website that’s converting well.

The idea here is to figure out what’s currently working, and what’s not, so that you can set yourself up for future success.

Identify gaps in your existing content

Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have. If you’re a math tutoring company and have discovered in your audience research that one of your persona’s biggest challenges is finding interesting ways to study, but you don’t have any content that speaks to that concern, then you might look to create some.

By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a certain type of landing page convert really well for you (much better than webinars, for example). In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an ebook about ‘how to make studying more interesting’ to your content creation plans.

Create a content creation plan

Based on your findings and the gaps you’ve identified, make a content creation plan outlining the content that’s needed to help you hit your goals. This should include:

• Title
• Format
• Goal
• Promotional channels
• Why you’re creating it (e.g., ‘Marketing Mary struggles to find time to plan her blog content, so we’re creating a template editorial calendar’)
• Priority level (to help you decide what’s going to give you the most ‘bang’ for your buck)

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if you’re planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you’re producing it yourself.

5) Audit and plan your earned media.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.

You can get this information from tools like Google Analytics, or in HubSpot’s Sources Reports if you’re a customer.

You might find that a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn converted really well. Or you might discover that LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing your content, which in turn drives a lot of traffic. The idea here is to build up a picture of what earned media will help you reach your goals, and what won’t, based on historic data. However, if there’s something new you want to try, don’t rule that out just because it’s not yet tried and tested.

6) Audit and plan your paid media.

This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what’s likely to help you meet your current goals.

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you’d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. (Check out this free AdWords guide for more on how to leverage it for business.)

By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you’d like to scrap.

7) Bring it all together.

You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that are going to make up your digital marketing strategy. Here’s what you should have so far:

1. Clear profile of your buyer persona(s)
2. One or more marketing-specific goals
3. A spreadsheet of your existing owned, earned and paid media
4. An audit of your existing owned, earned and paid media
5. An owned content creation plan or wish list

Now, it’s time to bring all of this together to form a solid strategy document. Let’s revisit what ‘digital strategy’ means — ‘the series of actions that are going to help you achieve your goal(s) using online marketing’.

By that definition, your strategy document should map out the series of actions you’re going to take to achieve your goals based on your research to this point. An Excel sheet is probably the best format. For the sake of consistency, you’ll probably find it easiest to map out according to the owned, earned and paid media framework we’ve used so far.

You’ll also need to map out your strategy for an extended period of time (usually 12 months or longer, depending on how your business is set up) so it’s helpful to overlay when you’ll be executing each action. For example:

• In January, you might start a blog which will be continually updated once a week for the entire year.
• In March, you might launch a new ebook accompanied by paid promotion.
• In July, you might be preparing for your biggest business month.
• In September, you might plan to focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic during the run-up.

By taking this approach, you’re also creating a structured timeline for your activity which will help communicate your plans to your colleagues — and help keep you sane!

Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Remember that the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time — as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.

If you’re eager to learn more about digital marketing and how you can build a truly effective digital marketing strategy for your business, check out The Simple Guide to Digital Strategy in 2016.

What other questions do you have? Share them with us in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Internal HubSpot research has found that companies that blog at least 15 times each month see 5 times more traffic than those that don’t. Some MIT smarties studied HubSpot’s ROI specifically and found that users generated 4.1 times more visitors and 3 times as many leads per month after using HubSpot for a year.

That’s real, impactful return on your marketing efforts. The reality of these positive numbers makes sense given the operating premise of inbound marketing. Namely, the old, interruptive “Buy me now!” approaches don’t work today.  The number of information channels never stops growing and nobody gets to enjoy a captive audience anymore.

Inbound marketing simply reflects the fact that in today’s market place, the consumer (constituent, donor, or member) is in the power position. If an organization, nonprofit, or otherwise, wants people’s dollars or loyalty, it first has to earn their attention. That’s why inbound marketing is all about building trust and authority with people through content.

Once becoming a trusted authority that holds the right people’s attention, an organization can then move those people to respond positively to the larger asks, such as making the commitment to become a member.

For a review of the basics on how inbound marketing works for nonprofits, check out our free crash course here >>

Here’s the rub. Becoming a trusted authority doesn’t happen with one banner ad or annual report. Succeeding with inbound marketing takes consistent effort over the long haul. 

That’s why the answer to the question when should your organization start inbound marketing is “now.” Inbound really is the only marketing that’s proven to be cost-effective, yet it takes time to see results. 

Forget About Going “Viral”

Even people who aren’t familiar with a term like “inbound marketing” know about going viral. If your goal with inbound marketing is “to go viral,” you’re doing it wrong. Inbound marketing is a long-haul proposition that requires investing time and effort.

Your organization isn’t going to get a reputation for being as informative, helpful, and reliable overnight. You have to work at it. 

Consider the first phase in inbound marketing methodology – attracting traffic and prospects. The inbound tactics to attract your ideal prospects include: boosting traffic to your website via SEO-optimized pages and blogs, and earning high quality backlinks. Strong SEO rankings and authoritative backlinks only come with consistently publishing relevant content that’s irresistible to your market.

Getting those backlinks that push your content up in the SEO rankings takes time. They each feed off each other. When you regularly publish on-point content, it starts getting shared, which can attract backlinks. Google takes more backlinks to content as an indicator of high authority, so ranks it higher.

Of course, your great content will only get shared by the organic traffic if it gets found in the first place. It takes time to see whether your current SEO strategy is bringing in the traffic you need. Everyone has to tweak their SEO based on actual results to improve traffic flow. That takes time as well.

The good news is that both work in a virtuous cycle of refined SEO strategies bringing in more organic traffic, which gets shared and attracts backlinks, which in turn increases the authority of your website with Google, bringing in more organic traffic. But if you want to get into this cycle, you have to make the first move. 

So if you have a major membership drive or other campaign scheduled for six months from now – get your blog and inbound marketing strategy rolling now. Any delay undermines your potential.

Inbound is an Investment with Long Term Dividends

Now we’ve been focusing on the long-term investment you need to make with inbound marketing to reap its highest rewards. But understand a major reason why inbound has such great opportunity is because you aren’t simply developing marketing collateral – you’re developing marketing assets. Assets that can attract eyeballs and hearts towards your organization well after they’re originally published. 

HubSpot’s research into our own blog performance showed that 76% of our monthly blog views and 92% of our monthly blog leads came from posts at least one month old. That means the more we post, the more lead potential we realize. Blog posts are (a bit) like wine… they age well.

But we also found that with some tweaking, we can get old blog posts working even better. We refreshed some of our highest converting blog posts with updated keywords based on more recent research, and updating the content to be more accurate and comprehensive. Once we did that, the traffic and leads coming off these refreshed posts doubled.

That’s right. Older content that already rocked got a refresh and started rocking even harder. Yet for this to work, you need enough content already on your site that gives you the information and insight on how to optimize it effectively, at least a year’s worth.

A similar approach can work for all sorts of inbound content. Once you create an in-depth report as gated content, you can regularly update it, run a new angle promotion campaign, refresh its landing page, or add a download call-to-action for it on more blog posts.

After you create a high quality inbound asset, you always have it to be used in all sorts of ways to drive prospects into and through your funnel. But as with all inbound tactics, it takes time. You need a certain library of content assets already created before you can start maximizing the return they provide you.

Start Building Your Organization’s Asset Portfolio Today

I always hate those charts that show how much you’d have in savings if only you started saving five years ago or two years ago, and so on. I hate them because I know they’re right.

It’s the same with inbound marketing. The sooner you start, the sooner your organization will reap the rewards. And the sooner you’ll get to that tipping point where your results seem to accelerate even faster now that you’ve built successful workflows and campaigns, online authority, and a growing library of content assets. 

Getting started is easier than you think. First, take a deep dive to understand the inbound marketing methodology. After you learn the framework and processes that drive inbound marketing success, you can launch your own plans for inbound success. Your timing will never be better.

One of the barriers to getting your work read and widely shared in the age of information overload is time. With research revealing that 55% of pageviews are less than 15 seconds in duration, your content needs to provide value and pique interest quickly to align with your readers’ behavior.

This doesn’t mean that you should stop producing long-form content all together. However, it does task you with the challenge of creating more skimmable content that can be read and understood without a ton of effort.

What does skimmable content look like? While there are many ways you can format your long-form content to make it more digestible, we’ve put together a list of sites that are doing a particularly good job of adapting their content for skim-readers.

TL;DR: Your readers don’t have enough time to fully read your long-form blog content. Use the strategies below to make your content more skim-friendly.

13 Examples of Super Skimmable Content

1) DigiDay

Last year, DigiDay introduced a TL;DR (“Too Long; Didn’t Read”) button for their articles. When TL;DR mode is turned on, long-form articles transform into shorter paragraphs with the article’s main points for maximum skimmability.

Pro Tip: If you can’t create a TL;DR button on your own site, consider writing an explainer paragraph like DigiDay’s that your readers can check out without having to read or skim your entire article.

2) theSkimm

When it comes to skimmable content, there’s nothing better than the aptly named newsletter: theSkimm.

The folks at theSkimm curate a newsletter of top stories Monday through Friday, accompanied by a brief summary of each headline. The newsletter is sent out before 8:00 a.m. EST with the intent of allowing readers to skim the news prior to arriving at work. And their approach is working: theSkimm grew its readership to 3.5 million in under two years.

But email isn’t all they offer. In fact, theSkimm’s website is also home to a series of boiled down news stories known as Skimm Guides, like this one on the Olympics:

Sliced up into a series of digestible chunks, these guides cover everything you need to know about a specific topic in a way that’s easy to consume and understand.

Pro Tip: Roundups rock. They’re a great opportunity to beef up your email marketing strategy for subscribers or to publish a highly valuable, skimmable piece to draw more readers to your site.

3) CNN.com

Most of CNN’s online stories are published with a ‘Story Highlights’ section at the top of each article to allow readers to glean the biggest points without having to scroll through the entire piece. Additionally, their articles are shared with a video or photo explainer from CNN News, which is another option for ease of understanding.

Pro Tip: Create a callout box at the beginning of your article with its main points. Try linking them to the different sections of your article to encourage reading the entire piece.

4) Inc.

When Inc. publishes articles about companies that are taking part in technology innovation, the article leads off with a ‘Company Profile’ section so readers can understand the need-to-know information about the company and skip to the bottom to learn the big takeaways.

Inc. also uses slideshows in articles, which use engaging visuals and short explainers to help readers skim and distill the most important points:

Pro Tip: Make a section at the beginning of the article with bulleted who, what, when, where, and why details about your story’s subject to provide readers context before they dive into the rest of your piece.

5) The Week

Every day of the week, The Week (get it?) publishes “5 Things You Need to Know,” a roundup of political news stories with explainer paragraphs in addition to long-form news content. Readers can check it out on their site, or subscribe to receive it via email.

They also feature a “Speed Reads” section for readers who are on the go:

Pro Tip: Send a regular roundup of your strongest articles with a short explainer for readers who might have missed them when they were first published.

6) Bustle

Bustle writes lifestyle articles in formats that allow for skimmability. By using headers and numbered lists in their content, they break up long-form content in a way that allows readers to quickly scan its main points.

Pro Tip: Large pieces of text can benefit from headers, numbers, and bulleting. Formatting will allow you to draw greater attention to your main points and will allow your reader to skim more easily.

7) Newser

Newser’s slogan is “Read Less, Know More,” and their content’s skimmability achieves that mission. Their articles consist of short explainer paragraphs with links to longer original sources. Newser also uses subheadlines very strategically to drive home the main takeaways from their content.

Pro Tip: Try linking out to your sources and condensing information you’re citing from them in your actual article. You’ll shorten your article while still providing additional information and value to your readers.

8) The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast has a feature that allows readers to visualize the progress they’ve made while reading an article. It doesn’t necessarily make the articles faster reads, but it allows the reader to see how they’ve progressed if they’re considering navigating away from the page before reaching the conclusion.

Pro Tip: Add language throughout your post that helps to set the reader’s expectations — whether that be a helpful nudge like, “Keep reading to learn more about XYZ,” or something simple like, “We’ll cover XYZ in more detail in the final section.” Additionally, if your publication can implement a progress bar, be sure to analyze that information to determine where readers are dropping off to inform your future strategy.

9) Circa News

Circa is a news aggregator devoted to speed reading. Their articles take shape with the help of curated paragraph explainers, tweets, and poll results to create a stream of content on a specific topic or story that can be easily skimmed or clicked on for more information.

Pro Tip: Don’t be afraid to pull in curated visuals — charts, tweets, videos, and so on — to help say more with less.

10) The Verge

The Verge has an entire TL;DR section of its website for readers who already know that they want to get the information quickly and easily. They position it as its own section on their homepage, like a column, with bright colors to attract more readers.

The articles feature big, bold quotes and lots of visuals to make it easy to work through, without sacrificing value.

Pro Tip: If you organize your blog by categories, create one category for quick reads so your visitors can easily identify pieces to skim and pieces to close read.

11) Medium

Medium has a highlighting feature that allows readers to highlight key phrases in the articles they read, and see which phrases have been highlighted by other readers. This feature allows for skim-reading in a unique and crowdsourced way, and makes it easy for visitors to see what other readers have found interesting.

Pro Tip: Highlight or type in bold key sentences in your article to signal to skim-readers where they should be close reading.

12) The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times publishes an Essential California roundup of local news each week featuring short blurbs about news stories in the area and links to the full articles already written about them.

Pro Tip: Do an article roundup featuring your top articles or based on another theme to encourage skimming.

13) The Great Discontent

The Great Discontent publishes highly skimmable interviews by incorporating introductory sections, images and illustrations, and blocked quotes to break up large chunks of text in visually interesting and reader-friendly ways.

Pro Tip: Images and coded blockquotes or callout boxes can break up your text to highlight must-read sections for your skim-readers.

Now that you’ve learned how to make your long-form content format more skim-friendly, learn some specific strategies for writing more concisely in your next blog post.

What strategies do you use to make your content more readable? Share with us in the comments below!

Imagine you’ve been tasked with spinning plates on sticks while also hula-hooping on a balance beam.

That’s kind of what being a project manager is like.

With so many varied responsibilities, demands, and expectations, not everyone is cut out for the job. Finding a project manager who fits your unique needs can be a real challenge, and it’s difficult to nail down exactly what qualities you should be keeping an eye out for — or how to test for these.

We’ve compiled a list of interview questions that can help you identify the right leader for your next project, and we’ve given you some insight into what to look for in a good response. Whether you’re hiring internally or recruiting outside of your company, these questions can help you identify a good hire. 

9 Interview Questions for Project Managers

1) How do you build consensus on a conflicted team?

One of a project manager’s core responsibilities is managing groups of people. And where there are people, there are conflicts.

A good project manager knows that some conflict is inevitable — and even healthy — on a project team. Avoiding or glossing over conflicts that arise can be detrimental to the project’s objectives and can actually exacerbate underlying issues, causing them to bubble up and wreak havoc later down the line.

The ideal candidate will understand that each conflict is nuanced and unique, and she won’t try to approach each one with a cookie-cutter solution. Having some knowledge of conflict resolution techniques is great, but project managers need to be able to adapt to the needs of their individual team members and the greater company culture, particularly in high-stress situations. Look for a candidate who doesn’t fall back on textbook frameworks or inflexible methods.

2) What was the outcome of your last project?

This question is less about whether or not her last project was a success, and more about what she took away from the experience. She should be able to evaluate the success or failure of a project, determine what precise steps led to that conclusion, and take steps in the future to improve.

If the project ended well, what exactly contributed to that success? Look for a candidate who is able to find learning experiences even when a project’s end result is successful. Just because the project went well, doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could have gone better.

If the project didn’t go as planned, where does she think it went wrong? What changes does she wish she could make in hindsight? You want to see candidates who have the ability to identify issues post-mortem so that they can recognize them if they arise on a future project.

3) When every task is urgent, how do you determine what to prioritize?

With all the intricate details and moving parts that go into a project, it’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed. But a strong project manager possesses discerning sifting abilities, enabling her to identify the most important components of a project and filter out the static noise.

Deciding which areas of a project require the most resources is a tough call, especially when every single component seems like it should be the #1 priority. Your candidate should be able to comfortably convert a tangled web of responsibilities into an organized hierarchy of action items, and follow through on all the tasks.

4) How will you gain and keep the support of your project sponsors?

Building and maintaining support for your project is absolutely imperative, and losing that support is essentially a kiss of death. If your sponsors aren’t able to see the definitive purpose of your work, their support will rapidly dry up — along with any hope of completing the project.

Project managers are responsible for managing these upwards relationships, ensuring that sponsors understand the value of the project as it progresses. Seek out a project manager who exhibits strong negotiation skills and has a history of building strong relationships with her colleagues.

5) How do you turn around a project that isn’t going as planned?

Anyone who has ever worked on a project knows this to be true: Things don’t always work out as you originally intended. From the kindergarten classroom to the corporate boardroom, all projects are vulnerable to the unexpected.

What really matters is how a project manager deals with whatever gets thrown at her. The ability to re-evaluate and re-prioritize as a project progresses is a crucial skill, but it’s also important to keep up the team’s overall morale. Find a project manager who isn’t afraid to change course when the waters get rough and who can keep the team energized even when things aren’t looking so great.

6) How do you handle an under-performing team member?

One of the many hats a project manager wears is the one of head coach. She’s responsible for the training, ongoing development, and motivation of all her team members. If someone on the team is under-performing, it’s her job to figure out the best method to help them get back on track.

Working around a team member’s slack or even replacing that team member shouldn’t be the first answer, and acting rashly can deal an unrecoverable blow to team morale. Look for a candidate who understands the importance of having the entire team working at maximum capacity and who is committed to helping her team members mature and thrive.

7) How would you characterize your communication style with your team?

Being a strong communicator means being self-aware about your own communication style. There isn’t a single ideal style that all project managers should have, but they should be hyper-aware of how their communication methods affect those around them.

If a candidate is unable to clearly characterize her own communication style, it indicates that she may not have an adequate grasp on how she’s perceived by others. Possessing an awareness of how you communicate enables you to navigate difficult conversations as they emerge, and project managers need to be able to know where they stand.

8) How do you evaluate whether or not the team is on track?

Being a project manager requires a lot of balance. The person needs to be hands-on enough to check in with team members at regular intervals and hands-off enough to avoid over-scheduling extraneous meetings that can eat into the team’s precious time. She can’t let any small detail slip under the radar, but she also has to remain completely focused on the end result. And most importantly, she needs to monitor the progress of delegated responsibilities without micro-managing.

Find a project manager who can keep the team focused on a task-by-task basis and continually re-affirm the project’s main objectives. If a project manager thinks that the only way to keep the team on track is to constantly hover over everyone’s shoulders, she probably isn’t a good fit for the job.

9) Have you worked on a project in our field before?

In addition to the extensive list of organization, communication, and leadership skills a good candidate must posses, a project manager also needs to have some solid expertise in your field. This is more relevant for external hires, but it’s important to ensure that internal hires have sufficient knowledge of the project’s needs as well.

Generic skills and experience may seem adequate at first, but down the line they could lead to problematic gaps in understanding and contribute to major missteps. Make sure that your candidate has more than a basic understanding of your company and field. Otherwise, they could fall behind and steer the project in the wrong direction.