Running Effective Marketing Meetings: A how-to guide to run marketing meetings that teach, inspire, and change how you and your team work

They go by many names, but staff meetings are basically the ones where you get together with your team to get status updates, make announcements, and follow up on pending items. In some companies, they are called the all hands meeting, others just use marketing team weekly, or simply staff meeting as the name.

Sometimes, you will have meetings for the sole purpose of reporting the status of a project, campaign, or other activity. Status report meetings can take many forms, but effective ones are short and to the point. In many situations, a formal face-to-face meeting may not even be required. Many organizations ask that the current status be simply emailed on a weekly basis, unless there are issues that have to be discussed or resolved in person. For larger projects or those that involve cross-departmental teams, it is typical to have face-to-face status report meetings that also provide a way for additional interaction and ensure that all team members are aware of the multiple ongoing activities within the project.

Fail to plan and you plan to fail, is how the saying goes. For marketing, nothing is more critical than properly planning your marketing campaigns and projects. Marketing planning meetings typically revolve around annual, quarterly, and monthly planning cycles. Each company is different when it comes to how often and how detailed their marketing plans are, but odds are you will be running a few planning meetings throughout the year. The main goals of these meetings are the setting of targets and metrics, and the overall delineation of what types of marketing activities will be carried out. In some cases, a formal plan of attack is created, and depending on the type of plan you are putting together, input from other departments may be required.

Although a good meeting is sometimes described as a meeting where decisions were made, sometimes you will need to schedule some time to get everyone together to make a final decision on something. It could be a decision on which vendor to select for the next advertising campaign, which software will be implemented for marketing automation, or even which trade shows to attend.

If there is a department that seems to be constantly meeting, marketing is probably on the top of the list. Due to the creative nature of many marketing projects, the marketing team typically meets many times per week (or even per day) to work on one project or another. These meetings are sometimes unstructured conversations among team members, but in other cases these meetings can be formalized and efforts can be coordinated to get something done. An example might be brainstorming new ideas for a promotion, reviewing and commenting on a new website section, or even discussing and editing a video script that showcases a new product.

Sometimes bundled together with status report meetings, these types of meetings are typical of any marketing department. After, or even during, the execution of each marketing campaign, you will want to learn what went right and what could be improved. A report of the results is most likely the starting point of this meeting, and a full evaluation will take place so that you can make the necessary course adjustments to the marketing plan and future campaigns.

Depending on the business, marketing is required to provide monthly, quarterly, and annual reports. In many cases, the head of marketing presents a summary of the key marketing metrics, their results, and plans going forward to the senior executive team. In some cases, these meetings are of the closed door type, but in many organizations that pride themselves for transparency, the marketing VP will be asked to deliver the presentation in front of all employees as part of a routine state of the union address.

The coordination of sales and marketing activities is not only critical for the success of a company, but is also of the utmost importance to any top marketing professional. If in your organization marketing doesn't participate in sales meetings, you should address this. Although in most of these meetings, the marketing participation is listen-only, it is a great opportunity to communicate to the sales team the latest campaigns, results, and what is coming down the pipeline of marketing projects.

When you hear offsite meeting, you may think of executive offsite where senior managers mingle and discuss the vision for the company and the year ahead. In marketing, you may sometimes want to take the team offsite in order to focus on solving a specific challenge without office distractions, to thoroughly review and reassess important campaigns, and even to stimulate creativity and help with brainstorming new ideas. Properly planning this type of meeting involves careful attention to detail and ensuring the time spent outside the office is well worth it.

Marketers use a variety of vendors or contractors to help out with design, copyrighting, trade show management, and more. Whether you have a one-off project with a vendor (for example, a company creating a new video or website for the company) or an ongoing relationship (for example, marketing agency), your meetings with them will set the tone for the relationship. Plan and execute them effectively and you will save both your team's and the contractor's time.

Borrowed from the Agile movement in software development, marketing teams have also been implementing agile techniques in order to gain speed and better results from marketing campaigns. A traditional element of an agile team are their meetings, sometimes called standups. Marketing teams who want to use agile methods will have to adapt to this fast-paced rhythm and different meeting style where the whole team meets for a few minutes every day and focuses on briefly discussing the tasks at hand.

This is not an exhaustive list of all types of marketing meetings, but this list should cover the most common ones you will encounter. In fact, any time a group of people get together to discuss a common subject, this can be considered a meeting, even if not formally arranged. The important thing to keep in mind is that although meeting types vary, they will all require some basic tools to be effective, which we will cover in the next chapter.

You may be asking yourself why I left online meetings out of the list. Yes, it was on purpose. Although marketing meetings using online conferencing tools such as WebEx, GoToMeeting, and others, the type of meeting doesn't change, only the way people communicate. The same is true for meetings involving phones and video conferencing. Each tool may need a few adjustments and if you have remote people participating, the leader of the meeting will have to take that into account and plan accordingly. But in the end, they are just tools that can be used to enhance the meeting experience. We will talk more about meeting tools as we address each component of an effective meeting in subsequent chapters.

Why is it important to understand the different meeting types? Because each one has its own goal or goals. And while at your company they may differ, typically the meeting types I just described will aim for the following:

Understanding what you will want to get out of the meeting is the first step to being able to properly plan, execute, and follow-up on a meeting. If you are only a participant and not the organizer or leader of the meeting, then knowing what is expected of the meeting (why are we having this meeting?) will help you get prepared. Not all meeting organizers (as you probably have already experienced) are good meeting organizers. If you can become a better participant, then you can help the meeting be more effective, and then everyone wins.

In this chapter, we learned that not all marketing meetings are the same. Although they may involve similar elements, and even the same people, they each have different goals and characteristics. By knowing that, you will be able to adequately prepare for each meeting in order to make them successful.

How to prepare and why you should prepare are the next steps and will be covered in the following chapter, so read on and start your journey into the world of effective marketing meetings.