Think fast: How much time do you spend in weekly marketing meetings? How much of your meeting time is well-spent? If you are a manager, how much does your organization spend on salaries allocated to the time you spend on each creative marketing meeting? Each marketing strategy meeting? How much of your own time is spent coming up with your marketing team agenda? And if you are on the sales team, how many sales do you miss because you were in a meeting?
What should be discussed in a marketing meeting?
When the weekly marketing meeting agenda seems to lack focus and get nowhere, the solution is to set a marketing team meeting agenda with a laser-focused purpose.
Brief, regular marketing team meetings where you cover the same kinds of information in more or less the same order every time can reinforce your sales goals by making sure team members know what is expected of them. And team members can understand what is expected of them at team meetings and come prepared.
You can begin every meeting with three things you want your team to know. You can review changes in meaningful metrics since the last meeting. You can brainstorm new ways to meet your marketing goals. And your team can use the weekly marketing meeting template to communicate their concerns about any new roadblocks to reaching sales expectations.
The kinds of questions you ask in your brainstorming session include:
- Who is our target audience?
Growth in market share is driven by continually refining the team’s understanding of who is reachable. Growth in marketing conversions is driven by constantly improving the team’s knowledge of what customers are looking for versus what they want. Your marketing team provides the “Aha!” moments that power desire for your product.
- How does this fit in our current strategy?
If you have invested serious effort in creating a focused, actionable, measurable weekly marketing meeting agenda, you came away with clear goals and a good overview of how to reach them. Weekly marketing meetings help everyone stay on the same page with the details for meeting marketing goals that bolster company profits.
- If you could change one thing about our strategy or execution, what would you change?
The weekly marketing meeting is not a gripe session. It’s not a time for team members to vent every disappointment and indignation they could experience on the job. But it is an excellent opportunity to get team members in the habit of presenting actionable concerns within management’s power to change. These concerns can be discussed empathetically but with a rigorous insistence on supporting company goals. Then at the next meeting, the convener can discuss how management acknowledged and acted to change the point of concern from the last meeting. The concerns of team members are treated with respect, but team members and managers fill different roles.
Weekly Marketing Meeting Agenda Sample
Here’s an example of an agenda for a weekly marketing meeting. It gives time to each area of focus in a theoretical, successful company. The organization of your marketing team may vary from this example. But the important thing is to organize projects by stage in their life cycle and responsibilities of the group.
Review Goals, Metrics, and KPIs – 5 minutes
Announcements and Big Wins – 10 minutes
Growth – 10 minutes
- Update on ongoing projects
- Where are you stuck?
Creative – 10 minutes
- Update on ongoing projects
- Where are you stuck?
Comments – 10 minutes
- Update on ongoing projects
- Where are you stuck?
Operations – 10 minutes
- Update on ongoing projects
- Where are you stuck?
Closing – 5 minutes
- Summarize action items
Need help creating this agenda in Docket? Get started with one of our marketing team meeting agenda templates.
Planning Your First Marketing Team Meeting
Now that you know the general principles of holding a successful marketing team meeting, what kind of preparation do you need to do to pull it off?
Distribute the agenda for your meeting ahead of time. Give participants a chance to come prepared to share their insights and help colleagues with current marketing issues. Allow participants to discuss the meeting topics among themselves before they address them with you.
Invest some time and thought into coming up with an icebreaker. Maybe you will start the meeting with a pop quiz that everyone present can pass. This is a time to build up confidence in marketing ability, not to embarrass any team member or add to a sense of having lots of work to do (unless there is very clearly a lot of work to do to meet team goals).
Or maybe you could go around the room and ask every team member to sum up their experience since the last meeting in one word. This gives you an idea of the information you may need to add to your action points later in the meeting, and it gives team members a way to limit their requests for management intervention in roadblocks to meeting company goals.
Have follow-up tasks ready to add to participants’ management software programs such as Trello, Asana, or Monday.com. Your management platform is particularly important for keeping team members who work remotely in touch with their marketing goals. And automating mundane management responsibilities leaves you more time for the work that requires your unique managerial talents.
Maintaining a virtual work hub for your marketing team allows your sales force to communicate and collaborate from any location on earth. And it gives you a way to keep track of all the moving parts of managing your marketing team for continuous success.
