The monthly marketing meeting in most businesses is a report read aloud. Somebody walks through slides everyone could have read, a few numbers get commented on, and the meeting ends without anything being decided.
A marketing meeting that produces decisions is structured differently, and the main change is that the reporting happens before the meeting rather than during it.
Send the numbers in advance
Reading a report to people is the least valuable thing that can happen in a room with everyone in it. The numbers should be circulated beforehand with the expectation that they have been read.
That is a genuine cultural change and it is worth holding. The first meeting where somebody has not read it is awkward, and after that they read it. What you get back is the whole hour for the conversation the numbers should prompt.
Open with three questions
- What changed since last month, and do we understand why?
- What did we decide last time, and what happened as a result?
- What decision does this meeting need to make?
The second is the one most often skipped and the one that makes the meeting a series rather than a set of disconnected updates. Reviewing last month’s decisions before making new ones is what stops the same discussion recurring quarterly.
Ask what we decided last month and what happened. In most businesses nobody can answer, and that is the whole reason the meeting feels pointless.
Marcus Bennett, VP of Strategy, Media @ Marsons
Report on outcomes, and only a few
A dashboard with forty metrics gives everyone something to comment on and nobody a reason to act. Four or five numbers tied to the business, tracked consistently, produce better conversations than a comprehensive report.
Enquiries, qualified enquiries, booked work and cost per booking cover most service businesses. Impressions, followers and click-through rate are diagnostics rather than outcomes, and they belong in an appendix for the person investigating a specific problem.
Show the trend, not the month
A single month is mostly noise, particularly at the volumes most small businesses operate at. Twelve months on one chart prevents the reflexive reaction to a normal fluctuation, which is where a great deal of budget gets moved for no reason.
Separate reviewing from planning
Meetings that try to review performance and plan the next quarter in the same hour usually do neither. The review runs long, planning gets ten rushed minutes, and the plan is whatever was suggested last.
Keep the monthly meeting to review and decisions arising from it. Do planning as its own session, less often, with the accumulated evidence from those reviews as the input.
Write down decisions, with an owner and a date
A decision without a named owner and a date is a topic. The record needs to be specific enough that anyone reading it in six weeks knows what was agreed and who was doing it.
Keep the running list visible and open the next meeting with it. That single habit does more to make marketing meetings feel worthwhile than any change to the reporting.
Invite fewer people
Meetings expand to include everyone with an interest, and past about six people the conversation becomes presentation rather than discussion. The people who need to be there are the ones who will make or execute the decisions.
Everyone else can have the notes. Where the numbers cannot answer the question the meeting is asking, that is a measurement problem to fix before the next one, and it is usually the more valuable finding. The PPC hub covers what that reporting looks like for paid channels.
Decide what would change your mind
The most useful question in any review is what evidence would make you stop doing something. Asked in advance, it converts an open-ended commitment into a testable one and removes the awkwardness of arguing about it later.
Agree it when a channel or campaign starts: what result over what period would mean this is not working. Then the meeting where that threshold is crossed becomes an administrative decision rather than a defence of somebody’s idea.
Leave room for the thing nobody put on the agenda
The most valuable item in a marketing meeting is frequently something a person noticed but did not think was worth raising. Ten minutes at the end for anything unstructured surfaces it, and it is the first thing cut when the reporting overruns.
Reviews that never decide anything?
We will restructure your reporting so the monthly meeting produces decisions rather than updates.
