Five things required to run effective marketing meetings
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Whether virtual or in-person, meetings can be some of the most effective ways to communicate ideas, discuss strategies, and determine actions in the digital marketing sector. However, according to Zippia’s research, 71% of meetings are considered unproductive, with the average worker spending 31 hours per month in meetings that do not yield positive results.
With that in mind, we’re looking at ways to ensure you are running effective meetings that can produce actionable outputs.
Five essential elements to a successful marketing meeting
1. Give your meeting a purpose
One of the first and perhaps most important steps when planning a meeting is understanding why you require one.
A meeting can be defined into many different subcategories, but most fall into one of two categories:
- Presentation – one person presents a topic and leads a discussion
- Status update – generally shorter meetings focused on gaining updates and addressing any progress issues
By understanding the type of meeting you want to run, you can ensure you are planning effectively.
If you struggle to categorise your meeting, start by defining your objective. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What do I want to achieve from this meeting?
- What is the question that I’m trying to answer?
- Does this question require a meeting?
Once you have a clear and defined objective for your meeting, it’s important to detail this in the meeting invite to allow your participants to prepare or ask any questions ahead of time.
2. Pick the right participants
Armed with a question that you require an answer to and a defined meeting type, the next step is picking the right people to help you find the answer. Who is going to offer the most? Do you have the decision maker in the room? These are all questions that you need to ask yourself.
There’s nothing more frustrating than having an hour-long meeting where you all agree on an outcome, only to have your ‘solution’ rejected by the decision maker.
Understand that time is very limited, particularly in the digital marketing world, so ensuring that you have the optimum forum and aren’t wasting people’s time is vital.
3. Plan ahead
Now that you have established the purpose of your meeting and curated the ideal list of attendees, a well-thought-out plan should be put together.
One element that is often overlooked when it comes to meeting planning is ensuring that you have chosen the correct format and time. If you have quite a difficult topic to discuss that requires a lot of thought, it may not be best to have this virtually at 4 pm on a Friday. One study found that the best time for a productive meeting is 2:30 pm on a Tuesday, but generally, the consensus is that morning meetings are the most effective.
It should be relatively easy to put together an agenda for your meeting, given the purpose-based questions you posed earlier. Setting an agenda helps make sure that a meeting stays on track and doesn’t go off on tangents, it ensures that everyone arrives prepared and ready for the topic of choice.
A bonus tip to ensure that you get the most out of your meeting is to have your agenda points in priority order. That way, you can allocate a specific percentage of your time to the most important points. This helps you be as efficient as possible without wasting time on low-priority discussions.
4. Encourage participation
The most effective meetings have engaged participants. Although one of the hardest elements of a meeting to ensure, there are a few tips to ensure that you maintain an interactive atmosphere:
- If presentation slides are used, don’t make them overly wordy: Text-heavy slides can encourage participants to read the presentation rather than listen to what’s being said. It’s better to use your slides as pointers to remind you of important information or key stats, as opposed to a script.
- Go no more than 5 minutes without participation: The Havard Business Review recommends that all effective meetings use the 5-minute rule. If participants are expecting to just be spoken at rather than engaging in a discussion, they’re less likely to remain engaged. With this, it is recommended that you go no longer than 5 minutes without participation of some kind from your attendees.
- Consider icebreakers: Rather than starting the meeting off immediately with the big questions, sometimes you can encourage more engagement and help participants relax into the meeting by introducing icebreakers. These can be quick exercises to get people talking and feeling comfortable in the room, therefore driving more open conversations.
- Ask for feedback: At the end of your meeting, asking for feedback can be a great way to learn how to improve meetings moving forward and also encourage an open and honest culture within your team. If your participants know that you are open to receiving feedback, they are more likely to remain engaged throughout the meeting.
5. Round up and follow up
Upon finishing your well-structured, planned and effective meeting, one of the best ways to ensure you can see clear action points is by rounding up and then following up.
When the meeting is coming to a close, it is important to summarise the key points to the room, relaying the actions and the person responsible for completing these with deadlines. This ensures that everyone leaves the meeting on the same page with clear, actionable outcomes.
The final step of an effective meeting is to make sure that you send a follow-up email. This summarises the meeting, includes everything that you mentioned in your roundup, and gives another opportunity to ask for feedback or be asked questions. By sending a follow-up email to every meeting, you are making sure that no information gets lost and attendees can be held accountable for their action points.
Ready? Now it’s time to run effective meetings!
It is inevitable that the digital marketing industry, despite being largely online, will still use virtual and in-person meetings to solve problems and develop ideas. With that, it’s important to ensure that these are effective, given the time-poor nature of digital marketing professionals.
That being said, if you follow these steps, your future meetings should be effective and productive. Don’t forget – set your objective, pick the correct attendees, plan and share your agenda ahead of time, encourage engagement throughout, round up and follow up!
If you want to find out more about the digital marketing industry, get in touch.
