Marketing meetings: Tips for better meetings, types of marketing meetings, and templates to try!

Here are the different types of marketing meetings, tips for hosting better meetings, templates you can try, and more.

And don't forget to use Range to enhance all of your meetings!

What do you need to cover? 6 marketing meeting agenda items

Project and marketing performance updates

Project and performance updates don’t need to be anything complex — just a quick overview of who is working on what, why they’re working on it, and what they’ve accomplished.

Plan to spend just a few minutes per person on these updates at the start of every meeting. This helps you set the pace, and more importantly, it gets all team members on the same page.

Current status of OKRs

Your OKRs are “objectives and key results,” and they should be among your agenda items for most, if not all meetings. Basically, outline the objectives for whatever your team is working on — like objectives for the quarter, the month, or the sprint that you’re currently on — and touch on the results you’re targeting when you’ve met those objectives.

Current project challenges

In a perfect world, your team’s plans and projects would always go off without a hitch — but in reality, there are almost always roadblocks, either small or large, that get in the way of your marketing goals.

Create a space within every meeting during which team members can bring up challenges.

Retrospective and planning

Just as you give everyone a few minutes to outline the current status of their projects, they should also get a few minutes of meeting time to discuss the things they did the week prior and what they’re planning to do in the coming week.

Why? This helps you, as the manager, identify who needs help where. It also helps keep everyone accountable and updated on project status.

KPIs and goals review

A huge part of marketing revolves around key performance indicators (KPIs). Reserve some space within your meeting to review your KPIs — where they are currently, the goals you’re targeting, and what needs to happen to get there.

Successes and wins

As you’re wrapping up the meeting with key takeaways, make sure that you end it on a positive note with successes and wins. You’ll be surprised by how much this one simple trick improves productivity, team culture, and general positivity toward meetings.

Common types of marketing meetings

Now that you know some of the essentials to discuss at marketing team meetings, it’s time to look at the different types of meetings you can hold. While you can bring up any of the above topics at these meetings, each type has its own focus area.

Scrum meetings or standup meetings

Scrum meetings and standups are designed to be quick. They’re popular among agile teams, where there is often a time limit of 10 minutes or less. During that span, each team member summarizes what they accomplished the day before, what they plan to do that day, and any challenges standing in their way.

The idea is to set the pace for the day and kickstart everyone into work mode — and that’s why they need to happen at the start of the day.

Sprint-related meetings

Much like scrum, sprints are another popular method for agile marketing teams. Sprints are short marketing campaigns that run for a week or two with clearly defined goals.

Naturally, sprint meetings are meetings made to talk about the sprint. These are also short meetings, but they’ll typically last longer than a scrum meeting. Usually, they’re held after the sprint to hand over marketing materials to stakeholders and review the sprint's outcome.

Sometimes, however, sprint meetings may happen before a sprint to get everyone aligned, or midway through when brainstorming is required to complete tasks or correct problems.

Campaign update/campaign review meetings

Campaign updates and reviews are all about analyzing progress. Partway through a campaign, you may have update meetings so that everyone can check in with progress toward certain goals. This is especially common with longer campaigns that run for a few months — you may have a monthly campaign update meeting to keep everyone updated.

At the end of a campaign, you may also have a final review meeting. This is where everyone digs into the completed campaign to analyze successes and failures so that you can figure out how to improve future campaigns as a team.

OKR meetings

These are meetings designed to talk about your objectives and key results. They don’t have to be long meetings; they’re typically better as short meetings.

The idea behind OKR meetings is to ensure that the project doesn’t veer off the track, so your discussion topics and action items need to center on the objectives your team is pursuing, the progress toward those objectives, and any roadblocks in the way.

Marketing retrospective meetings

Marketing retrospectives are crucial to continuously improve your marketing strategy and your workflows. Hold these meetings at the end of each campaign or when you’ve reached a major marketing goal so that you can analyze campaigns as a whole.

The idea here is to get your team, the marketing manager, and any stakeholders involved so you can analyze the campaign as a whole. Identify successes and failures and use those lessons to improve future marketing efforts.

8 tips for hosting better marketing meetings

With meetings so often viewed as a waste of time, it’s time for a few tips. To help you out, here are a few surefire strategies for more effective marketing meetings.

1. Always follow a meeting agenda

A detailed meeting agenda is the most important tool at your disposal — and it doesn’t have to be difficult to create. Put together a list of must-discuss topics to keep meetings on task (and avoid veering off into small talk or time-waster topics).

How to write a meeting agenda: Use a marketing meeting agenda template (we’ll have examples below, or you can make your own), and fill it out with topics to be discussed. All you need is a heading for each topic, and a brief paragraph or bullet points covering the main points to bring up.

2. Keep meeting attendance limited to the marketing team only (if possible)

The more, the merrier, right? Wrong!

When it comes to efficiency, there’s no need to invite the sales team or anyone else who isn’t on the marketing team or directly related in some way (like project management for the marketing team).

Fewer people means fewer chances for those people to jump in and steer the conversation off course.

Follow the two-pizza rule: The “Two Pizza Rule” is something that Jeff Bezos came up with. In short, Bezos has a strict policy of keeping meeting attendance low enough that two pizzas should be enough to feed all the attendees.

While you don’t have to be that strict about it, this rule is a great guideline to help keep meetings smaller, flowing faster, and more productive.

3. Use the right tools and technology

Whether you’re hosting in-person meetings or virtual with a remote team, make sure that you’ve got all the right meeting tools and technology.

For remote teams, make sure you have a virtual meeting room platform that your whole team is comfortable using.

• Share your the meeting agenda on your screen, make a doc, or create a deck for key points
• Zoom and Slack are great for creating virtual meeting rooms.
• Range is ideal for helping you create agendas and host asynchronous meetings.

4. Keep meetings short and to the point

The longer a meeting goes on, the more likely it is to veer off track. Even if you stay on task, team members are bound to get bored eventually — or start checking their watches because they need to get back to their tasks if they’re going to meet their goals.

What is the sweet spot? There are many opinions, but research says about 25 minutes is the maximum length before people lose focus.

Of course, for scrum meetings, standups, sprints, and other types of hyper-focused meetings, the duration should be even shorter than that, if possible.

Ways to consolidate meetings:

• Make an agenda and stick to it.
• Set a time frame for the whole meeting, and place time limits on each agenda item.
• Make sure you have a facilitator who can keep an eye on the discussion and the clock so that everything stays within your time allotments.

5. Create action items for every member in attendance

Action items are an awesome tool because they do a couple of things. First up, they’re a great way to ensure that everyone who attends the meeting feels like the time was well spent.

But action items can also be a way to identify people who may not need to attend meetings. Do you always have one or two people who never have action items assigned? Unless they’re contributing to the meeting in some other way, there’s a good chance they don’t need to be there.

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to create action items for every attendee, even if those items are the next step in whatever task they’re working on. It helps everyone stay on track.

Example action items

• Create a new branded website header — assigned to Bob
• Outline new blog content for the coming week — assigned to Jane
• Update buyer personas — assigned to Jennifer

6. Host fewer meetings and more async check-in meetings

Do a quick Google search for “too many meetings" and you’ll find hundreds of articles decrying the sheer number of meetings people must endure every week.

In some workplaces, meetings are frequent and long enough to be downright disruptive to workflows.

The secret is to hold fewer meetings — as few as you can get away with while keeping everyone on the same page. When you do need meetings, rely on the quick ones as much as possible, like scrum meetings or check-in style meetings.

Benefits of async check-ins:

• They’re designed to be done in 5 minutes or less
• They can be asynchronous, take less time than face-to-face meetings, and easily fit into busy schedules.
• Provide immediate context for future, in-person convos
• Check-ins are likely to be small since they’re usually either with a single individual or a group working on similar tasks.

7. Establish camera etiquette for virtual meetings

“What is that in the background?”

“Hey, where did Joe go? I see his cat, but not him!”

“Your screen is black. What happened to your webcam?”

Ever heard any of these statements tossed around in a virtual conference room? People have been known to wander away from the camera, get distracted by background items, or shut their webcams off.

Determine how your team wants to operate in regards to audio-only meetings, video backgrounds, and walking and talking.

Video conference tools to consider:

• Zoom is everywhere — a good choice for connecting people outside your organization.
• Slack offers video conferencing plus text-based comms tools.
• Microsoft Teams comes with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.

8. Leave space in meetings for feedback and brainstorming

Meetings shouldn’t be a one-way street where you talk at people rather than with people. Make meetings feel useful and productive by providing a space for brainstorming and feedback. This way, everyone is comfortable knowing that their thoughts are always welcome, which helps promote positive feelings toward meetings in general.

Why feedback is gold: Feedback is especially important because it helps you to improve continuously. Be open to ideas and suggestions from your team members, and they’ll tell you the tools, formats, and tricks that help them be most productive during meetings.

3 meeting templates every marketer needs

Ready to try out some meeting templates to help get your marketing meetings on track? We’ve got a few below you can use.

Marketing team weekly meeting template

This template covers all the bases you should tend to on a weekly basis: KPIs, news, wins, things you’ve learned, and big events in the near future. All of those topics are up for a quick review to check their statuses.

Then you’ll follow those with a round of topic sharing, where team members can go in depth on a particular subject. Last, you’ll close the meeting on a positive note by talking about something exciting in the week ahead.

1:1 weekly meeting template

You need this template for meetings between yourself and one of your team members. It’s a simple agenda, starting with an icebreaker, moving right into follow-ups from the prior week, then roadblocks. The biggest chunk of the meeting is open for deeper discussion on topics of your choosing, and at the end, you can ask for feedback.

This is a great template to help you keep those 1:1s on track — and confined to a relatively short time frame.

Project review template

How did the last marketing campaign go or product launch?

Talk about notable updates, blockers, and results. Then dive into what needs to be improved upon and optimized.

Close out with top priorities or an icebreaker question for team building.

Host incredible meetings with Range

Ready to step up your meeting game? Range has the tools you need. Host meetings asynchronously, use templates that come with the platform — and to it all while cutting meeting time and fostering teamwork.

• Collaborate better with more effective meetings
• Easily facilitate balanced discussions that make every meeting worthwhile
• Keep everyone included and on track with much less effort.
• Build agendas, record actions, and share notes automatically
• Create a recurring agenda for all the topics your team discusses every week from metrics to project updates.
• Empower discussion by building a collaborative agenda & spinning to select others to speak
• Easily document notes from each topic to keep everyone in the loop.
• Share notes via Slack & email

Start your team on Range for free.