3 Meetings Every Growth Marketer Needs To Run (With Agenda Templates)

Speaker 1: Do me a favor and raise your hand if you love a pointless, time-wasting meeting that could have been an email.

Weird, I'm not seeing any hands out in the audience.

Just kidding. All dad jokes aside, here at Motion, we've actually been ramping up our paid engine and setting up weekly creative strategy meetings.

And lately, we've been trying to make them as effective and efficient as possible. So we started looking at how elite performance teams like HexClad, Jones Road Beauty, Ridge, and our good friend Dara Denny run their meetings.

Here's what we learned and what we're applying at Motion. There are basically three types of meetings.

The weekly performance review meeting, the monthly creative review meeting, and the idea generation sprint meeting.

And I'm going to share with you what actually goes down in these meetings and offer some step-by-step agendas.

That way you can customize them for your company and for your team. Let's go ahead and get started. Meeting number one, the weekly performance review meeting.

Okay, so first up, we have this weekly performance review meetings, and we took a look over at HexClad and our friend Connor Rolain and his team are having these weekly performance review meetings where they dig into what ads performed well, why they worked, and they're planning minor tweaks for those that maybe didn't hit the mark.

So, for example, they might look at a Facebook ad that had a high click-through rate but had low conversions and discuss why it didn't lead to more sales.

Here's an agenda of what the step-by-step might look like in these types of meetings. You'll start off by addressing any ad hoc issues.

Taking a few minutes at the very beginning to tackle maybe urgent challenges or opportunities that have come up. And you'll have open your Motion page that looks like this, and then any relevant tracking spreadsheets to monitor and inform your decisions.

Maybe an example of this could be like a sudden drop in ad performance due to creative fatigue that you want to address with the team.

Next, you'll spend about 10 minutes or so with your performance data review, and you're analyzing last week's ad performance, identifying high performers, underperformers, and taking a look, maybe in this example, at an ad with Gordon Ramsay that had super high engagement and is scaling according to plan.

Or, if you're HexClad, maybe their knife set carousel on Facebook didn't convert as many as they'd thought, so they need to tweak it.

After that, they're going to take a look at low-lift iteration planning for about 15 minutes and thinking through small tweaks that can be made for underperforming ads.

So, for example, this could be where they talk about how the media buyer can make tweaks to targeting for their Facebook ads.

The creative team maybe is updating some statics, you know, and their visuals, and the creative strategist is revising some copy.

Lastly, they'll wrap up this meeting pretty informally, assigning tasks and some set deadlines.

And with your weekly performance review meetings, you'll want to keep them a little less formal.

And Dara Denny actually has a great tip for ending the meeting, though, which is to define who's responsible for what, from research to execution.

It helps clarify and streamline your workflow and boost performance. So, if a certain ad isn't performing, make sure everybody on the team knows their role and who is fixing what.

Okay, let's jump into meeting number two, the monthly creative review meetings.

This is where the magic happens and the strategies are really getting fine-tuned.

With our friends over at Jones Road Beauty, Cody Plofker, he tells us how he categorizes their ad performance into green for above KPI, yellow for average, and red for something that they really need to pay attention to and possibly discard.

This little system helps them focus on scaling winners, refining average performers, and ditching the duds.

And here's what that go-to agenda for a monthly creative review meeting might look like. They'll start with an introduction that's just a professional reminder of the meeting's purpose and the goals to stay within the allotted time and talk about both net new ideas and iterations on existing ads.

Next, they'll do a performance recap, which should last about 15 minutes or so, and you're going to review the past month's ad performance using that green, yellow, red system we mentioned.

So for Cody over at Jones Road Beauty, maybe they'd share a screen on Zoom, they'd look at Motion, and they'd start reviewing the greens, the yellows, and the reds, kind of one by one.

After that, they're going to do a deep dive into top performers for about 10 minutes or so.

They're going to analyze the best ads and document their learnings. So for example, Cody and his team might discuss a skincare ad's strong visuals and influencer partnerships and hypothesize the elements that led to its most successful results.

Then you'll do a review of underperformers. This is about 10 minutes or so, and you're going to discuss why certain ads failed and how to improve them.

So, again, for Cody over at Jones Road, maybe they're looking at why a fragrance ad failed due to unclear messaging.

So they'd plan to simplify the message and use more engaging visuals based on customer feedback that they saw inside of some of their Facebook customer groups. And then lastly, at the end, you'll do some strategic planning for a few minutes.

You're going to plan the next month's creative strategy. Here's where you decide on the themes for future campaigns. You're assigning roles for creating content around new product launches, and maybe setting specific performance goals based on how things are measuring up now in comparison to your year's plan.

A pro tip from our good friend Dara Denny is to really leverage creative analytics platforms like Motion to give your team's clear metrics and visual performance reports. In this meeting, performance and creative need to be speaking the same language.

That data needs to be more accessible, and it motivates creatives to use metrics in their daily work. Meeting number three, idea generation sprint meeting.

Okay, let's dive into the fun one, the idea generation sprints. These are your powerhouse sessions for developing and refining net new ideas.

Of course, you might not have these meetings every month. It depends on your annual campaign structure, but the concept is to have separate meetings for generating net new ideas.

At both Ridge and Jones Road Beauty, their teams are coming prepared with multiple new ideas. They present and critique and vote on which ones to move forward with.

This ensures a steady flow of fresh concepts that are ready for production.

Your idea generating meetings should have an agenda that looks something like this. Again, you'll start with guidelines and an introduction that's reminding folks of the meeting's purpose to critique the ideas and not the people.

You're going to want to encourage dialogue and let the creative implets really fly here.

Next up in your agenda, you'll kick off the ideas presentation part of the meeting by going around and letting each team member present three to four new concepts for both static and video that they've already prepared.

Likely, some of these ideas will be things that you've shared in maybe a group chat or a work Slack channel. That is really helpful for getting the juices flowing.

Next up is the data and insights sharing portion of the meeting.

Here's where creative strategists will share any relevant customer survey information, competitor analysis research, historical ad performance data, anything that could relate to and support certain ideas and their potential impact.

Your creative strategist could maybe, for example, explain how a TikTok challenge for a competitor either went viral or it bombed and discuss the demographics and engagement metrics that are inside of TikTok's ad spotlight.

Lastly, it's time for a group critique and the voting.

Here's where you can professionally and constructively critique ideas. Support or challenge some assumptions on your colleagues' ideas. For instance, here's where you could discuss maybe some potential improvements for a campaign that involves whitelisting some influencers and voting on the final UGC creators that the team really likes best. You'll end this part of the meeting by assigning tasks for the next steps, setting deadlines, and then when to expect completion of these new creatives and when they can begin testing them live.

A pro tip we picked up from Dara on this meeting is to adopt a sprint structure with clear stages for research, execution, review, client submission if you're an agency, and then launching.

Assigning responsibilities and tasks in the project management tool like Asana for each of these stages removes ambiguity and keeps your team super focused.

This structure helps maintaining a high output for meeting those deadlines effectively. Well, there you have it, folks. Three must-have meetings, three structured agendas to follow. And if you want a deeper dive into building high-performing creative teams, you're definitely going to want to check out Dara Denny's comprehensive slide deck in the LinkedIn description and in the YouTube description that is going to help you a lot.

I'm curious about what you might add. Are we missing any critical meeting types or agenda items that your team uses? Let us know in the comments and make sure your meetings are not a waste of time.