9 Client Meetings Your Agency Should Be Prepared For

Successful marketing campaigns require a considerable amount of communication and collaboration.

With that said, it should come as no surprise that great results don’t come from a silent team, and great client relationships certainly don’t come from a lack of communication.

Meetings and the conversations that they spark build a strong foundation for relationships and lead to even stronger campaigns.

At Revenue River, we’ve held a variety of different types of meetings with many different goals in mind. And we’ve identified 10 of the most common marketing meetings that you will encounter during the lifetime of any campaign.

While the goals, agendas, and tones are often very different for each, we’ve provided some valuable insights to help you see them through successfully.

One-Time Meetings

1) The Campaign Kick-Off Meeting

It’s important that you start any campaign with a strategic, well-defined plan.

At the beginning of the meeting, you should introduce the two teams that will be collaborating on the campaign and highlight the main points of contact on either side. This will give everyone an opportunity to set expectations and lay the necessary groundwork for creating foundational elements such as personas, offer strategies, and sales connections.

The goal of this meeting is for both teams to walk away from this meeting with a strong understanding of the campaign basics, as well as a clear direction to start the campaign and the communication series to follow.

2) The Oh Shit, Something’s Broken! Meeting

One minute what you’re doing is working, and the next minute it’s broken and needs your immediate attention.

We’ve all been there.

These meetings often play a key role in course correcting your efforts -- whether you’ve found out that a tool hasn’t been working properly or the strategy isn’t living up to your expectations.

It can be easy to point fingers when things veer off track, but it’s important for you and your team to remember that your client’s trust is on the line.

3) The Hot New Project Meeting

While many companies prefer to plan their annual content calendar in January, it’s not uncommon for new, time-sensitive projects to crop up throughout the year. As marketing professionals, it’s up to us to quickly jump on them and roll with it.

If and when a client presents you with an “out of the blue” project that needed to be done yesterday, you’ll want to start by holding a quick meeting to gather the basic information, set priorities for the most crucial aspects, and sort out a plan for implementation.

This type of project is often incredibly important to your client, which is why it’s so important to set aside the time necessary to fully understand it before drafting a contract.

4) The Quick Confirmation Call Meeting

Oftentimes the agency-client relationship dictates that certain items be reviewed and approved before publication.

While these exchanges often take place over email, factors like time constraints or information complexity may require you to jump on a phone call.

This may not technically be a meeting, but it’s worth pointing out that this type of communication can help quickly move projects along while also showing clients your commitment to completing tasks in a timely fashion.

5) The New Direction Meeting

Whether you’ve just added a new deliverable to your campaign or your client has changed the tone and direction of his marketing strategy, major changes require impromptu meetings that will help to clarify how these adjustments will influence the scope of work.

No matter what this major change is, you will need to use this meeting to quickly understand what new direction you will be taking before revising the overall strategy.

Recurring Meetings

1) The Weekly Deliverables Meeting

The key to a focused and relevant digital marketing campaign is targeted communication on a regular basis.

We use weekly deliverables meetings to help keep our clients up to date on the projects and tasks we’re working on. This is so they can connect the work that goes on behind-the-scenes with the end result.

For us, a normal agenda might look something like this:

1. Opening minutes: This includes small talk and updates on anything new going on with client.
2. Project updates: This is where we define where we’re at with our current projects.
3. Company updates: This is where we discuss anything that the company is targeting in the coming future that marketing can help with.
4. Next steps: This is where we let the client know what we plan to do in the coming week so that they will have a reasonable understanding of what to expect in the next meeting.

As shown in the third point, this meeting is also a great time to update the client on any short-term strategies and stay ahead of any new directions the client may be taking in the future.

2) The Smarketing Meeting

In many organizations, the relationship between sales and marketing is a rocky one.

However, for your two teams to deliver the results you’re looking for, constant communication is necessary.

Part of that communication should be a weekly or bi-weekly meeting between the two teams to review leads generated within that time, follow-up with any qualified leads, provide updates on current opportunities, and explore feedback from sales to marketing regarding lead quality.

The “smarketing” meeting ensures that sales sees how marketing is working to improve lead quality, and marketing receives invaluable feedback to help feed future content and overall marketing plan. (If that last sentence didn’t make you jump for joy just a little, I’m not sure you’re in the right industry.)

This alignment can make the difference for not just sales or marketing but for the entire team.

3) The Monthly Report Review Meeting

Inbound campaigns provide marketers with the unique ability to track and report on a number of different sets of data to prove ROI.

With all of this data, reporting becomes a major part of the campaign that requires your client’s attention.

Spending time on a monthly basis to review results and improve alignment moving forward allows you to prove your worth and stay on top of areas where numbers are flat or falling.

We like to cover a short list of topics and results in our report review meetings including:

• KPI results vs. goals: Traffic, leads, qualified leads, and customers
• SEO results: Keyword rankings and organic and direct traffic results
• Smarketing: Lead tracking and customer acquisitions
• Campaign deliverables and successes: What we produced and how it contributed to our successes

Much like the monthly report review meeting above, this meeting should focus on reviewing a larger set of data to showcase inbound progress, strategy success, and overall results.

This meeting should also serve as an opportunity to discuss future strategies and generate a better understanding of overall campaign feedback from the client’s perspective.

These meetings are where you start to show real, quantifiable results and trends, so it should be taken seriously to help gauge the health of the campaign and relationship.

4) The Annual Strategy Meeting

A new year often calls for a new strategy and a new set of campaign objectives.

On an annual basis, either before or after the new year, you should get together with all of your client’s main decision makers to review the annual reports and establish a new or continued strategy for the next 12 months.

Not only does this meeting help to establish clear objectives for your campaign, but it also showcases your dedication toward the continued success of your client.

Meetings Matter

Meetings always seem to have a negative connotation within the business world, but in reality, focused get-togethers can lead to extraordinary results.

Are there other meeting types your agency has with clients? Don’t necessarily agree with my list of meetings? Leave a comment down below, and let’s all grow together.