The Weekly Marketing Meeting That Works

The weekly marketing meeting is where good intentions go to be discussed again.

It runs an hour, everyone reports on what they did, nothing is decided, and the same items appear next week.

Thirty minutes, three questions

What went out last week. The actual list. Posts, emails, ads, pages, videos.

What is going out this week. The actual list, with a name against each item and a day.

What is stuck, and who unsticks it. Not a discussion of the problem. A name and a date.

That is the meeting. If it takes longer than thirty minutes, something in it is not a meeting item.

Why it works

The first question makes output visible every week. Nothing exposes a stalled marketing effort faster than saying out loud, seven weeks running, that two things went out.

Most marketing failure is a volume problem wearing a strategy costume, and a weekly count is the cheapest way to see it.

The second question turns intentions into assignments. "We should do a case study" survives for months as a good idea. "Sam, case study draft, Thursday" either happens or visibly does not.

The third question is where the meeting earns its time. Most marketing work stalls waiting on one thing: a photo, an approval, a login, a decision from the owner. Those blockers sit for weeks because nobody names them.

What does not belong in it

Reviewing creative. Feedback on a draft is not a group activity. It happens between the person who made it and the person who approves it, in writing, before the meeting.

Strategy. The weekly is for execution. Strategy is the quarterly review, and mixing them means you do neither.

Reporting. Numbers are read before the meeting, not presented in it. If someone has to walk the room through a dashboard, the dashboard is wrong.

Brainstorming. Ideas are fun and they expand to fill the hour. Keep a list, deal with it separately.

The one artefact

A single page that carries over week to week.

Shipped last week. Shipping this week, with owner and day. Blocked, with owner and date.

Same page every time, updated in the meeting, visible to everyone. No slides.

If someone cannot see what they own by looking at one page, you have a tracking problem, not a meeting problem.

Who is in it

The people doing the work and the person who can approve things.

That second one matters. A meeting where every decision has to be taken away and confirmed by someone who was not there is a meeting that generates follow-ups instead of decisions.

Keep it small. Marketing meetings expand to whoever is free, and every extra person adds five minutes and removes some candour.

Same day, same time, never cancelled

The cadence is doing most of the work.

A weekly that happens only when things are calm stops happening in exactly the periods when output slips, which is when you need it.

Twenty minutes on a busy week is fine. Skipping it is not, because the skipped week is always the one where three things quietly stopped.

The test after a month

Look at the output count for the last four weeks against the four before you started.

If it has not moved, the meeting is a status update and you should change it or stop it.

If it has, that is the whole return, and it came from thirty minutes a week of making the work visible.