As a digital advertising and marketing agency, we have many meetings every day. Such meetings are intended either internally or with clients. For internal company meetings, we do a form of stand-up meetings that last no longer than 30 minutes. It is because we are most afraid of long and inconclusive meets.
Recently, Google launched a very noteworthy feature. The platform added detailed analyses and insights about meetings in Google Calendar. The data tells you how much time you spend in meetings every day, how many people and who you have meetings with, and so on. It is a function that is like our phone’s Calendar app.
Most business leaders and marketers have to engage in many meetings. But are they viewing their weekly or monthly meetings’ summary? It is important to do so. It will help them know if the time spent in meetings is effective. It can also help them check if the results are proportional to the meetings’ length.
Is the Goal Always to Get More Likes?
This is the typical workday of many people in Hong Kong. Daily meeting schedules keep them busy to target a sense of fulfillment. But they often and ultimately fail to achieve the goals set out for these meetings.
Before entering the meeting room, all participants need to think about what they want to achieve at the end of the discussion. The same goes when formulating a marketing plan. The goals should be articulated first. This is not a straightforward challenge. Most of our clients’ goals are to increase “Likes” and sales. In most cases, they want both.
At this point, apart from consoling ourselves that “the customer is always right,” we take the time to explain to the client the relative weight of each goal. If they have more than one goal, we ask them to rank the goals in terms of priority. These well-articulated goals can greatly in the planning phase.
Goals Other Than Getting More Likes
Generally speaking, there are other marketing goals beyond getting more likes and sales. These fall under three categories:
- Awareness and Exposure. This is to have more people pay attention to the brand’s products or services.
- Engagement. This refers to the users’ participation on social media through likes, comments, and shares.
- Conversion. This could be in the form of clicking a link to access an online store, filling in customer information, purchasing a product, etc.
The third marketing goal requires a carefully designed user end-to-end conversion process. This is to ensure that the data obtained in the process are meaningful in achieving these goals. Thus, if there is more than one goal, it is more practical to distinguish which takes priority and work toward them on stage.
Focusing on Execution But Ignoring Goal Setting
It is undoubtedly true that the devil is in the details. Only a well-executed project can succeed. However, if a marketing campaign begins with the wrong goals, no matter how well you execute a plan, it will only speed up the process of failing.
It is highly possible to embark on small projects with small investments. The mentality of executing an idea quickly is to fail and learn fast through the process. However, for many medium- and large-scale projects, it is wishful to think that focusing only on the execution and its details – when there is a lack of articulated goals – can create miracles.
Some businesses spend a lot of time fine-tuning the design of advertisements, targeting interests, and so on. Optimizing advertising isn’t important, but that it is not cost-effective to spend too much time on them, compared to spending time on other marketing projects and content. Everyone only has 24 hours in a day. Time is an asset to everyone. As a busy marketer, how are you making use of this limited asset that once spent can’t be earned back?
Source: https://berniewong.net/calculating-the-roi-of-marketing-meetings/
