In part one of this series, we established that your sales team is the fuel that should help drive your content marketing efforts. We also shared a few quick tips on making sure they understand their role in the process and how content marketing will help shorten sales cycles, grow your pipeline, and educate prospects.
Whether you have one salesperson a small team, or a larger group to pull from, the next step in the process is setting up a regular team meeting for content marketing. Holding regular team meetings will keep content ideas and topics rolling, ensure the team is in full alignment and help everyone understand what’s working (and what’s not).
Let’s get started with strategy #2 – from start to finish, how to run the perfect content marketing meeting everyone will love.
Before we jump into the framework and how to structure the ideal agenda, let’s address the five things we want to avoid in our content marketing meetings:
- Wasting time
- Going off-topic
- Pointing fingers
- Showing up unprepared
- Not discussing goals and metrics
The best way to avoid these types of roadblocks and maximize everyone’s time is to set the stage with the right meeting framework.
The Perfect Content Marketing Meeting Framework
The goal of this meeting is to provide the marketing team with ideas for what they should be writing, creating, and producing that will be meaningful to prospects and customers.
The marketing team should start by sending an agenda to the sales team two days in advance, and a meeting reminder one day in advance with what to come prepared with for the meeting.
Here is a sample agenda and framework for your meeting.
- Intro and recap – Marketing team leader (5 minutes)
5-minute kickoff for marketing to share why you’re there, how content marketing works and what you’ve produced since the last meeting. - Problem – Solution Discussion – Marketing and sales (10 minutes)
This is where everyone on the team can contribute. Take ten minutes and discuss a customer problem or security challenge they are experiencing with a solution you can deliver.
Example: Customer problem – A medical office needs to know who fobbed in and out of a door – Our solution – by integrating a Cloud-based Access Control System we can deliver a solution that helps medical centers track access and manage it remotely.
NOTE: Outside of this meeting, the marketing team will start to produce the topic ideas, social posts, blog articles and resources from this discussion. - Metrics that matter – Marketing team leader (5 minutes)
Take five minutes and share metrics that matter with the team. Refer to our three-part series on metrics for ideas on what to bring to your content marketing meeting – Lead quality, sales, user behavior.
The marketing team should have this prepared in advance. - Wins – Marketing team leader and sales (5 minutes)
Again, go around the room and ask specifically, do we have any wins to share about our content marketing efforts? Did we generate leads, subscribers, or sales in the past two weeks? Has the sales team or leadership team gotten feedback or reactions from social posts, blogs, or customer resources? Did the sales team use any of the content and share with prospects or customers? Come up whatever you feel are wins and make this a regular part of the meeting. - Actions and next steps – Marketing team leader (5 minutes)
Finish with a good set of action items and next steps for each person to complete ahead of the next meeting. For the marketing team, it might be a series of posts, two blogs and a resource to work on. You’ll show these at the next meeting during your recap. For sales, it might be additional questions customers have related to the problem-solution discussion part of your meeting.
Keys to success
- Avoid Monday and Friday meetings.
- Virtual attendance is fine, but in-person is ideal.
- Schedule meetings two times a month.
- Keep a timer so you stay on track for the 30 minutes.
- Send a meeting debrief to all who attended with a quick summary of actions and next steps for what you will be creating or working on.
In our final article in this series, we’ll share strategy #3 – organizing and scheduling content with the ultimate Content Calendar.
