Qoob’s Guide To Marketing Meetings

Meetings can be scary. Board meetings even more so. You may dread facing your seniors with a presentation of your job and its results, some of which you may not have control over, with the fear of having to explain yourself to those who don’t fully understand what you do – only the numbers you create.

Honestly, though? It’s not that bad, it never is.

I’ve put together a guide to help you shape how you run through your marketing meetings – covering performance, insights, opportunities and next steps. This has been put together with over a decade of experience of meetings, anxiety and all, and covers what I’ve found works best to get buy-in from those involved and to keep things positive between everyone.

Here’s a brief outline of what I’ve run through in this piece:

1. This guide is structured into three sections – Before, During and After the meeting
2. I’m the Head of Paid Media so a lot of my examples will lean towards paid ads – but I strongly believe the points are just as valid for other members of the digital marketing landscape
3. The guide is written with the marketer, or presenter, in mind but I feel that it will be of benefit to the recipients at C-Suite/board level too, to get everyone on the same page
4. There’ll be a temptation to read this once and never again – why not bookmark it and refer back for your next meeting? It could help!

Before You Begin

Know Your Audience

You’re the expert in your marketing role and your board/team, experts in their roles and likely the business overall, will be looking for you to effectively translate the numbers and lines into actionable insights.

How you say it is crucial, though. You’re presenting the data to people in different areas of the business, with different skillsets and backgrounds – bridging the gap between digital marketing data and the business’ operations is a key part of your role. One action that always helped me in this instance is asking the team to clarify their level of understanding before I begin.

For example, you may have someone who has used Google Analytics in a previous role, someone who has a very rough idea of how “the Google AdWords” works and someone who is new to digital marketing entirely. 

In this instance, diving into technical explanations and metrics may lose two thirds of the room. By providing a simple summary (in leyman’s terms), you can make sure all three members have an understanding of your performance, and then you can build upon the detail for the other members of the team if needed – all whilst ensuring that all three people leave the meeting with value.

Take a scenario where you’ve increased your ad spend by £1000 a month and reduced your Target ROAS bids, which in turn has led to a 20% increase in revenue. You can say this in various ways depending on your audience:

1. “Last month we spent more on Google Ads to allow our ads to be seen by more people searching for our products, which led to a 20% increase in online revenue.”
2. “Last month we increased our budgets on Google Ads so that our best-performing campaigns could reach more people searching for our products. We also adjusted our bidding to be more aggressive to make sure we’re in front of the right audience at the right time – both changes allowed us to increase online revenue by 20%.”
3. “Last month we increased our best performing Performance Max campaign budgets from £2000 to £3000 a month which meant they were no longer limited by budget. Additionally we reduced our ROAS Target from 800% to 700% to bid more aggressively – whilst this slightly increased our cost per sale, it increased our revenue by 20% and captured more of the market share.”

Share Your Goals

Make sure everyone is on the same page with the goals! Reiterate it before the meeting if you have to, reference it on your reports, slides, spreadsheets. 

The last thing you need is a situation where conversations are derailed over minor metrics like click-through rate when your goal is to grow online sales. By all means have an appreciation of the metrics and their performance, but only let your defined KPIs be the barometer of success/failure.

Key summaries could include:

• “Our target for the year is to reach £1.5m online revenue, up from £1.2m in 2024, and our marketing activity is set up to drive online sales”
• “Last month’s target was to achieve 250 leads at an average cost per lead of £20, which we achieved by…”

During The Meeting

Use Visuals

Aside from being a great way to present years’ worth of data at a glance, it can open up discussion in your meeting. One person may see the data differently to others, key questions may arise that you hadn’t even thought about, and it could lead to new ideas and opportunities in future.

The great thing about using charts and graphs is that you’ll have the raw data behind it as well, which you can lean on for additional detail if needed. How much you show in the meeting is up to you, I usually overprepare with data (or keep ongoing trackers of performance) so I can verbally add value/insights as I go along.

Don’t just wait to be told what’s on the chart or table whilst sitting in silence – Ask questions! Share your views! It’ll also show the marketer that you’re engaged, which will go a long way towards shaping the discussion.

Provide Comparisons

Don’t just show a single month in isolation when providing a report – context is key! You may have a target for the month to measure performance against, but aside from that how do you know if things have gotten better or worse? What impact have your changes made? How are you faring towards your wider goals for the year?

This is even more important if you’re in a seasonal industry. If your sales get a huge boost every Black Friday, then only comparing November 2025 to October 2025 could be misleading. Sales will be higher, but it’s a different window! How does it compare to your last 2,3,4 Black Fridays?

For monthly reports, your go-to comparisons and timeframes could be:

• This month vs last month
• This month vs the same period last month
• This year to date/last 12 months year on year

You may also have longer term tables/graphs to cover performance by month year over year (perhaps for 2-4 years!) which will show you a clearer picture of your performance over time. If you don’t have that yet, the best time to start is now – the suggested comparisons above should help you in the meantime to ensure you and your board are seeing the bigger picture.

Be Transparent

The best meetings you can possibly have are collaborative sessions where everyone is open and adding value from each corner of the business. This is important when times are good, and often responsible for the good times!

However, there’s no point avoiding it – there will be bad weeks, bad months and even bad years in terms of performance. The reasons could be plentiful, both internal and external, but the key is to be open and face them head on as a team.

From the marketer’s side, your insights could include:

• Using tools like Auction Insights in Google Ads to see how competitor visibility is changing in ads – are competitors pushing more aggressively and has that affected your performance?
• If you’re running Shopping Feeds in ads, what is your stock like? Are your bestsellers available?

This transparency doesn’t just apply to marketers, either. If the board or other members of the team have insights to provide from their side of the business, then this is a great time to share. 

For example, if your marketer is running Google Ads designed to generate web leads for your business that aren’t turning into closed sales, then performance may look poor and no one may understand why. However, as Sales Director, you know that your sales team has been hit with illness and holidays, meaning you haven’t been able to close the sales, then suddenly everything makes sense for all involved.

There are also unfortunate times where performance has been affected by human error – whether it’s a change that has had a negative impact, an issue that hasn’t been spotted in time or something else entirely. If you’ve made a mistake, congratulations, you’re human! You’ll make plenty more in your lifetime, and so will the people you’re presenting to. The key is to own it, learn from it and put measures in place to prevent, or at least reduce, the risk of it happening again in future.

Opportunities

Performance meetings and reports have a habit of focusing on what’s happened, but be sure to take time to discuss the opportunities for the future too. Apologies in advance – there are a lot of questions in this section for you to consider!

What’s Working Well?

You can start by assessing what’s working and if you can push this further – are your best performing campaigns limited by budgets? Remember, increased ad spend isn’t just extra cost when used correctly – it can generate more sales, new customers (with lifetime value) and grow your brand visibility online.

When requesting more budget, be sure to be specific – use Performance Planners, forecasting tools and more to show the scope of the opportunity. Be clear, as much as you can, what the business can expect in terms of results for their investment and how it helps everyone reach the agreed goals for the year.

Show your board what is possible, and then ask what is available in terms of budget to support you – it could help shape the conversation in a more positive way!

What Isn’t Working Well?

Similarly, you can also look at what isn’t working. Is there a clear reason for it? Does one campaign work better on certain channels than others? Is there benefit in continuing to spend on a campaign that isn’t generating results? Could this budget be reinvested into better performing campaigns to help you meet your overall goals? Don’t be afraid to ask the difficult questions and avoid accepting the status quo.

What New Ideas Could You Try?

Don’t just limit yourself to your current marketing channels, either. If you’ve reached the limit of what your Google Ads sales campaigns can do, could you try more upper-funnel activity like Demand-Gen/branding? Or could you try other platforms like Facebook Ads, Microsoft Ads and TikTok Ads to reach new audiences?

Be sure to look beyond your initial marketing actions and into the wider process. You have acquired a new customer, are you requesting reviews to grow brand trust, helping to improve conversion rates and attract new first-time customers? Are you using email marketing to re-engage these customers and cross-sell/upsell more to increase their lifetime value?

What’s Realistic?

This will underpin all of the above points and is closely associated with knowing your audience and being transparent. You need to be clear with all involved as to what is achievable within the constraints of the tools, channels and platforms you’re working with.

To give specific examples, members of your board may not know:

• What monthly search volumes are like for your target keywords
• What the average cost per click figures are for your target keywords
• What target audiences are available for you to use in your ad campaigns

…all of which will inform what can and can’t be done on the ad platform. 

It may be that your board would like web leads generated at a £3 cost per lead, but you know that ad clicks cost £3 on average in your sector – a 100% conversion rate is wildly unrealistic. If your current conversion rate is 20%, your realistic cost per lead could be around £15.

If this cost per lead is considered too high in isolation, then look beyond the lead generation stage to the final result:

• How can you improve the lead to sale conversion rate? This can reduce the overall cost per sale without sacrificing the bids needed to generate the lead in the first place.
• How can you drive higher value leads? Can you adjust your targeting? Cost per lead may stay the same, or increase slightly, but if the value of the final sale is higher because of the person you are targeting, more often than not this will help with your overall goals.

Sharing knowledge and educating all involved will help the discussion to be as productive as it can be, will temper expectations and ensure that your next steps are beneficial to the business.

After The Meeting

Don’t just let the meeting end and fade away. Share a copy of your slides, presentations, reports with all involved. In addition to this, provide a list of agreed actions, assignees and dates stemming from your discussions in the meeting.

Finally, make sure the next meeting is booked in – keep the momentum going and hold each other accountable.

Summary

If you’ve made it this far, I salute you and hope this guide was as helpful to read as it was for me to write. There’s nothing earth-shattering in the suggestions listed above, and they can be summarised as:

1. Know your audience and make sure your meeting, presentation or report is shaped in a way that can be understood by all members of the team
2. Be open, honest and encourage discussion/knowledge sharing
3. Don’t get lost in the small details – tie everything back to your overall goals
4. Give the future as much attention as the past – you have your learnings, now what are you going to do about them?

If you’d like a second opinion on your current marketing approach, give us a shout and we’ll be glad to help!