Once a month, the head of marketing opens a forty-slide deck in front of the leadership team. People comment on the charts, someone asks why traffic dipped in August, the meeting overruns, and a month later it all starts again with nobody quite sure what was decided last time. It is a common scene in marketing committees, and it is nobody's fault: the format is what doesn't work.
If there is one lesson I take from my client work, it is this: a monthly report that goes out on its own and a committee that makes decisions are worth more than a dashboard nobody reads. I don't claim to have found the formula. I share the agenda I suggest, the metrics I would keep, and a few rules I first wrote for my content machines, which turn out to fit a meeting with leadership surprisingly well.
01What a marketing committee is for, and what it is not for
To me, a marketing committee does three things. It checks whether the plan is moving. It decides what changes. It says who does what before the next one. If it produces none of those, it is a dashboard read out loud, and an email would have done.
The most accurate description I know does not come from marketing but from Scrum. The Scrum Guide describes the Sprint Review as the moment to inspect the outcome of the work and decide on future adaptations. It adds that it is a working session the team should avoid limiting to a presentation, and that it should never be treated as a gate. I take that idea as it is: the committee is not where marketing comes to ask for permission, it is where leadership and marketing adjust together.
What it is not for: rewriting the strategy every month, proofreading every post, or judging a campaign on three weeks of data.
02Preparing: the numbers arrive on their own, before the meeting
The rule I care about most: nobody should discover a number during the committee. If leadership sees the chart for the first time on screen, the meeting is spent commenting on it, and there is no time left to decide anything.
That is why I automate the send-out rather than relying on someone to export the figures. A Looker Studio report (Data Studio in Google's current documentation) can be emailed automatically as a PDF with a link to the full report, at the frequency you choose and to up to 50 recipients, according to the Google Cloud documentation. Everyone reads it in their own time a few days before. I described how I build this kind of send-out in my note on automated SEO reporting.
I also suggest preparing one page before each committee, no more. It covers what was decided last month and what came of it, the two or three gaps worth discussing, and the decisions you need to get. Arriving with a clear idea of what you have come for changes the tone of the meeting.
03A five-part agenda
Here is the agenda I suggest. It fits into an hour if the numbers have been read beforehand. The most useful thing is that it stays the same from one month to the next: everyone knows where they are in the meeting.
1. Last month's decisions (10 minutes)
Go back through the list of decisions from the previous meeting, one by one. Done, not done, dropped and why. It is the least pleasant part and the most useful, because it shows whether the committee has any real effect.
2. Results against the plan (15 minutes)
No full tour of every channel. Look at the handful of metrics set at the start, compared with the target, and with the same month last year when the business is seasonal.
3. Gaps worth discussing (15 minutes)
Two or three topics at most, chosen before the meeting. A workstream running late, a drop nobody understands, an opportunity. For each one: what we see, what we think, what we propose.
4. Decisions (15 minutes)
Make the call. Each decision is written down with a name and a date. If a question cannot be settled for lack of information, the decision is who will go and find that information.
5. The record (5 minutes)
Read the list of decisions out loud before closing. The record goes out the same day. It is what opens the next committee.
04Which metrics to show the leadership team
Show few metrics, and keep the same ones. Changing dashboards every three months makes it impossible to see a trend.
The outcome that matters is usually an enquiry, a sign-up or a sale, not the number of visits. In GA4, these are actions you mark as key events. One practical detail worth knowing: according to Google Analytics Help, marking only applies to data from that point on, and historical data is not changed. If you decide in committee to track a new action, you will have nothing to compare it with for several weeks. Better to say so straight away.
Alongside the outcome, I would keep one or two metrics that come before it, such as organic traffic or average position in Google. You then need to explain what that number measures. Search Console Help defines it as the average position of the site's topmost result. So it is not where each page sits, and the average also moves when the set of queries the site appears for changes. A leadership team that doesn't know this can be pleased or worried for the wrong reasons.
The third block, often the one people look at most, is the progress of the plan's workstreams: done, in progress, blocked.
05What I borrow from my content machines
I build machines that write, check and publish articles, for this blog and for Moonworkers, my own company. Three rules from those machines help me directly when running a committee.
A calendar that says where things stand
Each topic has a line in a versioned file, with a status: to do, in progress, published, on hold. "On hold" means one thing only: a human decision is needed, and the machine leaves it alone. I keep the workstreams of a marketing plan the same way. One line per workstream, a status, a name. Whatever is "on hold" becomes, almost word for word, the agenda for the decisions part.
Red, amber, green, and amber gets written down
Before publication, my articles go through a three-level check. Red blocks. Amber can go through, but only with a written justification, which I read afterwards. I described it in my note on the content machine and human review. In committee, I sort gaps the same way. If we decide to let an amber workstream slide, we write down why. Without that, amber quietly becomes green, and we rediscover it three months later.
Comments become rules
When a reviewer keeps coming back to the same thing in my articles, I stop fixing it by hand: I turn it into a written rule that the tool checks. A committee benefits from doing the same. If leadership asks the same question every month (where does this drop come from, what does this number measure), the answer goes into the automated report, and the question disappears from the meeting.
06When the committee doesn't work
This approach has limits, so let me be clear about them.
It assumes there is a plan. Without a diagnosis or written priorities, the committee has nothing to follow and drifts into a discussion of ideas. In that case it is better to pause the committees for two months and build the plan first.
It also assumes the person who decides is in the room. A committee where leadership sends a representative produces decisions that will be reopened later, and everyone can feel it.
Finally, an hour a month does not replace the work between meetings. A committee can be very well run while the workstreams go nowhere, because nobody is carrying them day to day. It does not make up for that. It only makes it visible sooner. And a badly built automated report will send, every month without fail, numbers nobody understands: automation is only as good as the choice of metrics.
07Where to start next month
If you already have a monthly marketing meeting, you don't need to change everything. I would start with three moves, in this order:
- Send the numbers three days before, automatically if you can.
- Open the meeting with last month's decisions.
- Close by reading back the list of decisions, with a name and a date for each.
After two or three meetings, you will know whether the committee is there to decide. If you don't have a plan to follow yet, that is where I start on a project, with a diagnosis of a few days. You can see how I work on the services page. If this rings a bell, we can talk about it.