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As your business grows, you face more obstacles, challenges, opportunities, and projects in general. It’s a good and natural part of scaling an organization, but how do you determine your priorities? Which initiatives should you execute on first, and which challenges should you address right away?
Enter the SWOT analysis, a framework that can help you develop a roadmap for moving forward with your business, maximizing opportunities and minimizing roadblocks along the way. 

While it may seems simple on the surface, a SWOT analysis allows you to make unbiased evaluations on: 

Your business or brand
Market positioning
A new project or initiative
A specific campaign or channel

Practically anything that requires strategic planning, internal or external, can have the SWOT framework applied to it, helping you avoid unnecessary errors down the road from lack of insight. 
Importance of SWOT Analysis
You’ve noticed by now that SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threads. The framework seems simple enough that you’d be tempted to forego doing using it at all, relying instead on your intuition to take these things into account. 
But you shouldn’t. Doing a SWOT analysis is important because: 

It gives you the chance to worry and to dream. Adding the SWOT analysis as an important step in your strategic process, you’re giving yourself the space to dream, evaluate, and worry before taking action. Your insights in this regard then turn into assets as you create the roadmap for your project or initiative.

It forces you to define your variables. Instead of diving head first into the planning and execution, you’re taking inventory of all your assets and roadblocks. These can help you create a more specific and effective roadmap.

It allows you to think more critically and account for mitigating factors. As you identify weaknesses and threats, you’re better enabled to account for them in your roadmap, improving your chances for success.

It helps you keep a written account. As your organization grows and changes, you’ll be able to strike things off your old SWOTs and add new things as the industry changes. It can be illuminating to look back to where you started as you look ahead at what’s to come.

Here, we’ll tackle how to best do a SWOT analysis, provide you with a SWOT analysis template, and conduct SWOT analyses on major brands Apple and Starbucks. When you’re done reading, you’ll have all the inspiration and tactical advice you need to tackle a SWOT analysis for yourself.
How Do You Write a Good SWOT Analysis?
There are several steps you’ll want to take when evaluating your business and conducting a strategic SWOT analysis.
1. Download HubSpot’s SWOT Analysis Template.
There’s no need to start from scratch for your analysis. Here, I’ve created a sample using a free, editable template — feel free to use the model yourself, or create your own as it suits your needs.

Download a free, editable SWOT analysis template.
2. Arrange each section into a table with four quadrants.
Whether you use the template above as a model or create your own to suit your needs, it can be helpful to start in table format to visualize your SWOT analysis. This can be done by arranging each of the four sections into separate quadrants.
3. Identify your objective.
Before you start writing things down, you’ll need to figure out what you’re evaluating with your SWOT analysis. Be specific with what you want to analyze. Otherwise, your SWOT analysis may end up being too broad, and you’ll get analysis paralysis as you are making your evaluations.
If you’re creating a social media program, you’ll want to conduct an analysis to inform your content creation strategy. If you’re launching a new product, you’ll want to understand its potential positioning in the space. If you’re considering a brand re-design, you’ll want to consider existing and future brand conceptions. 
All of these are examples of good reasons to conduct a SWOT analysis. By identifying your objective, you’ll be able tailor your evaluation to get more actionable insights.
3. Identify your strengths.
“Strengths” refers to what you are currently doing well. Think about the factors that are going in your favor as well as the things you offer that your competitors just can’t beat.
For example, let’s say you want to use a SWOT analysis to evaluate your new social media strategy.
If you’re looking at a new social media program, perhaps you want to evaluate how your brand is perceived by the public — is it easily recognizable and well-known? Even if it’s not popular with a widespread group, is it well-received by a specific audience in particular?
Next, think about your process: is it effective or innovative? Is there good communication between your marketing and sales to ensure both departments use similar vocabulary when discussing your product?
Finally, evaluate your social media message, and in particular, how it differs from the rest of the industry. I’m willing to bet you can make a lengthy list of some major strengths of your social media strategy over your competitors, so try to dive into your strengths from there.
4. Identify your weaknesses.
Similarly to your strengths, what are the roadblocks hindering you from reaching your goals? What do your competitors offer that continue to be a thorn in your side. This section isn’t about being a Negative Nancy. Rather, it’s critical to foresee any potential obstacles that could mitigate your success.
When identifying weaknesses, consider what areas of your business are the least profitable, where you lack certain resources, or what costs you the most time and money. Take input from employees in different departments, as they’ll likely see weaknesses you hadn’t considered.
If you’re examining a new social media strategy, you might start by asking yourself these questions: First, if I were a consumer, what would prevent me from buying this product, or engaging with this business? What would make me click away from the screen?
Second, what do I foresee as the biggest hinderance to my employees’ productivity, or their ability to get the job done efficiently? What derails their social media efforts?
5. Consider your opportunities.
This is your chance to dream big. What are some opportunities for your social media strategy you hope, but don’t necessarily expect, to reach?
For instance, maybe you’re hoping your Facebook ads will attract a new, larger demographic. Maybe you’re hoping your YouTube video gets 10,000 views, and increases sales by 10%.
Whatever the case, it’s important to include potential opportunities in your SWOT analysis. Ask yourself these questions: What technologies do I want my business to use to make it more effective? What new target audience do I want to reach? How can the business stand out more in the current industry? Is there something our customers complain about that we could fix with our social media strategy?
The opportunities category goes hand-in-hand with the weaknesses category. Once you’ve made a list of weaknesses, it should be easy to create a list of potential opportunities that could arise if you eliminate your weaknesses.
6. Contemplate your threats.
It’s likely, especially if you’re prone to worrying, you already have a good list of threats in your head.
If not, gather your employees and brainstorm: What obstacles might prevent us from reaching our social media goals? What’s going on in the industry, or with our competitors, that might mitigate our success? Is there new technology out there that could conflict with our product?
Writing down your threats helps you evaluate them objectively. For instance, maybe you list your threats in terms of least and most likely to occur, and divide and conquer each. If one of your biggest threats is your competitor’s popular Instagram account, you could work with your marketing department to create content that showcases your product’s unique features.
SWOT Analysis Examples
The template above helps get you started on your own SWOT analysis.
But, if you’re anything like me, it’s not enough to see a template. To fully understand a concept, you need to see how it plays out in the real world.
These SWOT examples are not exhaustive, and I’m sure you could add some yourself, but hopefully, it’s enough to inspire you as you do your own SWOT analysis.
Apple’s SWOT analysis
Here’s how we’d conduct a SWOT analysis on Apple.

Strengths
First off, strengths. While Apple has many strengths, let’s identify the top three:

Brand recognition
High prices
Innovative products

Apple’s brand is undeniably valuable, and their business is considered the most valuable in the world. Since it’s easily recognized, Apple can produce new products and almost ensure a certain degree of success by virtue of the brand name itself.
This degree of recognition lends itself to Apple’s ability to sell products. For instance, in 2019, Apple sold 72.9 million iPhones compared to 70 million Galaxy phones by Samsung. This is despite the price disparity between the two (the flagship Galaxy phone is $100 cheaper). Often, people don’t care about price as much as they care about brand recognition.
Lastly, their innovative products: Apple didn’t earn its reputation for nothing. They create highly innovative products, which are often at the forefront of the industry.
Weaknesses
Next, let’s look at three of Apple’s weaknesses.

High prices
Closed ecosystem
Lack of experimentation

While the high prices don’t deter Apple’s middle and high class customer-base, they do hinder Apple’s ability to reach a lower-class demographic.
Apple also suffers from its own exclusivity. Apple controls all its services and products in-house, and while many customers become loyal brand advocates for this reason, it means all burdens fall on Apple employees.
Ultimately, Apple’s tight control over who distributes their products limit their market reach.
Lastly, Apple is held to a high standard when it comes to creating and distributing products. Apple’s brand carries a high level of prestige, but that level of recognition inhibits Apple from taking risks and experimenting freely with new products that could fail.
Opportunities
Now, let’s take a look at opportunities for Apple.
It’s easy to recognize opportunities for improvement, once you consider Apple’s weaknesses. Here’s a list of three we came up with:

Expand distribution options
Create new product lines
Technological advancement

One of Apple’s biggest weaknesses is its distribution network, which, in the name of exclusivity, remains relatively small. If Apple expanded its network and enabled third-party businesses to sell its products, it could reach more people globally, while alleviating some of the stress currently put on in-house employees.
There are also plenty of opportunities for Apple to create new products. Apple could consider creating more affordable products to reach a larger demographic, or spreading out into new industries — Apple self-driving cars, perhaps?
Finally, Apple could continue advancing its products’ technology. Apple can take existing products and refine them, ensuring each product offers as many unique features as possible.
Threats
Finally, let’s look at threats to Apple.
Believe it or not, they do exist.
Here are three of Apple’s biggest threats:

Tough competition
Lawsuits
International issues

Apple isn’t the only innovative tech company out there, and it continues to face tough competition from Samsung, Google, and other major forces. Many of Apple’s weaknesses hinder Apple’s ability to compete with the tech corporations that have more freedom to experiment, or that don’t operate in a closed ecosystem.
A second threat to Apple is lawsuits. Apple has faced a bunch of lawsuits, particularly between Apple and Samsung, and so far it has only won one case. These lawsuits interfere with Apple’s reputable image, and could steer some customers to purchasing elsewhere.
Finally, Apple needs to improve its reach internationally. It isn’t number one in China, and doesn’t have a very positive relationship with the Chinese government. Then, in India, which has one of the largest consumer markets in the world, Apple’s market share is low, and the company has trouble bringing stores to India’s market.
If Apple can’t compete globally the way Samsung or Google can, it risks falling behind in the industry.
Starbucks SWOT Analysis
Now that we’ve explored the nuances involved with a SWOT analysis, let’s fill out a SWOT template using Starbucks as an example.
Here’s how we’d fill out a SWOT template, if we were Starbucks:

Download this Template for Free

Dine-In Thai Restaurant SWOT Analysis
Some small-business marketers may have difficulty relating to the SWOT’s of big brands like Apple and Starbucks, so here’s an example of how a restaurant might visualize each element:

While a Thai or any other restaurant might not be as worried about high-level lawsuits like Apple, the small business might be more worried about competitors or disruptors that might enter the playing field. 
Local Boutique SWOT Analysis
In another small-business example, a local boutique might be well known in its neighborhood, but it also might take time to build an online presence or get its products in an online store. Because of this, some of its strengths and opportunities might relate to physical factors while weaknesses and threats might relate to online situations.

When to Use a SWOT Analysis
Ultimately, a SWOT analysis can measure and tackle both big and small challenges, and opportunities, and both big and little strengths and weaknesses.
While the examples above focus on businesses in general, you can also use a SWOT analysis to evaluate and predict how a singular product will play out in the market.
Hopefully, our SWOT template will supplement your market research and business analysis, and provide fair insights into how to optimize your products for bigger payoffs, and less hurdles.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Ever wake up on the wrong side of the bed?
Of course you have. We all have.
Ever wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and then have to be cheery? Like, interact in social media? Write an engaging blog post? Put together a lovable email marketing campaign?
Ugh. Those are the times you wish you could shut out the world, or at least channel a little of your inner snark. Well, the good news is you can do that once in a while, and your marketing results may even thank you for it! Sometimes, it’s good to embrace a little bit of the negative. (Trust me — this will all make sense in a second.)
So, here we go … if you ever wake up wanting to shut out the world, here’s how you can take it out (positively!) in your marketing.

Keep in mind, however, that negative marketing shouldn’t be deployed simply because you want to be cranky. Instead, it should be implemented strategically with one (or more) of these goals in mind: 

Empathizing with customer struggles 
Differentiating your brand with that of competitors, especially those who may not be willing to take a stand or acknowledge certain truths in the industry
Cutting through the noise of “neutral” messaging that might not be resonating

If you’re successful, the end result causes you to stick in your audience’s mind, which gives you the bandwidth to prove your brand as a superior alternative.
How to Be Negative in Your Marketing
So how do you implement this tactic successfully? Here are some opportunities to be “more negative” in your marketing.
1. Create negative, or exclusionary, personas.
Let’s start with something a little bit easier to swallow than just being a total grumpy pants: exclusionary personas. Exclusionary personas, sometimes also referred to as negative personas, are kind of like the opposite of buyer personas — they’re the personas of the people you do not want to target in your marketing.
This is about more than just recognizing that not everyone in the world is a potential future customer — it’s about recognizing that your marketing attracts certain types of people who totally clog up your funnel, waste your sales team’s time, and will never become customers.
Why won’t they ever become a customer? Could be a lot of things — they don’t have the budget, or they’re just fans of your content or social media presence. Or maybe they do become customers, but they cost you a ton of money; for instance, they could have a high acquisition cost or a high propensity to churn.
In this case, it behooves you to identify who these folks are so you can ensure you either 1) stop creating content that draws in the wrong people, or 2) let them keep reading and engaging with your content to help you spread your reach, but keep them from getting rotated to sales reps using methods like assigning them a low lead score.
2. Leverage a little exclusivity.
This is the VIP, red-carpet tactic we all know and love (or love to hate). When you tell someone they can’t have something or what they want is scarce, it often makes them want it more. You know, the whole “playing hard to get” thing.
This just so happens to be a common sales tactic, but marketers can use it, too. Tell prospects they can have an offer … but only for a limited time. Or only for the first 10 that respond in social media. Heck, you don’t even always have to tell them what it is.
This tactic is particularly popular with savvy ecommerce shops, too — ModCloth, for instance, frequently sends me emails letting me know that an item I like is so popular, it’s almost out of stock. “Oh no! Everyone else is snagging it! I have to get it before I’m left out!”
The moral of the story? Leave people out once in a while. If everyone gets something, it’s not as special. And when you go VIP, the ones who do get it feel uber-special. (There… we just turned a negative into a positive. See?)
3. Craft “negative” headlines and titles.
I don’t know what this says about human nature, but there’s an undeniable correlation between page views and negativity. Consider some of these titles you might find on a news site like CNN:

What you get wrong about BBQ
Could our favorite flavorings be damaging our DNA?
Beware the parental overshare

These are about clicks. No question about it. We all know the news has gone the negative route for years, and — for better or worse — they do it because it is effective at grabbing attention.
Now, you absolutely shouldn’t throw out some inflammatory headline just to get clicks — if you’re going to get negative with your titles, you have to back it up with some solid content that actually merits that title of yours. Here are a few examples that worked out extremely well for us:

15 Things People Absolutely Hate About Your Website
10 Cliché Marketing Taglines We Should All Stop Using
13 Hilarious Examples of Truly Awful Stock Photography
17 Sales Closing Mistakes That’ll Stop a Deal in Its Tracks

4. Create a bond over a shared negative experience — but don’t dwell.
Alright, now we’re getting warmed up! So you’re throwing out some negative titles, but have you considered drawing that negativity into your content? When you draw on a negative situation in your content — particularly right in the beginning — it can actually help reader retention and engagement. Some marketers are afraid to stir up negative feelings in their reader, but it can actually create a shared experience and tap into a level of emotion that some may not expect to get while reading marketing content, particularly if you’re a B2B marketer.
I mean, that’s why I started this post the way I did — getting up on the wrong side of the bed is an experience everyone I know can relate to. And sometimes, it’s easier to form a bond with someone over a shared negative experience than something warm and fuzzy.
But be forewarned — once you have a bond with the reader based on a shared negative experience, it’s crucial to shift the mood to something more positive and solution-oriented. People like to know they’re not alone (misery loves company), but most don’t like to dwell on the negativity.
5. Cast some villains.
Just like we can all bond over a shared negative experience, so too can we bond over a common enemy. Casting a villain has been a common marketing tactic for years, and I’m not just talking about the Hamburglar. Villains can take more subtle forms, playing on common tropes — the jerk boss, the slob roommate, bureaucratic drone.
These take common experiences and personify them in order to elicit a feeling in the consumer, and help tell the story you’re trying to tell. A great example of this is Genesis’s “Going Away Party” commercial where they use the “stuffy” party trope and the “villains” within it to demonstrate that luxury doesn’t have to be stuffy.

 
6. Take a stand for something you believe in, even if it’s controversial.
If you feel confident about your brand, your PR team, and your position on an issue, you can take a controversial stance on a popular topic. Controversial marketing is a risky play because, in many cases, your brand could be seen as capitalizing on an issue just to peddle your products. However, when done well, your brand could be seen as socially responsible. 
Controversial marketing can also do a few other things for your marketing:

Position you as a thought leader (only if your thought was a good one — so try to make sure it is)
Help you define your brand in the eyes of consumers and what it stands for
Drive natural publicity
Elicit strong emotions from audiences, both positive and negative

That last one is what I want you to pay the most attention to. When you take a staunch position on a polarizing issue, you will have people who like you less for it. You will also generate some seriously ardent supporters. If you’re going to play the controversy game, be prepared to deal with both, because while some results could be really exciting for your brand, some backlash will inevitably come with it.
7. Use data to build a case study around why something stinks.
Let’s start off with an example: [New Research] It’s Official — Lots of Salespeople Hate Their CRM. It gets props off the bat for its grabby negative headline, but it’s also full of interesting statistics like this one:
50% of sales leaders say that their CRM is difficult to use, and 18% say this has caused them to lose opportunities or revenue.
You build a case around why one thing stinks (traditional CRMs) so you can show why something else is awesome (the new HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise).
This can be made even more compelling if you have two data points that demonstrate a stark contrast; the juxtaposition of positive and negative paints a pretty dramatic picture in readers’ minds, and the succinct data points make it easy to quickly demonstrate the bad versus the good.
8. Poke some fun at your competitors.
This is perhaps what most people think of when negative marketing is discussed, but it’s rarely executed because of how delicate the situation can be. On one hand, a little healthy competition can be a good thing, especially if you want to position yourself as a better option. However, if done poorly, your audience may actually think less of your brand for “playing dirty” or being too low-brow. In addition, if you leverage false claims, you could be asking for legal trouble.
There are two types of negative marketing with regard to your competitors: 

Attack: Focuses on the negative sides of your competition’s offerings. 

Contrast: Focuses on the positive sides of your offerings and establishes the gap. This is more subtle but still highlights what your competition may lack.

Typically, it’s easier for larger brands to engage in negative marketing with their competition because they’re already well-known, so the reward can be greater than the risk to highlight value propositions.
Pepsi has a famous “attack” ad in which a child dispenses two Coca-Cola cans from a vending machine and stands on them in order to reach the Pepsi button. 
Bud Light uses the more subtle “contrast” approach in their “Special Delivery Corn Syrup” ad: 

This ad works because it’s a light narrative and doesn’t engage in serious mud-slinging (it merely highlights a differentiator).
Nonetheless, controversy brewed even in this case as the company was sued for potentially misleading consumers by not acknowledging the difference between corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, which demonstrates exactly why this tactic is risky.
If your brand isn’t a household name, it may be better to highlight value propositions and differentiators in less risky ways.
For example, some brands engage in competitor criticism without mentioning any names. Doing this ensures you’re not giving your competition free airtime while you capitalize on ideas your consumers know to be true. For example, Domino’s does this in their “Designed to Be Delivered” ad, which doesn’t mention a single competitor (but does imply them):

 
9. Make fun of yourself.
Another less risky way would be to turn that negativity inward. A little self-deprecation can be fun for others, makes you seem more human, and actually might make you feel better about your slip-ups. After all, we all have them, and it’s important to learn how to make light of your mistakes. Speaking of Domino’s, one of the best examples of recent self-deprecating advertising is when Domino’s admitted their pizza tasted like cardboard and what they’re doing about it:

 
When Negativity Backfires
All this being said, it’s important to always consider whether your negativity is going to backfire. Are you being an unadulterated jerkface? Is this negativity going to be lost on your audience? Does your buyer persona really hate this kind of stuff?
For instance, something that almost always comes off as totally petty and unnecessarily negative is bickering with competitors. I mean, think about how annoying political ads are; you certainly don’t want to come off like that. I think one piece of advice from my childhood can sum up how you should approach bickering with competitors:
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Yes, even if they started it.
It’s also important to remember that any negativity you draw on needs to be tempered with some positivity. 
Finally, I think striving to be inspirational should always be an aspiration for marketers. There’s no question that marketers capable of inspiring people see unbelievable success from their efforts. In fact, I think if you’re able to inspire people in your marketing, the effects last much longer and are much stronger than any of these negative tactics.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Meetings suck. They’re time for people to avoid doing actual work, stare blankly at each other, throw in generic comments to look like they’re paying attention, and if you’re lucky, maybe come out with some wicked notebook doodles.
Is that how people perceive your marketing meetings? I hope not, because they don’t actually have to be that way.

Turn your marketing meetings into something useful by — you guessed it — creating compelling content! (Oh my gosh, inbound marketing concepts work in real life, too!)
As your team grows, it’s important for everyone to get in a room together and talk about what they’ve been working on in their corner of the world. So to ensure those marketing meetings aren’t blocks of time your team dreads, make note of these tips for how to make marketing team meetings truly useful for your employees.

How to Run an Effective Meeting
While this post will primarily focus on marketing meetings, I want to address a team-agnostic section about effective meetings as a whole.
As I said above, meetings can be a grandiose waste of time. It’s tempting to run your work by others, gather feedback or affirmation, or simply avoid the tough stuff by calling meetings.
I’m here to tell you — don’t do it. The first step to running effective meetings is to only schedule meetings when absolutely necessary.
Quarterly meetings to report on company progress and important news? Of course. Monthly meetings to touch base on KPIs and recruit help for projects? Sounds great. Weekly meetings to report on current responsibilities and asks? I’m torn on whether this one is necessary, but for large teams or teams with new employees, this could be a good move.
Every moment in a meeting is time away from heads-down work, the work that arguably moves your business forward. Are meetings necessary to take a break, touch base, and rally with your team? Of course.
Secondly, to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of a meeting, ask your team. Ask, “is [meeting] helpful for you? If so, what are its top two benefits for you?” This can help you understand what percentage of your teams finds value in your meetings and what components or agenda items may be able to be removed to save time.
Speaking of agendas, let’s discuss next what your marketing meeting agendas should resemble.

Marketing Meeting Agenda
Whether your marketing team meeting is weekly monthly, this section will explain the content you should every single time. We also recommend creating a slide deck that you project for your team in each meeting so you can all follow along with each agenda item.
Marketing Meeting Agenda Example
For every meeting, you should have a dedicated agenda slide that lays out three things:

What will be discussed in today’s meeting
Who will be leading each discussion
How much time is allotted for each discussion

Take a look at one of our recent marketing team meeting agenda slides:

Outlining who is talking, what they’re covering, and how much time they have to discuss it will help prevent the meeting from getting derailed. It will also prevent people from delving into unproductive conversations that are best had at another time and place.
As for what components should be on your marketing meeting agenda, let’s discuss what to cover during your marketing meeting.
Review Important Metrics
Do a quick review of your most important marketing metrics. These shouldn’t be niche metrics, like email unsubscribe rate, social media reach, or blog subscriber growth; save those for your monthly meetings where you review month-over-month progress.
These should be the metrics your marketing team is measured on. In other words, at the end of the month, what metrics will tell you whether the marketing team succeeded?
While every business will likely review something different depending on their business model, here are some ideas for you:

Leads waterfall
Sales waterfall
Volume of marketing qualified leads(MQLs)
Paid vs. organic leads breakdown
Website traffic

It’s important to review your team’s important metrics because these are how you’re measured onas an overall marketing team. And if you don’t all know how you’re faring as the month progresses, individual contributors can’t do anything to step up and help your team’s numbers improve.
A Bit of Education

Marketing meetings should be a healthy mix of state-of-the-union content and educational content. Each week, have a couple team members present briefly about interesting projects they’ve been working on. This serves two purposes: it lets people know what their team members do all day, and they get to learn something new!
Think about it … wouldn’t it be interesting for a blogger to learn a little bit about a PPC experiment? Or for a social media intern to learn about the results of the latest email A/B test?
Sharing lessons from projects helps everyone expand their knowledge base, sidestep landmines if a project backfired, and implement effective new techniques that they never knew worked.
Boom — everyone leaves your weekly meeting a smarter, better marketer!
The Nitty Gritty Retrospective

Your meeting should also contain a review of the projects each employee (or if you’re a larger marketing department, each team) worked on last month/quarter/year, plus the results they’ve seen.
This is good for a few reasons. First, it keeps everyone accountable knowing that each meeting they need to stand up in front of their colleagues and explain just what they do all day. Second, everyone gets to learn from what everyone else worked on and become generally better marketers. Third, it helps everyone identify how individual teams are faring, and what projects they’re doing to improve their own metrics.
For example, if you have a social media team, this is their opportunity to report on the success of every single social network they manage. How is their reach faring? How much traffic are those networks sending to your site? How many leads are being generated? Why are some networks more successful than others?
While your weekly meetings (if you have them) may focus on more high-level, team-based metrics, a monthly or quarterly meeting is a good opportunity to do a deep dive into the channels and metrics that enable the entire team to meet its goals.
How You’ll Meet This Month’s Goals

After the retrospective, each employee or team should also present on their individual goals for the month or quarter, and how exactly they will meet those goals. This is not the time to be generic.
Teams should explain, point by point, everything they’ll be doing during the time period to meet the metrics they’re measured by.
For example, let’s say the email marketing team is responsible for driving more reconversions this month. What exactly will they do to, well, do that? Well, that slide might have some initiatives like A/B test email copy with and without a P.S., anoffers analysis to determine which offers convert at the highest rate, list segmentation experiments, tailoring lead generation offers to align more closely with personas to improve CTR … the list could, and should, go on.
This is also a critical time in your meeting for feedback. Build in time during every presentation — at least 5 minutes, more if you find you need it after a few meetings — for each team to solicit feedback on their proposed projects. This will help individual teams from getting derailed on projects that might not help them meet their goals, or perhaps other members of the marketing team have fantastic ideas that the teams hadn’t even thought of yet!
Big Wins
A little bit of recognition is a good thing. Set aside a couple of minutes — come on, you can’t find 5 minutes? — to showcase some of the amazing things your team members or department as a whole have accomplished.
This could be anything from press coverage, speaking engagements, engaging with power players on social media, a smash hit blog post, an email that received unprecedented click-through rates … you get the point. It’s easy to harp on where you’re falling behind, but a little cheerleading can help rally your team and remind them just how successful they can be when they put their mind to it.
Solicit Help
Everyone should have the opportunity to solicit help from team members during your marketing team meetings. The larger your team gets, the easier it is to work in silos — but everyone has their own little super powers that sometimes go unnoticed.
If there is a platform during every meeting for employees to share (if they need it) something they need a little help with, you may find others pipe up with a simple solution or resource that solves the problem.
There should also be a few minutes built into each presentation for a little feedback. If someone is presenting on the progress of an ongoing project, part of “soliciting help” may be getting feedback on what steps to take next. For example:

Is this project still worth pursuing?
How should we measure the success of this project?
Does anyone have a solution to a major roadblock?

So while there should be a few minutes at the end of each meeting dedicated solely to giving employees the floor to solicit help, time for feedback should be built into presentations if the presenter needs it.

You know what content to include in your marketing team meetings. Now, let’s discuss how to make those meetings run smoothly. These tips, despite helpful content, can make or break the usefulness of any marketing meeting.
1. Stay on time.
Start on time, you end on time, and honor the budgeted time set for individual presentations. I know it’s hard, especially when there’s a good discussion going on, but delegate a timekeeper who lets presenters know when they’re coming up to the end of their allotted time.
If you’re vigilant about this, people will start to self-edit their presentation, and meeting-goers will self-censor their comments, only contributing what truly needs to be said.
2. Don’t allow computers …
… said the internet marketing company. Seriously though, only the meeting coordinator should have a computer to pull up the agenda and presentations.
If others bring their laptops, you’ll find people can’t help but check their emails, get little bits of work done, and chat online, no matter how riveting the presentations are.
3. Build in time for a break.
Your weekly meeting may only be 30 or 60 minutes, but your monthly meeting could take a lot longer. In that case, build in time for people to get up, stretch their legs, go to the bathroom, get coffee, whatever.
You’ll start losing people’s attention otherwise.
4. End every meeting with action items.
Whatever you talked about during your meeting should be revisited briefly at the end of the meeting, preferably by the meeting coordinator. If you spend 20 minutes talking about how to solve your lead shortage problem at the beginning of your 90-minute meeting, there’s a good chance some of the to-dos and initiatives trickled out of people’s minds.
Make sure there’s someone taking notes throughout the meeting, and allot five minutes at the end of every meeting to review what people should start doing once they walk out of that meeting room.
5. Consider your remote folks.
Whether your entire team or just a few members are remote, it’s important to consider the remote meeting experience. As a remote worker myself, dialing into meetings as one of the few remote attendees takes a bit to get used to.
Research helpful technology to mitigate the gap between in-office and remote workers. Zoom is obviously a great choice, but other technology like The Meeting Owl by Owl Labs may be a good fit for your team. At the start of each meeting, test your connectivity and walk through your slides to be sure the message is clear for folks at home.

Source: Getty Images
Most importantly, gather separate feedback from your remote team members to understand their struggles and accommodate their requests.
6. Review metrics and celebrate wins.
You know those marketing metrics you decided to measure and review in the first section? The ones that noted your team’s progress throughout the month?
Now’s the time to see whether you hit your goals or not! If you hit your goals, do two things: celebrate, and explain exactly why you hit those goals. That second one is critical. Someone should explain what marketing activities strongly contributed to you hitting, say, your leads goal. That way you can repeat those activities this month!
Meetings Don’t Have to Suck
Meetings are a necessary part of work. They’re a time to celebrate wins, ask for feedback or help, and get aligned with your team and company.
Sit down with your colleagues to audit your meeting schedule and see where you can trim time or cut meetings altogether. Effective and efficient meetings are much more important than meetings for the sake of it. Your team will thank you.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Check this out:
“You’re sitting in the creaky, mesh-backed, black ergonomic desk chair you bought at a discount off Amazon — hunched over, eyes reluctantly wide open, staring intently at a dimly lit laptop screen bearing a blank document.
It’s 4:45 PM. For most of the day, you’ve heard hardly anything except for the occasional click-clack of keys to commit some fruitless inspiration to your blog post and the intermittent spells of grating silence that came after deleting everything you jotted down.
The lasting taste of the coffee you drank about two hours earlier has gone sour but still coats your tongue and the roof of your mouth. And you can feel the effects of the caffeine slowly waning. Subtle muscle fatigue is setting in. Your eyelids are heavy and it’s a struggle in and of itself to keep them from covering your aching, weary eyes.
Your mind has gone stagnant — trapped in the clutches of what’s most commonly known as writer’s block.”
Now, I like to think that passage was vivid and immersive, and that’s mostly a credit to the kind of language I used and the personal sensations I played on — specifically how it described the sensory experiences of the subject matter.
That language is most commonly known as sensory language, and it’s a powerful resource for any writer to understand and apply. Here, we’ll cover what sensory language is, review some of the data surrounding it, and go over how you can use it in your blog posts.

Sensory language is used to describe the five primary senses — touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. They’re most commonly used to convey the specific details of scenes or add a more imaginative element to concept descriptions.
Sensory language is most commonly associated with literature. It’s a central component of most fiction and poetry, but that doesn’t mean this kind of vocabulary is exclusively artistic in its application. Marketers stand to gain a lot from understanding how to leverage it as well.
Let’s take a look at some of the data on sensory language to get a better picture of why it’s effective and how to apply it.
What Data Says About Sensory Language
Our day-to-day experiences are multisensory, but that’s hard to capture linguistically.
A 2012 study from Charles Spence, published in Science Direct, established that “most of our everyday experiences are multisensory.” Very rarely — if ever at all — are our senses siloed when we perceive the world around us.
That said, the English language is limited in its ability to capture that phenomenon and general sensory overlap. In his book Sensory Linguistics: Language, Perception, and Metaphor, linguist Bodo Winter, explains those limitations by describing the experience of eating Kimchi.
He says, “The experience involves the salty and spicy mélange of pepper and garlic notes that excite the taste buds, on top of the fermented smell, the tingly mouthfeel, and the crunchy chewing sound.”
Though his description is vivid and engaging, he notes that “conveying this experience forces the use of decoupled sensory adjectives such as salty and crunchy. The compression inherent in these words, each one singling out one aspect of the experience, means that the simultaneity of the multisensory taste experience cannot be conveyed.”
This passage helps illustrate what might be the main challenge that comes with using sensory language. Ultimately, the goal is to capture a seamless multisensory experience, but the language you have at your disposal is mostly categorized by individual senses.
Taste and smell are the most difficult senses to describe.
The five senses are essentially tiered when it comes to expressing them linguistically. Certain senses are more ineffable — or difficult to put into words — than others.
A 2014 study from Stephen Levinson and Asifa Majid, published in the journal Mind and Language, found that “in English, at least, it seems generally easier to linguistically code colors than (non-musical) sounds, sounds than tastes, tastes than smells.”
Everyone’s sensory perceptions are different, but how we individually experience taste and smell — also known as “the chemical senses” — is particularly unique.
A landmark 1990 study in the journal Physiology and Behavior found that the number of taste buds humans have on their tongues can vary radically from person to person. It’s also been found taste and smell vary as a function of factors like age, gender, and culture.
In short, it’s tough to capture the essence of senses so personal and, in turn, ineffable. And the English language’s limited vocabulary for the senses doesn’t exactly make things easier.
As Winter puts it, “Detailed descriptive characteristics of smells are not encoded in the English lexicon.” Instead, smell is often described in terms of perceived pleasantness through words like aromatic and pungent.
It might seem like taste and smell have less practical application in marketing — especially when it comes to elements like blog copy — but don’t count them out. You can get a lot of mileage out of those senses if you can convey them articulately and compellingly.
The perception of taste and smell is more emotional than other senses.
Though these senses are harder to capture, it’s in your best interest to try when appropriate. Sensory language is used to invoke meaningful images and feelings. And research indicates that language describing taste and smell bear more emotional weight than other kinds of sensory language.
As Winter puts it, “Taste and smell [as senses] are more emotional in perception, and the associated words are more emotional as well, compared to words from the other senses…There is, by now, a wealth of converging evidence for the emotionality of taste and smell language ”
This point can mean a lot in the context of certain schools of marketing. If you can believe it, emotionally charged and compelling language can be an asset to a company’s emotional marketing efforts.
And if you’re interested in using sensory language in your copy in the interest of that cause, it’s worth having a pulse on which aspects of the concept are the most emotionally evocative.
Multisensory language makes for better marketing.
As I mentioned, our perception of the world around us is always multisensory, so it’s intuitive to assume that we’re naturally more receptive to marketing that reflects those kinds of experiences. And the data on the subject is consistent with that notion.
A 2009 study published in The Journal of Consumer Research focused on how multisensory advertising impacted subjects’ perceptions of taste. It found that multisensory ads result in higher taste perception than ads focusing on taste alone.
And while the study focused primarily on multisensory advertising’s impact on a single sense, other researchers have extrapolated upon its findings and assumed it applies to the other senses as well.
What does this tell us? Well, this means that multisensory marketing — supported by tactful use of sensory language — is more engaging and enriching than marketing that focuses solely on conventionally touched-on senses like sight or sound. It shows that there’s tremendous value to using a robust sensory vocabulary in your copy.
How to Use Sensory Language in Your Blog Posts
Understand when it’s appropriate to use.
First and foremost, you need to understand that sensory language can seem awkward and jarring when you force it in certain contexts that don’t necessarily warrant it.
For instance, if you’re writing a matter-of-fact, professional post about a business concept, you probably wouldn’t want to use sensory language while defining it.
Take this definition from a HubSpot blog about strategy consulting:
“Strategy consulting is when businesspeople — generally executives, boards, or management — bring in a third party to offer an outside, expert perspective on their business challenges. Strategy consultants usually have considerable industry knowledge and are expected to assess high-level business issues objectively. They take a holistic look at specific problems companies are dealing with and give advice on how they should approach them.”
It’s more appropriate to keep that aspect of the article more straightforward and professional. Overloading it with sensory language might undermine your ability to clearly establish what the concept is. That said, there are ways you could incorporate sensory language to bring that dry concept to life and make it engaging.
Add a narrative element to the post.
Even though sensory language might not be the best way to convey the more rigid, objective aspects of your post, you can still use it to qualify and illustrate certain concepts. One of the best ways to do that is by giving your piece some narrative flair.
This method gives you some space to use sensory language and make concepts more engaging and entertaining. Here’s an example of how you could do that when covering the concept of strategy consulting I just described above:
“Picture this: A CEO sits, poised in a high-backed pleather chair at the head of an engineered wood conference table, eyes shut tight with a cast of stuffy, sharply suited board members flanking the table’s sides. They look on intently — expressions caught somewhere between frustration and desperation.
The smell of stale coffee and the special kind of silence that only comes after an hour or so of beratement hang in the air. Day has turned to night out the floor to ceiling windows without any resolution about how to amend the company’s recent marketing campaign — the one that’s been trending on social media for all the wrong reasons.
The CEO finally opens their eyes, and in a tone that’s equal parts stern and exhausted, they say it: ‘We need to bring someone in.’
Enter the strategy consultant.”
With that kind of description, I was able to set the stage, capture reader attention, and pave the way for a more thorough description of what a strategy consultant does.
Use metaphors or similes.
This point ties into the one above — to a certain extent. Sometimes the subject matter you’re writing about is too dry to pull a narrative from without coming across as desperate to force sensory language on a concept that it doesn’t naturally gel with.
In those cases, it can help to use metaphors or similes — rife with sensory language and vivid description — to simultaneously engage and inform the reader. For instance, let’s imagine you’re writing a piece about quote graphics. You might want to incorporate something like this:
“Think of your quote as the entree to a Michelin star meal — an immaculate cut of filet mignon that tastes like heaven and cuts like butter.
It’s the centerpiece of the dish, and it’s delicious in its own right, but some side dishes and ‘eye-eats-first’ presentation would take it to another level. By filling out the plate with crispy, golden-roast potatoes and perfectly charred, still-sizzling Brussel sprouts, you can take the dish from ‘intriguingly a la carte’ to ‘bonafide five-star.’
That’s the fundamental principle behind quote graphics. The engaging backdrop, distinctive font, and other engrossing visual elements you use can elevate your content and make it compellingly complete.”
Though it might not always be obvious, you can often find ways to incorporate sensory language into your blog content. And when done tastefully and effectively, it can pay off in spades. So if you’re interested in finding ways to add some oomph to your blog copy, consider taking some time to better understand sensory language.