The Power of In-Person Meetings: A Marketer's PerspectiveThe Power of In-Person Meetings: A Marketer's Perspective

Testing messaging, theories and analytics is great, but nothing replaces the art of in-person conversation.

Coming back from a recent business trip to Denver, I was walking down the hall of the airport terminal when I was hit with the real power of in-person business meetings.

That was an ironic realization for me. As the head of marketing for a video conferencing company, I see customers, partners and employees on video all day long. And yet, for that day, I put the technology aside and spent eight hours face-to-face with 50 customers, six resellers and three vendors. For a marketer, that experience was amazing and quite a productive day.

The power of face-to-face meetings is still a necessary part of doing business, especially in marketing. As marketers, our job is to control messaging and to understand customers' pain points. As you can imagine, I spend several hours a day analyzing data, so I have a strong idea of what the marketplace is asking for. And to have an opportunity to validate what these analytics are saying is enlightening for a marketer.

But it can be a problem if you put analytics ahead of visiting the very customers, partners and vendors that are the audience for your messages. It's a mistake, and we're remiss if we're not making in-person meetings a normal part of doing business. Of course, it's not practical to hold these meetings as often as we'd like. It's inefficient and expensive to jump on a plane every time we want that kind of connected experience.

It's wildly important, though. In the case of my trip to Denver, we were going to present information for a new product line, encompassing our new messaging, story and product line. I wanted to test the messaging in the marketplace and see for myself what the analytics had been telling me all along. And sure enough, the data was right. Imagine though how often other marketers and yes, even you, send out information to the field that we mandate is the new "holy grail" without ever once testing it for ourselves in the marketplace. Sadly it happens all the time, often because someone simply provided a deadline.

Marketers are being forced, and rightfully so, to get out of the comfort zone of creating great slides and actually deliver the slides themselves. From speaking directly with the customer to working hand in hand with your sales team, we all have the opportunity to learn from your own self-delivery.

Tying into Video
If this in-person experience is so critical, why bring video conferencing into the discussion at all?

Honestly, because without video conferencing it would have taken months to build and finalize a presentation or new messaging; but it took only a couple of weeks by adding in video.

In the field, I heard directly from customers, partners and sales team members about what worked and what didn't, what messaging made sense and where there was confusion. That let me tweak and massage the messaging further. Then I poured over analytics to see trends, so I could be forward thinking. Ultimately, when it was time to reveal new content, I could do so quickly through a video call with our sales team. When it was ready, I visited in person to deliver the presentation to customers and to our own sales team.

So we were all able to use video conferencing in a collaborative way, but with the in-person experience coupled to that campaign. That made it easier to gauge feedback during the presentation before committing to language across customers and partners.

These two different means of communication complement each other. In-person meetings let you test and gauge responses more thoroughly. After all, you can't conduct all business from your office. On the other hand, video conferencing lets you engage people whenever you need to. I'm lucky that I have the opportunity to see people through video conferencing when I can't meet with them in person.

It's simple: Testing messaging, theories and analytics is great, but nothing replaces the art of in-person conversation. Marketers have an obligation to go out in the field and actually get their hands into the work being done. You have to understand how people will present the information, and the appetite that customers may have for it. You can't just read about that; you have to experience it for yourself, in person. How can you possibly know what works with messaging without that simple understanding?

Megan Lueders is VP of Global Marketing for the video conferencing company LifeSize. She can be reached at [email protected]