The Marketing team should focus mostly on the top of the funnel. Their job is to generate interest and make people aware of what your company has to offer.
The focus may seem narrow, but there’s no shortage of plays that a Marketing team can work on. You can launch campaigns, do paid advertising, sponsor conferences, leverage content, etc. Having a good set of OKRs will help the team converge their efforts towards specific outcomes, and it will also make it easier for them to sync with the rest of the business.
You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. Their Marketing team decides to focus on content for the next quarter to generate new leads and raise their SEO ranking.
Some of your objectives will be hard to achieve within a quarter. This is the case here with SEO improvements. So what should you do? The answer is to find leading indicators of success. You might not be able to observe progress on your core goals, but there might be ways for you to make sure that you're on the right path.
In the example below, the Marketing team balances things by adding some KRs that can be tracked weekly (number of backlinks), and other ones that may take longer to see results (search rankings).
Become the #1 online resource for the problem we solve
Secure 15 high-quality backlinks from industry influencers & publications
Rank in top 5 traffic share for top domain keyword on Google
Get 30% more organic visits to our online guides
See more Marketing OKRs →
Turn content into a lead-generation machine
Increase content click-through from 1,500 to 3000 clicks monthly
25% of our customers find us through content (vs 12% today)
See more Marketing OKRs →
A common mistake when tracking OKRs is to use a spreadsheet. They’re flexible, but you’ll lack the ability to see trends and it’ll quickly become hard to manage for your team.
Instead you can use Tability to simplify the tracking of your OKRs–and as a bonus, you’ll find dozens of templates ready to go in the app.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some example of metrics that can be relevant for your Key Results.
Number of backlinks
How many sites link back to your content?
Keyword rankings
Where do you rank on specific requests?
Domain Authority Score (DA)
Indicates how likely your website is to rank high in search results.
Content shares
How often your content is shared online.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost Per Acquisition is the cost of acquiring a non-paying user.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost of acquiring a paying customer.
Traffic
How many people are visiting your website, and how often do they do it?
Engagement
How do people interact with your content (it can be anything, from visits to specific sections to conversations in Intercom…)
Click-through rate
Rate of engagement with specific actions.
Leads generated / Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
How many users end up being interested in what you have to offer (demos booked, signups)
Conversion rate
Similar to click-through, but generally associated with a tangible result (signup, purchase…)
Which channel(s) do we want to focus on this quarter?
Do we need to improve our relationship with Sales/Growth/Product?
Are we happy with our acquisition costs?
How can we mix big bets with low-hanging fruits?
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