Examples of OKRs for Marketing Teams

Marketing teams are mostly focused on the top of the funnel. Their job is to generate interest and make people aware of what a business 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 teams converge their efforts towards specific outcomes, and it will also make it easier for them to sync with the rest of the business.

How to write OKRs for Marketing teams

Step 1. OKRs vs. Projects

Before jumping into the OKRs process, it is essential to understand the difference between Objectives, Key Results, and projects:

• Objectives: what do we want to achieve next quarter?
• Key Results: how are we going to measure progress?
• Projects: what are our best bets to get there?

This matters because a common mistake is to start listing projects as KRs or Objectives.

A good Objective should be inspiring and easy to understand by anyone in your org. It has to be specific (don't write "be the best"), but it's best to keep metrics out of the picture—that'll come later in the Key Results.

A good Key Result should follow the rules of the SMART framework. In particular, it should be relevant to its parent Objective, measurable through the quarter, and time-bound. A good test is to ask, "would we do things differently if this KR goes off-track?". If the answer is negative, then you need to refine your OKR.

Finally, your projects are the bets that can move the needle on your Key Results. Some will work—double down on it. Some will fail, and it should be okay to stop and move on to the next idea.

Step 2. Pick 2-3 areas of focus

The next step is to pick the right focus. One tool that can help here is the AARRR framework. This framework divides your customer's journey into 5 stages:

• Acquisition: how many people find out that you exist?
• Activation: how many of them sign up for your product and become leads?
• Retention: how many leads come back to use your product again?
• Referral: how many users share your product with others?
• Revenues: how many users end up paying for your product?

Marketing teams are mostly focused on the Acquisition part of the funnel.

It may seem like a small surface area, but it's also one of the most challenging due to the risks involved. A lot of Marketing plays involve spending cash in advance, hoping to recover it later through converted customers. This can become a disaster without a plan.

We know we need to focus on Acquisition, but we now need to define which part of the Acquisition process we want to improve this quarter:

• Do we want to focus on specific channels?
• Do we need to improve our relationship with Sales, Growth, Product?
• Are we happy with our acquisition costs?
• Are there low-hanging fruits that we can mix with bigger bets?

All these questions (and more) can help us identify our Objectives.

Step 3. Write your plan

Once you've narrowed down your focus, you can start writing your OKRs draft. Agree on 2-3 Objectives before diving into the Key Results. You'll see some examples below, and here's a guide about writing OKRs if you're just getting started.

Some of your Objectives will be hard to achieve within a quarter. This is often the case with SEO improvements for instance. 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 examples 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).

Examples of Marketing OKRs

OKRs to increase SEO performance

It can take weeks or months to see the impact of a great SEO effort. But while you may not be able to see a direct impact, you can still raise your confidence by using proxy measures of success like the number of backlinks.

OKRs to generate growth through content-marketing

Don't list all your action items as Key Results. Instead, you should focus on the expected outcomes at the end of the quarter.

OKRs to generate leads through event-marketing

This is an example taken from Mari Luukkainen's post 👉 Marketing OKRs: Practical examples and how to use them.

OKRs to improve paid Marketing

How to track your Marketing OKRs?

There are many options available out there but we're generally seeing 2 categories of products emerging.

For teams getting started: Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a great way to get started with OKRs. They're flexible and familiar, and they reduce the amount of learning when you're still getting comfortable with the Objectives and Key Results process.

But, you'll probably start to feel some friction as adoption grows. The lack of check-ins workflows and trends makes it hard for spreadsheet to be a long-term solution for OKRs.

For seasoned OKRs team: OKRs-tracking software

If you're looking to simplify your OKRs process, then a dedicated goal-tracking platform is best to keep track of your OKRs at scale.

A platform like Tability will automate the check-ins reminders, provide progress charts and dashboards out of the box, and make the whole experience more collaborative.