OKRs for Marketing Teams

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.

Example of Marketing OKRs

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.

Scenario

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.

General advice

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).

Their OKRs

Automate tracking of your OKRs

Best practices for tracking OKRs

#1 Make it part of the team rituals

OKRs won't be of much help if you're not keeping an eye on them. Staying focused and aligned starts by adopting a simple routine with the team.

• Monday: review progress on OKRs as a team, then look at your roadmap.
  
• Monday-Friday: work on projects.
  
• Friday: demos.
  

Start your Monday by looking at outcomes first (OKRs) and then outputs (roadmap). This will make sure that roadmaps discussions are centered around the most pressing issues.

#2 Make sure everyone can see trends

A common mistake for tracking OKRs is to use a table where you replace values in cells with the most recent update.

Not seeing trends can give you a false sense of security. You may be above the target line today, but the overall trend might be going the wrong way. So make sure that you have a simple way to understand if you're getting off track.

A simple progress chart can do wonders to help you understand if you're getting off track.
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#3 Automate your OKRs process

OKRs will most likely cause friction as you expand their use within your organization:

• Team leads have to send reminders every week.
  
• People have to scramble through spreadsheets to find their goals.
  
• Reports need to be handcrafted for leadership.
  
• There's a general lack of consistency in implementation.
  

You can greatly simplify things by adopting a platform like Tability that will automate most of the OKRs tracking and make progress easy to see.

Turning OKRs into a collaboration process with Tability