Marketing OKR Examples - What’s Important To Know
Marketing departments are likely one of the departments with the easiest task of implementing OKR. Other teams might need more inspiration from OKR examples, but most of what marketing teams do is related to numbers and goals.
Because such a department is used to working with numbers, implementing the OKR framework and figuring out how to formulate marketing OKRs is less of a struggle.
What You’ll Learn About Marketing OKRs
After you’re done reading this, you should be able to create your own Objectives and Key Results that match where you want your team or organization to go.
It’s important that a team is moving in the same direction. You can always read this checklist of things to remember when starting up your OKR efforts.
A Great Marketing OKR Example
Let’s go over one single OKR example for a marketing team and talk about why it’s great.
Objective: Improve weekly online reach numbers
Key Result 1: Increase weekly reach across platforms from 500k to 750k
Key Result 2: Maintain weekly engagement rate of 2%
Why Marketing Teams Benefit From Using OKR
Marketing teams benefit from OKR because how their main priority is to increase awareness about the company and ultimately help get more customers. Something that requires a great overview, which OKR can help with.
The Key Elements To A Great Marketing OKR Example
Overall, a great OKR should follow the SMART guidelines of being:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Results-oriented
Time-bound
OKR Criteria: Specific
This previous OKR example was concerned with the company’s online reach numbers. Areas like these are typically measured on various social platforms which provide statistics for general performance. Looking into these individually gives a great idea of how the company is performing.
OKR Criteria: Measurable
Because we chose a dedicated metric, it’s a lot easier to check the box that the OKR is measurable. We measure work-life balance based on the survey score and agree that’s how we evaluate balance. There are plenty of other metrics to include, but for now, we focus on this one.
OKR Criteria: Achievable
It’s important to have achievable OKRs. They should always be ambitious, but nothing is more demotivating than unachievable goals. A rule of thumb is that the chance of achieving a Key Result should be around 50% from the start. If you reach 70% and above, it’s considered a success.
OKR Criteria: Results-oriented
Being focused on results is a very important aspect of OKR. It’s so important, that we’ve dedicated an entire section to describing why you should focus on outcomes over outputs below.
OKR Criteria: Time-bound
A key part of defining a goal is also defining when you’re expecting it to be met. For OKR, your goals are usually divided into different cycles and your goals should of course be reached within the end of the cycle.
Focus On Reach Outcomes Over Content Outputs
As a marketing team, it’s easy to get caught up in focusing your day-to-day work on the outputs of what you do. Doing X gets us Y. But you shouldn’t do that.
OKRs are meant to force you to think about your desired outcome. Then activate the marketing specialists in your team and democratize how you’ll get there. The key way to turn output-focused goals into outcome-focused goals is to ask “why?”. “Why do we want the output you’re describing?”.
“Create 10 pieces of content for each platform” is a goal focused on outputs. Why do we want that? Well, because we’re guessing it’ll get us to a state where we have “750k weekly reach”. Voila, know you have your ingredients for the key results. Use the examples presented at the top of this page for even more context to concrete OKRs.