Marketing OKRs: How to Set Them with Examples

Without setting effective goals, a business will become a tug-of-war between departments for initiative and resources. Bright ideas will arise and be implemented, but they won’t lead to tangible business results.

That’s where marketing OKRs come in. Setting up OKRs before crafting a more detailed plan lets your team focus on a single important goal and align their efforts.

Let’s explore what OKRs are, what benefits come from setting them up, and how to do it.

OKRs are objectives and key results. It’s a performance management method with a large objective and key results to measure the competition against this goal.

A marketing OKR is a set of objectives and key results that you set to help you accomplish your marketing goals.

When you’re working within the OKR framework, start with choosing a large goal, like becoming one of the top ten brands in the industry. The measurement for this goal may be onboarding two thousand new customers by the end of the year and making appearances on top-rated blogs.

That’s the basic formula of any OKR goal: I will reach [objective] and measure it by [key result].

This approach was formulated in the 1970s and has become a popular goal-setting framework after 2018. Another popular framework for productivity management, KPI, or key performance indicators has been in use long before OKR.

The difference between the two is mainly in the scope. Key performance indicators are used to find the right metrics to measure performance. OKRs are mostly used for large-scale goal setting.

Setting up realistic OKRs for different marketing directions takes analysis and planning, but the benefits are worth it.

The main benefit of having OKRs is that you can effectively coordinate the efforts of different departments toward a shared goal. Whether it’s becoming a leader in a single channel or drawing in more leads, when the whole company knows what they’re aiming for, it’s easier to collaborate.

Shared goals also foster transparency. Instead of each department having its own tools and data, everybody is incentivized to share data to reach a common goal. This also leads to improved accuracy of analytics.

Having a single goal also helps with scattered focus. Sometimes, when different departments have multiple KPIs, they end up chasing numbers without seeing the bigger picture. OKRs solve that by helping everybody focus on one.

Doing this and sharing data actively leads to improved decision-making. The strategic company decisions will be aligned and based on data analysis.

Finally, innovations and new ideas will likely have a positive business effect. Without a shared goal, ideas will arise from the standpoint of what we can do in general. This can lead you to disregard ideas, and employees may become disengaged. With OKR, ideas will arise by asking how they can reach this goal, and these ideas will be much better.

Setting OKRs is pretty straightforward yet complicated. All you have to do is to follow the formula of what objective you choose and how you’re going to measure it. But, choosing the objective and the key results requires extensive planning.

Here’s where you begin.

Begin with Planning Common Business Objectives

Before you create digital marketing OKRs for individual marketing departments or teams, it’s best to set a company-wide OKR. Analyze your company performance and decide on an achievable goal in six to twelve months with your resources that would lead to significant improvements.

For instance, your objective could be to expand market reach in the national market. In this case, your key results might include:

• Doubling brand recognition in marketing surveys
• Doubling website traffic
• Dominating paid and organic search for key terms
• Earning mentions in top-ranking industry publications

You might also have an objective that leans into the financial side of things, like increasing ARR by 50%. In this case, orient yourself towards these key results:

• Relaunching pricing
• Improving customer loyalty
• Increasing the monthly number of new customers

Based on these goals, you’ll set OKRs for different marketing teams.

Creating Achievable Goals for Each Marketing Direction

Whether you’re creating OKRs for the whole company or smaller goals for each department or team, ensure they align with the SMART framework. SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Assignable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

As long as you set realistic OKRs assigned to a specific team or person and can be measured across time, you’re good.

Here’s how you can set goals for the most popular marketing directions based on the two examples of objectives discussed above.

SEO OKRs

Search engine optimization involves organic traffic and ranking for specific keywords. It also interacts with PR and branding in terms of earning mentions on other websites.

If you’re pursuing expanding your reach in the national market, your OKRs could be as follows.

Objective: Increase organic website traffic.

Key results:

• Add X new keywords to your pool.
• Add X new optimized informational pages.
• Increase positions to the top ten in transactional keywords.

Objective: Dominate SERP for key search terms.

Key results:

• Increase positions to the top 3 in targeted keywords.
• Earn a mention in AIO or featured snippet in targeted keywords.
• Increase CTR by X% in targeted keywords.

For the second large objective, your SEO OKR might look like:

Objective: Increase the number of organic leads.

Key results:

• Increase traffic for commercial keywords.
• Increase website conversions.

Tracking SEO goals with native Google tools is difficult. You can monitor progress with a reliable rank tracker. This specialized tool can help you monitor positions for crucial keywords and analyze SERP to improve your SEO strategy. It allows you to monitor changes in positions over time, which is a crucial way to review how your strategy is performing and alter it if needed.

Inbound Marketing OKR Examples

Inbound marketing deals with attracting visitors with valuable content instead of reaching out to them with advertising. Here are OKR examples for your inbound team for the first company-wide goal.

Objective: Increase traffic through organic channels.

Key results:

• Traffic to the blog increases from X to Y.
• Social media impressions increase from X to Y.
• Newsletter subscriptions increase from X to Y.

For the second goal, increasing ARR, you might have a different set of OKRs.

Objective: Increase new inbound leads

Key results:

• Increase traffic to key inbound pages from X to Y.
• Improve conversion rate from X to Y.
• Increase social media leads from X to Y.

Measuring these results can be done with your current SEO and social media tracking software. The exact ways to reach key results will differ and likely will require experimentation.

Content Marketing OKRs

Content marketing contains elements of both SEO and social media marketing, as both require quality content to engage audiences organically. It also uniquely benefits from having a shared company goal, as many content marketing efforts are ineffective due to misalignment with other marketing departments.

The marketing OKR examples for the first large goal of market dominance might look like this:

Objective: Establish your brand as a thought leader in the market

Key results:

• Increase social share rate from X to Y.
• Increase engagement rate from X to Y.
• Produce X through leadership articles per month.
• Get featured by X leading publications.
• Get featured on X podcasts.

For the second goal of improving ARR, content marketing OKRs might look like this:

Objective: Bring more organic leads through content.

Key results:

• Produce X lead magnet pieces per quarter.
• Increase organic traffic from X to Y.
• Increase conversion rate from X to Y.

Content marketing efforts can be hard to track, as not all customers convert right after interacting with your content. You may have to develop an attribution model to represent how many leads were influenced by your content to make a purchase or had an interaction with it.

Social Media Marketing OKRs

Social media marketing can take the form of both content creation aimed at gaining organic traffic and paid advertising. 

To achieve the goal of improving market presence, the OKR examples for SMM might look like:

Objective: Increase social media visibility.

Key results:

• Increase organic impressions from X to Y.
• Increase subscriber count from X to Y.
• Gain X impressions with a paid campaign.

OKRs for improving ARR might look like this:

Objective: Bring more leads from social media.

Key results:

• Produce X posts promoting your product per month.
• Increase website visits from social media by X%.
• Improve social media advertising conversion rate by X%.

Whatever larger goal you reach for, you’ll have to tailor the social media OKRs to the specific channels you use. To monitor how well you progress towards the key results, use a combination of native social media business tools and specialized monitoring tools. Social listening tools, for instance, would work.

Brand Marketing OKRs

Brand marketing is a top-of-the-funnel marketing technique that involves brand consistency, brand image, and brand recognition. For example, the OKRs for the branding team might look like this.

Objective: Improve brand awareness in the national market.

Key results:

• Achieve X impressions with a paid campaign.
• Achieve X impressions on organic search.
• Achieve X impressions on social media.
• Increase the share of voice from X to Y.

It might be harder to find something a branding team can do to directly influence ARR, but there’s an indirect way. Here’s what OKRs would be in that case.

Objective: Improve customer loyalty in the national market.

Key results:

• Reduce churn rate from X to Y.
• Improve CSAT from X to Y.
• Improve NPS from X to Y.

Some of these key results can be measured with monitoring tools. For others, you’ll have to run customer surveys.

OKRs for Lead Generation

Lead generation deals with ways of turning visitors into customers across all marketing channels. Since it’s so focused on conversions rather than top-of-the-funnel marketing, it would be harder to find a suitable OKR for the first goal of expanding marketing reach. Here’s what an adjacent goal would look like.

Objective: Diversify channels in the national market.

Key results:

• Add X new marketing channels.
• Increase traffic through each channel by X%.

The second large objective, improving ARR naturally, aligns with lead generation. Here’s what you can put as your OKRs.

Objective: Bring in more leads.

Key results:

• Increase traffic through all channels by X%.
• Increase the number of marketing-qualified leads by X%.

Your customer relationships management software would be a great fit for tracking key results for the lead generation team.

Email Marketing OKR Examples

The beauty of email marketing is that you have people who are already introduced to your brand, whether it’s newsletter subscribers or customers. This makes email marketing uniquely effective, versatile, and productive in terms of ROI.

Here are marketing OKR examples for the first large goal.

Objective: Expand email marketing reach.

Key results:

• Increase newsletter subscription rate by X%.
• Engage recipients who don’t open emails.
• Reduce unsubscribe rate by X%.
• Produce X email-gaited content per quarter.

For the second goal, improving ARR, your email marketing OKRs might look like this.

Objective: Educate customers about the product.

Key results:

• Run a campaign in the demographic that doesn’t use product features.
• Accomplish X% open rate.
• Accomplish X% CTR.

A campaign like this would help existing customers understand your product better and decrease the churn rate, resulting in a higher ARR.

Use your email automation software to monitor progress.

CRO OKRs

Conversion rate optimization is focused mostly on facilitating sales, but you can also put efforts into converting leads on the higher end of the marketing funnel. Here’s what you can put down as an OKR to support marketing reach expansion.

Objective: Improve top-of-the-funnel conversion rate.

Key results:

• Improve newsletter subscription rate by X%.
• Improve webinar attendance by X%.
• Improve webinar conversion by X%.

For ARR improvement, OKR examples might look like this.

Objective: Improve bottom-of-the-funnel conversion rate.

Key results:

• Increase conversions on landing pages by X%.
• Increase email marketing conversions by X%.
• Increase upselling conversions by X%.

A CRM would be a great way to track goal completion here.

PPC OKRs

Paid advertising is a versatile marketing channel, as it can improve brand awareness and drive sales. For the goal of expanding marketing reach, your OKRs might look like:

Objective: Run a successful brand awareness campaign

Key results:

• Achieve X impressions with the campaign.
• Dominate paid search on targeted keywords.

PPC can also achieve the second goal, which is increasing annual recurring revenue. The OKRs would look like this in this case.

Objective: Bring in more leads through paid channels.

Key results:

• Increase paid conversions by X%.
• Increase traffic from paid channels from X to Y.
• Decrease cost per acquisition by X%.

Advertising accounts on Google for search ads and Meta for social media ads would be enough to track these goals.

Define Measurement Systems to Track the Success of Your Marketing Efforts

You might have noticed that some of the OKRs for the different marketing departments are very similar. That’s one benefit of using OKR as the system, as it aligns efforts of all marketing departments moving towards a shared goal.

It also will prompt the sharing data across the company as both achieving and tracking OKRs between departments requires sharing performance data. The best ways to track performance are outlined for each marketing department. Your job in tracking OKR progress is bringing those tools and datasets together for analytics.

You have two major options here.

The first is to have each person assigned to be responsible for a key result, create weekly or monthly reports, and place them together in a dashboard or a PDF document.

The other is to syndicate all company data into one source, whether it’s OKR software or a BI tool. Then, you can process all the data together and view it as a dashboard divided between departments but still have open access to historical data from every marketing channel.

Review performance data monthly and do a quarterly audit to see whether you’re moving fast enough to meet the OKRs in time. If you’re not, you may either experiment to find better ways of achieving the OKRs or review goal-setting and decide whether it’s best to lower the expectations.

Even though OKRs follow a simple formula, mistakes are bound to happen. It’s possible both at the beginning of the goal-setting process and during execution. Here are the four most common mistakes with tips on how to avoid them.

Focusing on Small Goals

Objectives and key results are more suited for large company-wide goals, like optimizing processes, improving sales, and building brand image. If you set a goal that is too small, it defeats the purpose.

If your objective ends up being something like producing two more pieces of content per month, it’s hardly a large objective. This is more of a key result.

At this point, you can start over or think of what larger goal this key result can help with. That would be your objective.

Poor Analytical Capabilities

Any goal is as good as your ability to measure it. Poor analytics is the next largest problem that plagues OKRs.

Mostly, poor analytics will come down to one or more of these factors:

• The metric doesn’t measure the key result.
• You don’t have access to a good tool.
• Parts of data are missing due to communication problems.
• The reporting format you chose doesn’t represent the data well.

Before you work on your objectives, audit your analytics and reporting processes to ensure everything is good. It’s best to run this audit quarterly to see if your analytics solution serves its purpose well.

Chasing Key Results Instead of Objectives

When a metric becomes a goal, it stops being an effective metric. This is a problem that can disrupt efforts that require tracking results.

For instance, your SEO team might start chasing traffic numbers without verifying they’re attracting the right people to the site. The result is triple the traffic but the same amount of sales, with a lot of funds spent in between.

OKRs are a good framework for avoiding this, but only if you can clearly communicate the end goal to everybody in the company. Setting key results in a way that’s aligned with the objective also helps.

Communication Challenges

Communication issues can arise in any project that involves multiple hands. If you don’t explain OKRs to your teammates and don’t tell them the details of each key result, confusion and miscommunication will arise. This will likely lead to teams working on things that don’t contribute to the final objective.

To avoid this, run multiple planning sessions, some group and some individual. Explain the key concepts clearly, and the people responsible for execution can explain them to you. Fostering an open work culture also goes a long way.

Summary

Marketing OKRs are a goal-setting framework that can help you focus the whole marketing team on a single large goal. The key to making this framework effective is setting goals that are both big and achievable with the resources you have at hand, setting key results that reflect objectives, and tracking all of them well.

With the right goals and everyone on the team trying to reach them, your company is going to be ahead of the competition as planned.