Marketing OKR Examples To Inspire You

Marketing is one of the teams that sees significant performance increases from using OKRs – especially in an agile working environment. This is mostly because it’s naturally run by goals, why prioritisation and agile execution can dictate most projects and tasks. Marketing teams are mostly as masters of their own time. Compare this to customer service teams who have their workload partially dictated to by existing processes and demands from customers.

That doesn’t mean that marketing does not have the need for systems and processes, and a desire to improve them as well. it does. Common processes that are followed, sometimes automated or partially automated, and where necessary optimized by marketing to get better outcomes, include:

• Lead tracking and nurturing using Marketing Automation
• Monitoring for topic, own and competitor brand mentions
• Social Media Marketing – for your own content, influencer, and those you want to influence
• On-boarding Sequences
• CRO Testing e.g. A/B and Multi-variate testing
• Dropped Basket / Re-activation Campaigns
• Briefing and sign-off workflows
• Freelancer management
• Marketing budgeting

Marketing teams have a number of specialist teams as well that help deliver against higher level goals. Teams like SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing, and PR are common ones. These teams can naturally be aligned around goals and OKRs cascades become easier to create. Each of these teams will have established KPIs that tell them whether desired performance levels are being achieved and which might need attention.

The Marketing OKR examples below cross all the key areas of brand, lead generation and content, social, organic search, and paid media. However, Marketing OKRs are not meant to be where every KPI you track has a goal and a target value. 

General guidance for marketing team OKRs, as for all OKR creation, is:

1. Marketing department OKRs should be the most important priorities you want to address in the period e.g. quarter
2. Align Marketing OKRs with Company OKRs and teams like Sales who will have opinions on lead volume targets and other requirements like content
3. Focus on the KPIs that need to improve most and evolving processes that contribute to performance
4. An agile ‘experimental’ approach with result capture and documentation works well with OKRs – this is often called ‘growth hacking’ and ZOKRI’s Initiative management module is designed to offer a growth hacking management layer to OKRs which are the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. Move from Ideas, to Active, Complete and then document results.
5. Use KPI dashboards in ZOKRI for business-as-usual marketing metric tracking – connect to GA, Hubspot, Google Sheets, Excel and more for free

Here you will find some examples of typical Marketing OKR examples and goals. Remember that OKRs were NOT created for ‘Business As Usual’ Goals, projects you are going to undertake, or really long-term goals.