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 strategic planning, systems and processes, and a desire to improve them as well. 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.

Visit this Objectives and Key Results Guide

Easy To Understand Marketing OKR Examples

Before you look at these OKR examples for Marketing – ask yourself if you’re right for OKR and answer these questions. 

1. Name your top Marketing priorities right now – these might be delivering a certain KPI level like lead volume, or improving a critical process like lead nurturing to achieve a measurable outcome 
2. If you were then forced to prioritise them with the top of the list being the priorities that would have a material impact on the business right now, what would the sequence look like? 
3. How would you then measure the success and what would a hard to reach target be?

These are probably your candidates for your upcoming quarter Marketing department OKRs.

The examples below have been created to avoid being lists of Vanity Metrics. This means these Key Results should correlate with company performance. They will also work for B2B as well as B2C companies.

One of the common mistakes teams make with Key Results is to make them the inputs i.e. the Project / Campaigns / Tasks aka Initiatives that will be created to influence the outcomes you want i.e. Marketing OKRs.

The results of using the OKRs in your Marketing team will be improved performance as long as the Target Metrics are set with the right amount of stretch and you don’t set and forget them. Which is where the weekly check-in comes in.

OKR Examples For Marketing

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our CPA has been climbing and is not over $200 and we need it to be less than $150 whilst still delivering the volume and quality.

OBJECTIVE – A big reduction in our CPA
KEY RESULT 1 – Reduce out CPA from $210 to less than $150
KEY RESULT 2 – Generate 1,200 MQL for Sales to follow-up

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our website conversion rates are low compared to other websites and we need a big drive on optimising the conversation rates.

OBJECTIVE – Turn our website in to a lean mean lead generation machine
KEY RESULT 1 – Increase Trial Sign-up Conversion Rate to 8% this Quarter

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our sales team needs some amazing content to help the SDRs increase their performance.

OBJECTIVE – Great content is needed to help Sales sell and smash targets
KEY RESULT 1 – Whitepaper has created over 1,000 MQLs for SDRs to follow-up
KEY RESULT 2 – SDR email open rates have increased by 5%

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our lear nurturing process and scoring is being questioned by sales – lots of MQLs are not looking for our solution and lots of SDR time is being wasted. Let’s make it better.

OBJECTIVE – Our nurturing process is flagging MQLs that often become customers
KEY RESULT 1 – Increase our MQL to SQL Conversion from 15% to 40%

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our CRM system is not being used fully or enough so we want it to work harder and generate more engagement.

OBJECTIVE – Email is performing brilliantly & customers are loving getting them 
KEY RESULT 1 – Increase Email Open Rate to 5% this Quarter
KEY RESULT 2 – Increase Email Click Through Rate to 2.5% this Quarter
KEY RESULT 3 – Increase Sign-ups from Email to 200 this Quarter

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Our Google Ads spend in big and we need to make every $ count, so we’d like to balance it with more Organic traffic to reduce the blended search CPA, whilst increasing total sign-ups.

OBJECTIVE – SEO is a big ROI channel and can lower our CPA
KEY RESULT 1 – Increase Organic Search Session to 10K this Quarter
KEY RESULT 2 – Increase Content Downloads from Organic Search to 500 this Quarter
KEY RESULT 3 – Increase App Sign-ups from Organic Search to 250 this Quarter

Priority Problem / Opportunity
Sales want more social proof to help them close more deals. It’s also good for our own website conversion rates.

OBJECTIVE – We don’t need to say we’re the best, our users do and social proof helps us sell more
KEY RESULT 1 – Look – social proof, our G2 and Capterra ratings are over 4.5 stars this Quarter
KEY RESULT 2 – 3 epic case studies are on our website this Quarter

Want to see a full OKR cascade, from Strategy to Departments and team OKRs?

Visit this Objectives and Key Results Guide

OKR Examples For Marketing Conclusion