In the 1970s, Andrew Grove introduced the first OKRs at Intel, paving the way for their worldwide domination. In the following 50 years, this framework has been adopted worldwide across various industries, including marketing.
This article will share all the information you need to set OKRs for your Marketing department and engage it further in your company’s business. It follows our previous studies on OKRs for Sales, HR, and other departments. Remember that these are guidelines, not rigid rules — each company is unique, and you should always be able to change things around to suit your environment.
If you need to refresh your memory on OKRs, please check out our quick YouTube guide.
How to Set OKRs for Marketing
Marketing is a big industry and is often used as a blanket term for copywriting, content management, SMM, SEO, Design, and sometimes even PR. The subject matter is so bloated that even Hubspot leaves us without a clear definition and instead says:
“Marketing refers to any actions a company takes to attract an audience to the company’s product or services through high-quality messaging.”
Caroline Forsey for Hubspot
Either way, Marketing is the face of your company, and its direction will, in many ways, determine how the customers perceive it. That is why Marketing, more than most other departments, should align closely with your Vision, Mission, and Strategic OKRs. If you do not know what those are or how to set them, check out our article on How to Write OKRs.
Once you have the fundamentals covered, it is time to define the areas your marketing team will prioritize and set your OKRs around them.
Digital Marketing OKR Examples
Each marketing team is different and has its strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, promoting your company through carefully designed and targeted marketing campaigns makes sense. Other times you have a reason to carpet bomb the Internet with ads and see what sticks.
Marketing OKRs can be very different depending on the context, and blindly copying ideas from here might not yield the desired results. Instead, you should use them as inspiration and adjust them based on your company culture.
Marketing Department OKR Examples
Measuring Marketing is an exciting exercise in frustration — many tasks have unclear outcomes that you can only correctly evaluate weeks later. That said, OKRs can still be worked into the general marketing structure as long as you know what you want.
There are two valid ways to do marketing OKRs — either by pain points or by the desired outcome. For example, if your website performs poorly and doesn’t attract many leads, that is your pain point, and you should focus on it like this:
- [O] Optimize the company’s website.
- [KR] Raise the number of unique visitors on the site by 40%;
- [KR] Reduce the bounce rate by 15%;
- [KR] Increase the duration of the average session on the website by 30%;
- [KR] Lower the loading time of website pages by 65%.
This will define a framework for your Content, SEO, and Development teams’ OKRs. If you want to learn more about OKR Structure and how to align individual Objectives with the Department and Company ones, check out our article on OKR Alignment and Breakdown.
Alternatively, you can focus on the final goal — customers. Or leads, whom you will later turn into customers. So if you trust your teams and are fine with the more generic OKRs, try something like this:
- [O] Attract more marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
- [KR] Boost the number of MQLs by 15% through the partner channel;
- [KR] Attract 70 MQLs from the webinar;
- [KR] Attract 200 MQLs via email campaign;
- [KR] Bring 120 marketing leads from the organic search.
SEO OKRs Examples
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is probably the most crucial aspect of marketing. After all, if you have lousy SEO, your potential buyers can not discover your content and will never get converted into leads or customers.
SEO can be fickle and uncertain since search engines regularly change their algorithms. So when you set the OKRs for the department, leave the “how” in the hands of your SEO specialist and focus instead on the outcome.
- [O] Improve rankings in SEO.
- [KR] Boost Ahrefs health rate from 57 to 100;
- [KR] Increase the number of SEO keywords;
- [KR] Grow organic traffic from 15,000 to 55,000 per month;
- [KR] Place our website on the first page of Google for our top 10 keywords.
Alternatively, you can try and get technical with it.
- [O] Enhance website’s SEO performance to boost organic visibility.
- [KR] Increase the number of keywords ranking in Google’s top 10 by 30%.
- [KR] Improve website’s domain authority from 45 to 60.
- [KR] Reduce website’s average page load time by 20%.
- [KR] Increase organic traffic by 25%.
Lead Generation OKRs Examples
Leads are the core focal point of marketing — and yes, “core focal” is a tautology, but they are that important. You can have the most amazing website and the most useful content in the world, but if it doesn’t convert visitors into leads and leads into customers — you failed.
Inbound Marketing operates via content channels that attract leads to your content, and through it to your product. So you need to start with a content channel. For example:
- [O] Create a cool YouTube channel.
- [KR] Create a channel and fill it with content;
- [KR] Reach 1000 subscribers;
- [KR] Get the average watch time of one video at 15 minutes;
- [KR] Get 15% of Click-Through Rate Impressions.
Alternatively, you can aim for a higher level of abstraction and describe your desired final outputs as an Inbound Marketing OKR:
- [O] Build a powerful lead generation system.
- [KR] Finish product integration via LinkedIn lead generation forms;
- [KR] Find 5 new channel of leads generation;
- [KR] Attract 2 000 inbound leads per month to the website in total.
Content Marketing OKRs Examples
Technically, content marketing is a part of Inbound Marketing. That said, due to long-standing tradition, a lot of the time when people say “content marketing,” they mean specifically blogs and other written content. However, the same principles apply:
- [O] Develop the blog promotion strategy.
- [KR] Write 30 blog articles per quarter;
- [KR] Conduct interviews with 6 industry experts;
- [KR] Raise the number of blog subscribers to 3000l
- [KR] Add relevant infographics for at least 15 blog articles.
- [O] Revamp the content marketing strategy to engage and retain a larger audience.
- [KR] Increase monthly blog readership by 40%.
- [KR] Boost the average time spent on each content piece by 20%.
- [KR] Improve content engagement rate (comments, shares, likes) by 15%.
- [KR] Achieve a 10% increase in conversions from content marketing efforts.
Social Media OKRs Examples
We talked about how you generate content and how you can convert its consumers into leads — but that’s not the end of its lifecycle. You can significantly increase the effectiveness of your marketing by engaging directly with the audience and stimulating discussion — and social media are the best option for it.
For example, by having an active Facebook page you can attract an audience that might not be aware of your other channels. Or you can remind the bounced leads about your existence and attempt to reactivate them.
Here’s an example of how you could set your SMM OKRs:
- [O] Optimize social media strategy to increase engagement and reach.
- [KR] Boost total number of followers across all platforms by 25%;
- [KR] Increase average post engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) by 15%;
- [KR] Improve click-through rate from social media posts by 10%;
- [KR] Achieve a 20% increase in conversions from social media campaigns.
- [O] Improve involvement in Facebook.
- [KR] Raise reposts from 25 to 55 per month;
- [KR] Reach 20 comments per post;
- [KR] Boost likes per post from 200 to 500;
- [KR] Boost website traffic from Facebook by 50%.
Performance Marketing OKRs Examples
Performance Marketing is an exciting part of marketing since it combines inbound and outbound strategies to generate leads. It is also one of the most expensive, so there’s a lot of pressure to get your PPC campaigns right. Otherwise, you might end up melting a hole in your marketing budget on low-quality leads.
However, that’s why there are a lot of metrics for PPC, and you can easily design your OKRs around them. For example:
- [O] Update and launch PPC campaigns to further website promotion.
- [KR] Get at least 400 clicks per week from all campaigns;
- [KR] Boost Ad Quality Score from 4 to 9;
- [KR] Lower the cost of a click by 15% per month by optimizing the funnel;
- [KR] Increase purchases from sponsored ads by 15%.
- [O] Overhaul performance marketing campaigns to boost ROI.
- [KR] Increase the click-through rate on all ads by 20%.
- [KR] Lower the customer acquisition cost by 15%.
- [KR] Improve the conversion rate of ad traffic by 10%.
- [KR] Achieve a 15% increase in return on ad spend.
Brand OKRs Examples
Brand Marketing establishes and grows a relationship between the brand and the consumers. It is very close to PR, and often both disciplines cross over and intersect — especially regarding OKRs.
Brand marketing OKRs can look like this:
- [O] Make the brand more recognizable online.
- [KR] Find and speak to 15 key industry influencers;
- [KR] Perform as a partner at 5 industry conferences;
- [KR] Publish 20 press releases at third-party media;
- [KR] Boost the average number of brand mentions on the Internet from 500 to 1000 per month.
- [O] Strengthen brand positioning and recognition in the market.
- [KR] Increase brand awareness score by 20% in targeted markets.
- [KR] Improve net promoter score (NPS) from 40 to 60.
- [KR] Achieve a 15% increase in brand mentions on social media.
- [KR] Boost the click-through rate on branded content by 10%.
Conclusion
In conclusion, setting up OKRs for your marketing department is complex and requires a complete understanding of your organization’s pain points and desired outcomes. Whether it’s about optimizing your company’s website, boosting organic SEO rankings, creating engaging content, or strengthening your brand’s digital presence, OKRs must provide a clear direction and measurable outcomes to strive for. Without outcomes, they are just a lot of unnecessary overhead.
Understanding your company’s vision, mission, and strategic OKRs is paramount before setting up marketing OKRs. The goal should be to align marketing with the company’s overall objectives, leveraging your team’s strengths and addressing any weaknesses. This framework can give your marketing team clear, measurable goals and strategies, leading to more effective marketing campaigns and overall business success.
That said, now you have a decent starter for Marketing OKRs and should be able to design your own. And you can make the job simpler by using a dedicated OKR tool — like our very own OKR Board for JIRA. And if you still need assistance, Oboard OKR consulting team will be happy to help!
