Setting and tracking OKRs for marketing is a great way to ensure the marketing team contributes to the overall company goals in the best possible way.
If you work in marketing, you’ll know that prioritising between initiatives is often a challenge. There are so many things a marketing team can do, and it’s easy to either drown in busy work or get stuck in analysis paralysis. Another common challenge is to align the whole team around common goals and decide on how to track progress.
Recommended reading: OKRs – A complete guide to Objectives & Key Results
Objectives & Key Results is a goalsetting framework
There’s a myriad of marketing KPIs to get lost in, so how will you know which ones really matter? Many marketing teams get tangled up in vanity metrics, reporting on too many things in too much detail, while still not making the bottom-line contribution that really is, or at least should be, the end game.
Luckily, there is a remedy for all the confusion, and it spells OKRs. This is short for Objectives & Key Results, a goalsetting framework that works miracles for marketing teams in need of structure, alignment, and focus.
Ideally, OKRs should be implemented in and adopted in the whole organization. That’s when they have the greatest impact. But whether adopted at full scale or only at the team level, the OKR framework is incredibly well suited for marketing.
How we work with OKRs at Eletive
At Eletive, we use OKRs for our whole organization, but the ways of actually working with them differ slightly between the different departments. We use the Eletive platform to set, visualise and track Objectives and Key Results for the whole organization and the teams, and then the teams can shoes how to manage the projects and initiatives that will help us reach those objectives.
Depending on their needs and preferences, some teams use Jira, others use Trello, and some use the Eletive platform, to manage their tasks. But the Eletive platform is the Single Source of Truth that we use to create transparency and accountability for all the teams and to make sure we’re all aligned and pulling in the same direction.
How to set OKRs for marketing
When setting your Objective and Key Results for the marketing team, it’s helpful to keep the SMART goal framework in mind. SMART stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-bound. This is a great guide for crafting your objectives. However, SMART has no focus on the “how” part. While SMART goals pose the question “what is the goal?”, OKRs add the important layer of “how do we get there?"
Benefits of OKRs for marketing
When setting your marketing Objectives and Key Results, it’s essential to focus on the metrics that really matter. In the Eletive marketing team, we find that the discussions that stem from our OKR planning sessions spur this process on in a really great way. Good marketing OKRs will help the team focus on the goals and initiatives that move the needle for the business.
For example, a common goal for marketing teams is to increase website traffic. But is that really the goal? Or is the goal to increase relevant traffic, meaning, traffic that actually converts? This kind of reasoning applies to many marketing metrics, and making sure to pick the right ones is fundamental to OKR planning success. You want to pick the metrics and KPIs that drive the most desirable behaviors and actions, and that reflect your actual goals.
Marketing OKR examples
Objective: Reduce the bounce rate on our website
Key result: Embed videos on 3 high-bounce rate pages
Key result: Add a minimum of 3 internal links to all pages
Key result: Reduce loading time with 25%
Objective: Improve our SEO strategy
Key result: Implement an SEO tracking tool
Key result: Get 3 keywords to rank in position 1-10
Key result: Optimise all our meta descriptions
Objective: Increase the number of inbound leads
Key result: Increase referral traffic by 20%
Key result: Increase conversion rate with 25%
Key result: Build a new landing page for our paid ads campaigns
OKR software and OKR tools for marketing
Eletive is a People Success Platform that helps organisations build workplaces where people thrive and perform at their best. We offer intelligent employee engagement surveys and performance management tools, including OKR software and OKR tools for marketing as well as all other departments in the organisation. Our platform entails a complete toolkit for People Success:
Get in touch to learn how we can support your organisation!
