Marketing OKR examples: How to set great marketing OKRs

If you’re working in Marketing and feeling swamped by your to-do list, these example OKRs for Marketing teams can help you achieve clarity and focus while delivering against company strategy.

OKRs behave like glue and can connect your team allowing you to focus on the activity that delivers the greatest impact.

Before we dive into example OKRs, let’s look at how OKR can be structured within a Marketing team. OKR can be organized differently depending on how large the team is.

Structuring OKR for different company sizes

Marketing OKRs in large companies

If you’re in a Marketing department with several teams, each responsible for a Marketing function, department heads may want to set up department-level Group OKRs and have functional teams align to them. In this structure, Group OKRs for departments represent high-level OKRs, which align up with those of the Company OKRs (which contribute to the Ultimate goal. Each team creates their own quarterly OKRs to align with and drive those of the department. In Perdoo, Group OKRs for teams can be set as Sub-Objectives of departments’ Group OKRs.

This is the 4-level structure:

1. Ultimate OKR (5 to 10 years)
2. Company OKRs (annually)
3. Group OKRs: Department (quarterly)
4. Group OKRs: Team (quarterly)

Marketing OKRs in small companies

For smaller companies where the Marketing teams consist, for instance, of a single person for each marketing function, there’s only one level of Group OKRs. These Group OKRs are set each quarter and align directly to the annual Company OKRs.

This is the most common 3-level structure:

1. Ultimate OKR
2. Company OKRs
3. Group OKRs: Team

Marketing OKR examples for process optimization

The type of OKRs used by Marketing teams can be categorized into 2 main types. The first approach is to set OKRs to optimize Marketing processes or operations. Funnel optimization is a good example, and can be expressed as an example OKR like this:

Objective: Create a watertight, high-performing Marketing funnel

• Key Result: Website visit to trial conversion rate of 10%
• Key Result: Trial to Opportunity conversion rate of 65%
• Key Result: Opportunity to Close conversion rate of 75%

Besides the OKR itself, you’ll need to write down your Initiatives. Initiatives are the things you do in order to achieve an OKR. Here are some examples for the OKR above:

Initiative: A/B test homepage redesign
Initiative: A/B video in trial drip emails
Initiative: Survey customers post-trial
Initiative: Extend trial period to 30 days
Initiative: Build email and in-app message flow for lapsed trials

Campaign-based OKR examples

For campaign-based OKRs, a standard Marketing playbook can be adapted into an OKR with KPIs turned into Key Results and Initiatives making up campaign activities. For example:

3 golden rules for marketing OKRs and Initiatives

However, you decide to use OKR for Marketing, make sure you follow these simple rules:

• An Objective sets a clear direction and provides motivation. It should be inspirational and should NEVER contain numbers.
• Key Results tell you whether you're getting closer to your Objective or not. They should ALWAYS contain metrics you can influence but don’t fully control.
• Initiatives are the things you DO in order to achieve an OKR. You need to have full power over accomplishing them.

For more example OKRs and common Marketing metrics used for Key Results, make sure to grab a copy of our guide How to Write OKRs for Marketing Teams.