Marketing OKRs: real examples, explained

This looks like a collaboration between product and marketing, maybe a shared OKR. It's very clear what it wants to achieve. It attacks a specific part of the customer journey, so it has focus in that sense. Looking at how broad this is and how ambitious the targets are, maybe this is a yearly OKR, and then it could work. If this is on a quarterly basis, there's very little chance that the team will move all of this in one single go, maybe not even in a year. It's targeted, but it tries a little bit too much. It attacks one issue from very many angles.

My recommendation to the team would be to focus in on one of these, for example the trial-to-paid conversion, and see if they can build out more key results around it. That would add some clarity on how they're solving it, and not only the generic outcome focus here. Overall it's very strong and shows a mature team that has actually been able to construct an OKR that targets a specific issue like this.

Overall, a great marketing OKR, very clear. You could say the objective is maybe a little too generic or a little too sales-pitchy, in a sense, because it's coming from marketing. It could definitely connect better to strategy or overall team effort, but you see here three clearly outcome-focused, measurable key results from a marketing team. Which is great, and they are quite creative, but they're not impossible to measure.

This is a very strong OKR. Clear focus on a clear outcome, a clear change the team wants to achieve. The minor issue is key result two: raising organic visitors reaching a signup surface. I don't think anyone outside the team would really understand what that means. It is a little technical, but not complex enough to be a problem with the OKR. And on high-intent organic landing pages, hopefully the team already has a clear definition of which pages count. That is not something to invent as you start measuring. It is just for clarity, so you know what you set out to achieve and what actually matters.

Looking at the numbers, this is very ambitious for a team OKR, especially if it sits on a quarter. To move the needle this far you would need quite a few people on it, or a lot of SEO resources. You will also not make this kind of shift every quarter. This is a one-time real bump, so it sits a little on the too-ambitious side.

This is an example of a problematic OKR, but also of what an OKR can look like for many teams starting out with the framework. In many cases it can be worthwhile to run a quarter with something like this, to learn and understand what the issues really are with this kind of OKR. Overall we are lacking on most parameters here. There is no why or inspiration in the objective, and the key results are not outcomes or results. These are pure tasks to complete, or ambitions without measurability, like grow social media followers.

An improved OKR would have an objective more like: penetrate our core market with increased brand awareness. Then a key result that actually measures brand awareness, maybe one that measures direct traffic to the website, and another that sets a target for how many large publications or search PRs should generate, for example.