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When people think of marketing, they might think of “Just Do it,” and “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Notice how we didn’t need to mention the company behind the campaign! That’s how successful these organizations have been in their marketing strategies.
You may have heard the saying, “Impactful Marketing is telling powerful stories.” We disagree wholeheartedly – Marketing is much, much more than that.
The best marketers know exactly how to create a campaign, build the right strategy, develop memorable content, analyze data, and measure success; that’s where OKRs come in. Although Marketing is metrics-driven by nature, OKRs help you identify what’s working and what isn’t – so you can focus your efforts and minimize risks. In short, OKRs ensure your marketing efforts align with the company strategy and create outcomes.
Everyone knows that the Marketing team of any company has multiple focus areas – e.g. Product marketing, social media marketing, email marketing… But we’re not going to focus on that.
Instead, we’ll guide you through three examples from the marketing perspective. As we comb through the best practices for leveraging OKRs to empower your marketing growth, we hope that this will kickstart your own ‘successful’ marketing strategy that is as powerful as “Got Milk?”
OKRs is a strategy execution framework that relies heavily on critical thinking, making it easy for good marketers to leverage this tool to see outcomes. The first insight one gets is that OKRs will not magically make your problems disappear. It will, however, make it easy for you to see what you should do and what will/won’t work for you.
You need clarity on two things before you can find success in your Marketing OKRs.
Your marketing objectives will (ideally) align with your company’s strategy – so, if that’s ambiguous, that’s where you should start! Using the approach of a quarterly perspective: What is your company’s goal for this quarter? Next, think about how you and your team can contribute to helping the company achieve its goals.
Once you have clarity on your company’s goals and the ways in which you can contribute, you can start understanding OKRs and crafting your own.
You can’t leverage a tool if you don’t know how it works. Hopefully, you already know the basics of OKRs. Here’s a quick recap:
Objectives define the vision and tell you what you need to accomplish.
Key Results tell you if you’re making progress toward your Objective.
Tasks and activities are what you need to do to get there.
What sets OKRs apart from other frameworks is that it is inherently aspirational. It makes your teams stretch, experiment, and collaborate to achieve challenging goals. If your OKRs feel easy and everyday, then you’re doing it wrong. Fortunately, we’ve already identified some common OKR traps for you to avoid.
Now that we have clarity on the relationship between you, your company’s strategy, and OKRs, we can start crafting!
The first thing that a new marketing team would work on is to spread awareness about the company, also known as Brand Visibility. People who don’t recognize your brand will not think of finding your services, even if your services are the best solution to their pain points.
Think again of the successful marketing campaigns that we spoke of earlier. You may not be a sporty person, but you know that Just Do It means Nike! This is the ultimate goal of any Marketing team – to make your brand stand out to the extent that people who don’t even fall in your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) know about your brand and what you’re selling.
Here’s an OKR to increase your brand awareness:
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At the end of the day, driving revenue is one of the most important goals that any company can have. The Marketing team has the power here, simply because building a relationship between the company and customers is what will lead to revenue growth.
What does this boil down to? People should be aware of your services, then convinced to try your services – and hopefully, when they try them, they’ll keep buying them! Here’s an OKR that will make it happen for your team:
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Marketing activities require a fair bit of repetition and sponsorship. Using a marketing automation tool may eventually reduce CPL (Cost per lead), since your team can then focus on executing the tasks that require a human touch, instead of repetitive, robotic tasks.
As an experienced Marketer, you’ll know that time is money. Automation can move those boring tasks out of the way and clear up the space for you to focus on getting creative with strategies and data. That’s how you’ll come up with a marketing campaign that goes viral!
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Glad you’ve made it this far! Hopefully, these OKRs and perspectives will help you launch an impactful marketing strategy in the next quarter.
However, if you feel like there’s more you would like to learn about OKRs, you can take any of the following actions:
Bani is an OKR enthusiast who anchors content and marketing at Fitbots OKRs. She loves spreading the love of OKRs to enrich workplaces and collaborating to create engaging content for her readers.
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