Measuring Success: Choosing the Right Key Results for Marketing OKRs [With OKR Template]

Whether you’re in the travel industry, the automotive sector, or any other commercial operation, business goals are most likely a driving force behind your marketing strategy. But as important as these goals are, you probably won’t see the results you’re looking for without the support of a purpose-built goal-setting framework.

OKRs, short for objectives and key results, could be the perfect solution to help you measure the success of your marketing strategy. This simple framework allows businesses to create – and keep track of – clear, actionable goals with measurable outcomes.

But it’s not always as simple as setting your OKRs and hoping they’ll lead you to success – your approach must be intentional and strategic. Choosing the right key results can be your one-way ticket to marketing success, which is why we’re sharing exactly what makes a good key result, along with our top tips for setting yours.

What makes a good key result?

An effective key result should be measurable, actionable, timely and aligned with your business objectives. It details the intended outcome and how you aim to achieve the result. With that in mind, each of your key results also needs to go hand-in-hand with a clear, relevant objective.

For example, if one of your digital marketing objectives is to improve social media engagement, examples of effective key results could be something like:

• Increase paid social media advertising conversion rate by 5% each quarter
• Improve brand awareness by launching a meaningful influencer partnership
• Introduce monthly cross-departmental meetings focused on social media engagement growth

Strong key results vs. weak key results

The weaker your key results are, the less likely you are to see positive outcomes. Vague timelines or undetermined metrics can be difficult to track, causing confusion about what your priorities are.

On the other hand, a strong key result with clear timelines and metrics will make it easier to monitor your progress and keep teams focused on meeting the intended outcomes. 

Key metrics vs. vanity metrics

Vanity metrics focus on surface-level metrics, and while they might look exciting at first, there’s often very little real substance to them. While we wouldn’t say you need to ignore them completely, it’s better to focus on key metrics like engagement time, bounce rate and lead generation that can help your understanding marketing performance and shape future strategies. More importance should be placed on these kinds of metrics since they drive business outcomes.

One of the main reasons that vanity metrics can be misleading is that they aren’t usually tied to business goals or outcomes. So, if you’re trying to find metrics to explain conversions or ROI, vanity metrics like social media likes or comments won’t help prove that your digital marketing efforts have been worthwhile. 

How to identify the right key results

Sometimes, it’s easier said than done to identify key results that will provide tangible benefits for your business, but it’s not impossible. Here are a few tips to bear in mind when creating yours:

Aligning key results with business priorities

Having a clear understanding of overarching business priorities can help shape your key results. By aligning each key result with these main business objectives, you can ensure that initiatives, projects or tasks undertaken will provide value in all the right areas – and contribute to the success of the entire business.  

Involving cross-functional teams to ensure relevance

Your OKR task force should include people from different departments and at all levels of the business, so that key results remain relevant, useful and clear for everyone who’s involved.

Using data-driven insights to define measurable outcomes

Struggling to ensure your key results are defined and measurable? One of the easiest ways to overcome this is by using data-driven insights. In other words, making sure reports and data are consistently being generated so that they can be used to highlight areas for improvement. For example, if conversions from paid ads are down 15% on the previous quarter and one of your objectives is to improve social media and website engagement, you could use this data to come up with relevant, measurable outcomes.

Common mistakes to avoid

Understanding the most common mistakes businesses make when creating key results, and avoiding them, can be just as important as knowing how to identify an effective key result. So, here are a few of the main pitfalls, as well as the actions you can take to prevent them from reducing OKR effectiveness.

Choosing too many key results

Overloading your OKRs with too many key results is an easy mistake to make, but it can ruin the effectiveness of your strategy by pulling your team in too many directions. When everyone is stretched in this way, it could mean meeting fewer objectives.

To avoid this, simply set a manageable limit per objective. This will depend on the size of your business and the available resource set aside for working on these key results, but as a general rule, 2-4 is normally the right amount. 

Overlooking the importance of regular evaluation and adjustment

Another common mistake is overlooking the importance of regularly evaluating your key results and adjusting each one accordingly. If you forget about your key results, you could be under or over-achieving without knowing. Regular evaluation is what will let you spot any issues which could go unaddressed.

Steer clear of this mistake by setting up regular meetings with key team members to ensure accountability for OKR progress.

Download your free OKR Template

Ready to give your marketing goals a shake-up? With our free, downloadable OKR Template, we’re helping you swap ineffective goal-setting and tedious progress tracking for a simple and effective method of measuring success that slots straight into your business strategy.

Don’t have the time to create OKRs yourself? Our digital experts can take a look at your business objectives and create manageable, achievable OKRs based around them for you. Head here for more info or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.