Is marketing integral to your company’s business operations, customer acquisition, and growth objectives? If it is, great – you don’t need to read any further. However, if you feel that there is room for improvement in the planning, goal-setting, or effectiveness of your marketing, it’s worth delving deeper into the topic.
Quick answers: tactical marketing planning
An OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting model that connects what you want to achieve (the Objective) to measurable outcomes (the Key Results) and the practical actions that get you there (Initiatives). In marketing, it aligns campaigns and channels with the company’s core growth objectives instead of running them as disconnected activities.
A KPI measures the ongoing health of an activity, telling you whether something is working. An OKR drives change, setting a specific, ambitious outcome to reach within a defined period, usually a quarter or half a year. In practice, the two work together: a Key Result often uses a KPI to track progress toward the Objective, but there can be many KPIs to indicate the performance on the operative level.
Start with 1–3 key objectives that reflect your core growth goals for the quarter or half-year. Define measurable Key Results for each, answering “what indicators show we are advancing this objective?” Then attach concrete Initiatives, the campaigns and actions, to each Key Result. Review objectives quarterly, metrics monthly, and actions weekly.
Objective: reach and activate a new target audience. Key Result: create initial contact through targeted marketing, reaching 50% of the potential audience. Initiatives: audience mapping across channels, a targeted LinkedIn campaign. The Objective is inspirational, the Key Results are measurable, and the Initiatives are the practical steps.
Because it ties every marketing action back to a business objective and makes progress measurable. It aligns sales, marketing, and other functions around shared goals, removes activity that serves no clear purpose, and creates a rhythm of monitoring and learning that improves results over time.
A good marketing plan is based on goals
Always start with growth objectives. A company can have various levels of goals, such as business objectives, sales targets, marketing goals, and so on. However, the more layered these goals are, the harder it is to keep them in mind to guide daily activities. Therefore, consider whether you can condense these goals into the company’s core growth objectives, aligning actions across different functions (sales, marketing, technical development, etc.).
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting model we have found effective in unifying company objectives and guiding activities. This model allows goals (Objectives) to be conveniently translated into metrics and numerical growth indicators (Key Results) and further into practical actions (Initiatives) to achieve these goals.
“Objectives define the channels, not the other way around. Most marketing plans go wrong the moment a channel is chosen before anyone has agreed on what it is meant to achieve.”
Aapo Kyllönen
Partner, Head of Tactical & Performance at Aboad
Define 1-3 key objectives for your company
The appropriate review interval for OKRs can be quarterly or semi-annually. Key growth objectives can include sales or marketing goals, profitability, efficiency, employee-related goals, or goals related to thought leadership, vision, and market position. Here are a few examples of what objectives might look like:
- Increasing sales compared to the same period last year
- Significant growth in the number of leads compared to the previous year without drastically increasing budgets
- Streamlining the purchasing process and improving efficiency by identifying bottlenecks
- A growing and profitable business
- A safe and desirable workplace
- Achieving thought leadership in the industry
- Reaching and activating a new target audience
- Increasing the number of newly registered users
- Reducing the cost per sales qualified leads (SQL)
- Increasing the conversion rate
- Improving customer retention and engagement
The most important aspect of defining a company’s growth objectives is that they reflect the company’s core values and growth prerequisites and are achievable. The objectives are set to be inspirational goals (e.g., “Increasing sales,” “Significant growth,” or “Achieving thought leadership”), while key results set the standard for more measurable metrics (e.g., “Doubling sales,” “Achieving +XX% of growth,” or “YY number of SQLs”).
Metrics guide actions
Setting the right metrics (key results) is essential for planning systematic and growth-oriented marketing. It’s good to find numerical values for metrics that can be tracked percentage-wise, but using binary metrics (yes/no) is sometimes justified. The main question when setting metrics is: “What indicators can we use to advance the achievement of the key objective?” Here are some examples of key objectives (O) and their derived metrics (KR):
O: Reaching and activating a new target audience
- KR1: Mapping target audiences in various channels = 0/1 (yes/no)
- KR2: Creating initial contact through targeted marketing; Reaching 50% of the potential target audience = 0/50%
O: Significant growth in the number of leads compared to the previous year without drastically increasing budgets
- KR1: Number of SQL leads XX = 0/XX leads
- KR2: Cost per SQL lead under XX euros = 0/XX€
- KR3: Increasing the conversion rate to XX% = 0/XX%
O: Improving customer retention and engagement
- KR1: Reducing the percentage of churning users to XX% = 0/XX%
- KR2: Increasing the percentage of active users to XX% = 0/XX%
- KR3: Growing the number of monthly active users by +XX% = 0/XX%
The OKR model works best when marketing metrics speak the same language as sales and finance. When a Key Result is defined in isolation from the numbers leadership actually follows, marketing risks optimizing for something the rest of the business does not recognize as progress. Aligning these metrics early makes the whole model more credible and easier to defend.
How to Unify Finance, Sales, and Marketing Metrics for Clear Growth Insight >
Set actions toward goals
At the final level of the OKR model are the initiatives (IN) aimed at achieving the goals. Each metric should have actions defined to promote its achievement. Actions might need to be changed or added as goal achievement is monitored – an initial comprehensive plan isn’t necessary. The focus should be on identifying the first steps to achieve the goals.
Actions can be individual campaigns, marketing, and tactical methods in specific channels, or practical actions needed to achieve the goal. Achieving the same goal and metric may require actions from multiple company functions. For example, “Streamlining the purchasing process” in a SaaS environment may require actions from sales, marketing, and technical development. Here are some examples of actions set for metrics:
KR: Number of SQL leads XX = 0/XX leads
- IN1: Marketing and audience building in the initial contact phase with Facebook marketing
- IN2: Generating leads through LinkedIn lead gen campaigns
- IN3: Retargeting campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn
- IN4: Email automation for users who abandoned their orders
KR: Increasing the conversion rate to XX% = 0/XX%
- IN1: Lead validation for sales to improve the accuracy of the potential target audience
- IN2: Conversion-focused advertising using Facebook’s dynamic targeting
- IN3: Identifying bottlenecks through analytics and behavioral data
- IN4: Technical development to remove identified bottlenecks from the purchase/order process
“An initiative is not just a step toward a Key Result. It is a hypothesis. Each action should teach you something that makes the next cycle sharper, so the plan compounds instead of resetting every quarter.”
Aapo Kyllönen
Partner, Head of Tactical & Performance at Aboad
Monitor, measure, and develop
This way, marketing and other functional activities are aligned to serve the company’s key growth objectives. Continuous goal monitoring, critical and systematic analysis of the impacts of actions, and ongoing testing of new measures are essential for development. If goals are set quarterly, progress on metrics should be tracked at least monthly, while action evaluation is best done weekly. The key questions for effective growth marketing are: “What has been done, what has been learned/achieved, and what should be done next based on this?”
The model also depends on clear ownership. An OKR framework does not fail because the goals were wrong; it fails when no one is accountable for a specific Key Result, or when decisions about it stall in unclear structures. Assign a named owner to each Key Result, and make sure they have the mandate to act on it.
Learn more about using the OKR framework in action >
If the practical actions and metrics align with your company’s goals, you are on the right track. However, if you feel that the goals are disconnected and different functions aren’t working towards a common goal, consider revisiting your goal-setting approach. A good marketing plan is simple and answers one question: “How will we achieve our set goals?” The depth of planning various tactical methods to achieve these goals is another matter altogether.
“OKRs are worthless if they live in a document nobody opens. Keep the objective visible in every meeting, and let it decide what deserves attention and what does not.”
Aapo Kyllönen
Partner, Head of Tactical & Performance at Aboad
What is a tactical marketing plan and why is it so important >