Marketing is the function where OKRs go wrong most predictably. The team lives in activity: campaigns launched, posts published, emails sent, events run. All of it is countable, so all of it looks like a Key Result. None of it is one. A campaign is a task. The outcome is what the campaign changed: pipeline, conversion, cost, demand you own rather than rent.
The rule that fixes most weak marketing OKRs fits in one sentence. Every Key Result is a measurable outcome with a baseline and a target, and the campaigns live underneath it as supporting work. If completing the activity guarantees the number moves, you wrote a task list with percentages on it.
The eight examples below use realistic mid-market B2B numbers. Steal the shape, not the figures.
Pipeline and demand
Objective: Make the sales team's quarter with pipeline they actually trust.
- KR1: Grow marketing-sourced qualified pipeline from EUR 3.2M to EUR 5M
- KR2: Lift SQL-to-opportunity acceptance rate from 61% to 80%
- KR3: Raise marketing's share of total new pipeline from 28% to 40%
The acceptance-rate KR is the one most teams skip, and it is the one that keeps this OKR honest. Pipeline volume alone invites junk leads; the acceptance rate measures whether sales agrees the pipeline is real. Put both in and the two numbers police each other.
Objective: Own our demand instead of renting it.
- KR1: Grow newsletter subscribers from 4,100 to 8,000
- KR2: Lift organic and direct share of new pipeline from 22% to 35%
- KR3: Increase average webinar registrations per event from 180 to 450
This works because every number describes an asset that persists after the quarter ends. The common failure is drifting back into paid metrics mid-quarter because they move faster. If the paid budget rises while this OKR is active, the team is voting against its own Objective.
Brand and category
Objective: Become the name people mention when the category comes up.
- KR1: Grow branded search volume from 1,900 to 3,000 per month
- KR2: Get included in 8 industry roundups and comparison articles, up from 2
- KR3: Raise share of voice against the category leader from 14% to 25%
Brand OKRs fail when they hide behind unmeasurable words like awareness. Branded search is the cleanest proxy a mid-market team can track weekly without buying a brand-tracking study, and roundup inclusions are a concrete, countable form of third-party validation.
Objective: Publish content that sells while the team sleeps.
- KR1: Grow content-influenced revenue from EUR 480k to EUR 900k
- KR2: Lift organic signups from content pages from 210 to 400 per quarter
- KR3: Raise the share of closed-won deals that touched content pre-sale from 35% to 60%
The trap here is attribution theology. Pick one attribution rule at the start of the quarter, write it into the KR, and stop relitigating it. A slightly wrong rule applied consistently beats a perfect rule renegotiated every review.
Website and conversion
Objective: Turn the website into the best rep on the team.
- KR1: Grow demo requests from 85 to 160 per quarter
- KR2: Lift visitor-to-signup conversion from 0.8% to 1.6%
- KR3: Cut pricing-page exit rate from 74% to 55%
Conversion OKRs are where marketing and product overlap, so name the owner. If the signup flow belongs to product, marketing owns traffic quality and the pages before the form, and the KRs should say so. Shared Key Results with no single owner produce quarters where everyone assumed someone else was moving the number.
Objective: Make every euro of paid spend defensible in the budget review.
- KR1: Reduce blended CAC from EUR 3,400 to EUR 2,600
- KR2: Shorten paid payback period from 19 months to 13
- KR3: Raise the share of spend on channels with tracked revenue from 55% to 95%
The third KR is quiet infrastructure work disguised as a metric, and that is fine. A quarter spent closing tracking gaps changes every future budget conversation. Just resist making all Key Results infrastructure; at least one number should be an outcome the CFO already cares about.
Marketing ops
Objective: Kill the end-of-month reporting scramble for good.
- KR1: Cut campaign reporting lag from 9 days to 1
- KR2: Raise attribution coverage of active campaigns from 60% to 92%
- KR3: Reduce weekly hours spent on manual reporting from 14 to 4
Ops OKRs earn their slot when the saved time is real and named. Fourteen hours a week is two working days of a marketer rebuilding spreadsheets. The risk is declaring victory on tooling that nobody adopts, which is why the lag KR measures the outcome and the coverage KR measures whether the system is actually wired in.
Objective: Launch into the new market without starving the core.
- KR1: Build new-market qualified pipeline from EUR 0 to EUR 600k
- KR2: Achieve a new-market demo-to-opportunity rate within 5 points of the core segment
- KR3: Hold core-segment pipeline at or above EUR 4M through the launch quarter
The third KR is the interesting one. Expansion OKRs usually measure only the new thing, and the core quietly erodes while attention shifts. Writing the floor into the OKR makes the trade-off visible, and forces the conversation early if both numbers cannot hold with current capacity.
Adapting these to your team
Copy the shape, never the targets. Your baselines decide realistic targets, and a stretch that lands around 70% achievement is calibrated about right. Two or three Objectives per team is the ceiling before focus dissolves; the examples above are a menu, and a team running all eight has planned a year, not a quarter. Score at the end of the cycle against the baselines you wrote down, and grade drafts before committing them. The free OKR grader checks structure, and the OKR template holds the baseline-target format used in every example here. If you are still deciding whether OKRs fit your stage at all, the honest comparison in how to pick the right goal framework is the place to start.
For more function-specific examples, see the companion posts on product OKRs, sales OKRs, and engineering OKRs.
The half nobody writes down
Writing the OKR is the easy half. The hard half arrives in week six, when the pipeline KR sits at EUR 3.6M, the campaigns behind it have quietly stalled, and nobody flags it until the review. Whether a Key Result can still be reached at the current pace of the work underneath it is a checkable fact, and the gap between the target and that pace is execution risk. Marketing teams that connect their OKRs to the actual campaign and content work in Vindaris get that check continuously, so the number that will miss announces itself while there is still a quarter left to fix it.