Are OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) a good tool, or just another basic acronym that will further complicate your workflow? The truth is that OKRs can be great tools, but only if you use them the right way – especially for a marketing organization looking to gain a competitive edge. If they’re improperly leveraged, you can end up wasting time working around tasks rather than doing them head-on.

But if they’re properly leveraged, OKRs help organizations define clear goals and measure their progress towards achieving them. So if you’re looking for a way to ensure you set your company up for marketing success, Hive is one of the best OKR software to improve your overall process.

Hive has a range of features that can help you set objectives, track progress, and adjust your strategy. Tools like Hive’s Goals and Analytics features can help you set up your OKRs for success, while collaboration features link up your team to make knowledgeable changes to your strategy. And the best part is that you can try it free for 14-days.

In the meantime, let’s dig into 5 essential steps to help you set effective marketing OKRs.

1. Define your objectives

The first step towards setting OKRs is, of course, to define your objectives. Objectives are defined as the goals that you want to achieve. They should be specific, measurable, and achievable (or entirely SMART, ideally).

For example, if your objective is to increase website traffic through email marketing campaigns, you should define how much traffic you want to increase and within what time frame. If you don’t, your objective will be too nebulous and hard to achieve.

When setting objectives, keeping them aligned with your overall business goals is imperative. That means involving key stakeholders in the objective-setting process to ensure that everyone’s priorities are aligned. And once you have defined your objectives, you can move on to the next step, setting your key results.

2. Set your key results

Key results are the metrics that you will use to measure progress toward your objectives. Key results should be specific, measurable, and time-bound (or, again, if you can make them entirely SMART, that’s even better).

To continue with our example, if your objective is to increase website traffic, your key results could be: increase email-based traffic by 20% within the next six months.

Setting key results has to be completely achievable and perfectly aligned with your objectives. It doesn’t make much sense to get key results that don’t feed into your objective if you’re working with an OKR, so make sure that throughout the process, your key results stay relevant.

3. Involve your team

Setting OKRs is not a one-person job – it requires a fair amount of input from various team members or whichever stakeholders are involved in the project. Your team members have valuable insights that can help you set realistic OKRs, as they’re well aware of their own bandwidth and ability to execute tasks promptly. Involving your team in the process also creates a sense of ownership over the OKR and accountability for its refinement, which can help drive performance.

The best way to get your team to tap into the process of setting an OKR is to kick your communication up a notch by using Hive. Specifically, Hive has a feature called “Goals,” which allows teams to set objectives and key results. Your team members can then contribute their ideas, provide feedback, track progress, and communicate about completed action items in real time.

4. Regularly review processes

You don’t set and forget an OKR, and setting your OKR initially can vary drastically from how it will turn out. Consequently, setting an OKR is a longer-term process that requires review and adjustment on a regular basis – as much as weekly or even daily. Regular assessments help you identify areas where you need to adjust your strategy or make changes to your key results. And for marketing organizations in particular, these reviews are a good time to check out data about user engagement and see how current trends impact your key results.

Regular reviews also help teams celebrate your successes. These celebrations create a sense of accomplishment and motivation. And the best part is that you can build these wins right into Hive’s platform with Slack integrations (if you have a “Team Wins” channel).

Hive’s analytics feature also allows you to track advancement in achieving your objectives as they happen. You can also set up automated reports to be sent to your team at whichever increments you want, which can help keep everyone informed and enthused.

5. Adjust your strategy

Sometimes your OKRs can require a bit of pivoting, and you should be prepared to make necessary changes if things aren’t working out. This is especially true during the setting stages when you’re still experimenting with what might and might not work, so don’t get too tied to an idea right off the bat. During your check-ins, every team member should have a voice to provide their own valuable insights that can lead to informed decisions.

Hive’s “Action Cards” can make adjusting your strategy a breeze. They allow you to assign tasks and collaborate with your team – and they can be edited, added to, or proofed. Hive’s analytics feature is also applicable here to identify areas where you are not making progress, thus saving you time and energy on repetitive mistakes.

Use Hive to reach your Marketing OKRs

Are you ready to start setting some leadership goals for yourself or your organization? You’re in luck — Hive’s newest (and most exciting) feature is Goals. Everyone wants to know how they’re moving their organization forward, and your contributions are more than just tasks and projects. With Goals, you can set various goals, visualize progress, and keep everyone aligned in one centralized dashboard. You can also:

• Create one, ten, twenty, or more goals for your team, so everyone understands what they’re contributing to.
• Centralize and automate your goal tracking and reporting.
• Pull data from other systems into Hive to streamline operations and reporting.
• Share your goal or goals, assign the goal to relevant teammates, track activity, and give yourselves a deadline.
• Understand how your team and organization are pacing towards an individual goal or a set of goals.
• Color-coded designations allow an easy understanding of “on-track” items.
• When it’s time to review progress, accomplishments, and achievements, easily export all relevant information.

Want to get started? Start your free trial of Hive Goals today!