Why OKRs are Martech’s Must-Have 3-Letter Acronym for 2022

Why OKRs are Martech’s Must-Have 3-Letter Acronym for 2022 -https://ift.tt/4WPyUdZ –

Sometimes a mess grows so large, even contemplating the task of cleaning it can feel overwhelming. Who hasn’t, in the face of a mountain, suddenly found extremely good reasons to look another direction? For digital marketing leaders, managing a marketing tech stack can feel this way. Portfolios have grown large and the products so interdependent that many have added tech in order to coordinate the tech (Hello CDPs!).
Marketers who’ve yet to prioritize martech maturity are at risk. Feature overlap between commonplace products — marketing’s alphabet soup of MMH, ESP, MCCM, MA, CDP, DAM, and so on — leads to low levels of utilization and eventually to dyspeptic CFOs. At more than a quarter of the CMO’s budget, roughly a third of capabilities go unused. Advanced teams use agile,iterative strategy and product champions to boost adoption, adjust roadmaps, and build cross-functional relationships (see Maturity Model for Managing Marketing Technology, Gartner subscription required).
What if you’re just at the beginning? What if you don’t have a martech strategy, a roadmap, or even executive support? How do you even get started?
A Quick Intro to OKRs
If scaling the mountain feels too Sisyphean, you’ll be pleased to hear of the newest TLA (three letter acronym) out of Silicon Valley: OKRs. Objectives and Key Results are a simple way to help martech teams attain results that matter, not just maintain KPIs. While not specific to marketing per se, OKRs can help you kick off, and even accelerate, your program for martech management.
OKRs emerged from Intel in the Andy Grove era and were used to great effect at Google. Recently popularized by John Doerr’s Measure What Matters, OKRs are a lightweight way to help teams, especially fusion teams —  cross-functional that blend business, tech, and data skills, to deliver innovations — say a new customer journey — tied to revenue, customer experience, or other objectives. OKRs only take a few hours to learn and require little more than a shared file to put in motion.
OKRs Connect Martech to Company Objectives
Let’s put OKRs in familiar terms. Suppose “personalization at scale” is one of your company’s 2022 priorities. You lead a cross-functional team tasked with standing up a CDP. You might connect, or localize, the company objective’s to your team as follows.

Sample Martech Objective and Key Results for Q1, 2022

Objective

Supercharge our Martech Stack to Personalize Every Interaction

Key Results

Complete data onboarding to the Smarthub CDP by Feb 15.
Move 50% of journeys to the CDP by EOQ
Integrate churn prediction data from the data warehouse into the customer profile and use in 3 tier 1 campaigns
Support data flow to journey analytics to identify new candidate journeys
Operationalize the new real-time lookalike model on 15% of the customer file
Maintain