🧭 How to Create a 2024 Marketing Plan You'll Actually Use, with One Simple Framework (& ChatGPT)

“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” - Yogi Berra.

This quote from the legendary baseball player turned philosopher sums up why Objective and Key Results (OKRs) are so valuable.

Without a clear destination, it's impossible to chart the path.

And with 2024 a week away, it’s time to lock in your big goals (and more importantly, how you’ll achieve them).

OKRs outline the destination and mile markers to track progress.

For marketers, OKRs create focus amidst the noise of tactics, channels, and vanity metrics.

Rather than a spray and pray approach, OKRs systematically align teams around objectives and measurable results.

I was introduced to OKRs when I was leading the marketing at Jungle Scout in 2018, and found it immensely helpful to distill a ton of different opportunities and distractions into the few things that should be most impactful.

So let's dive into how you can create OKRs, and use ChatGPT to accelerate the process and outline the exact steps you need to achieve your marketing goals in 2024.

💡 Strategy: Leverage AI to Set Powerful Marketing OKRs

Google pioneered the use of OKRs at scale (inspired by Intel’s use of the system), driving growth from 40 employees in 1999 to over 140,000 today.

And Google still uses OKRs (as well as Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix and more).

Source: Mint

Here are some of the key benefits of using OKRs for marketing teams

• Alignment: ChatGPT can quickly outline objectives and key results tailored to your business to cascade top-level goals down to specific marketing outcomes. This ensures every effort ladders up into meaningful impact.
• Focus: With so many potential initiatives, it's impossible to do everything. ChatGPT can provide a framework for your team to prioritize the 3-5 most critical objectives for the quarter. This focus helps marketing activities stay centered on driving outcomes despite the daily chaos.
• Accountability: ChatGPT can assign clear owners and cadences to your OKRs so tasks don't slip through the cracks. Public goals creates positive peer pressure as teams support each other.
• Agility: While the objective remains fixed, ChatGPT can help modify key results and approaches if needed to adapt in dynamic market conditions. The key is using ChatGPT and AI to quickly outline objectives and key results tailored to your marketing needs. This creates focus amidst the noise to drive growth.

🔍 Use Case: Marketing OKRs Aligned to Your Goals

ChatGPT can help create a set of marketing focused OKRs tailored to your specific business objectives and growth goals.

If you’re a content marketer, you may have an OKR like this:

Objective: Increase lead generation through content distribution

Key Results:

• Grow monthly website visitors from 5,000 to 10,000
• Increase email subscriber list from 1,000 to 2,500
• Improve website conversion rate from 2% to 5%

Suppose you’re a social media marketer, you may have an OKR like this:

Objective: Amplify reach on LinkedIn

Key Results:

• Publish 2 posts per week
• Achieve 5k post clicks per month
• Grow connections to 500 high-quality leads

Note that the OKRs have qualitative, ambitious objectives paired with 3-5 quantitative, time-bound key results that define what needs to happen to achieve the objective.

The best OKRs focus effort, are measurable and challenging yet realistic enough that achieving 60-70% of them is considered good performance.

🤖 Prompt: Create OKRs with ChatGPT

Only you know the goals and current context of your marketing.

However, once you feed the details and goals to ChatGPT, you’ll be amazed at what you get in return.

This prompt will ask you to include all of the relevant context that you can provide to get your OKRs set for the year. The more details and specifics you can provide, the better!

Use this prompt and add your personal information in the [placeholder text]:

Act as my marketing consultant and OKR specialist named [name]. You are experienced in  developing high-impact marketing strategies and world-class OKR frameworks for [types of companies].

Please develop a set of prioritized marketing focused OKRs for my [type of company and niche]. Ask me any clarifying questions first about my marketing objectives, target customers, budget, business goals, assets, competitive landscape etc.

Then provide a framework I can use to generate a list of the top 3-5 high level marketing objectives and measurable key results underneath each one to track progress.

Ensure the objectives and key results you provide meet the following criteria:

- Objectives are inspirational, aligned with business goals, and time bound
- 3-5 Key results per objective that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound
- There is clear ownership and ways to track progress identified

Make your recommendations detailed and actionable for my marketing team to implement. Provide your best advice on OKRs as an experienced marketing consultant.        

Here are the details that I got after entering the prompt above for SuperMarketers:

Here is one of the objectives that ChatGPT created based on the information I provided.

🔬Expand: Generate Actionable Marketing Initiatives from Your OKRs

Once you’ve been through the prompt above to get your OKRs, you can drill down and have ChatGPT outline some high level strategies, based on each channel:

And break it down into timelines:

From here, you can definitely dive in deeper for each week, each tactic, and then leverage ChatGPT to help do the work.

The beauty is in continuing to have an interactive “conversation” with ChatGPT to build out your plan in granular detail.

We can use the OKR framework to create detailed and tactical marketing initiatives including:

• Initiative Overview
• Proposed Start and End Dates
• Overarching Strategy
• Primary Channels
• Success Metrics

The OKR framework lays the foundation. Expanding it into actionable tactics brings clarity on how we'll actually achieve these goals.

You can expand further by including budget estimates, assets needed, and cross-functional stakeholder identification.

📖 Resources: More on OKRs & More on 2024 Marketing Plans

To make OKRs truly effective, you need buy in across teams and ways to monitor progress.

John Doerr, godfather of OKRs, has a book on the topic (I have not read it though), and a website which has a ton of great content.

And the guys at the Marketing Against the Grain podcast also recently had a great session on creating marketing plans for 2024. Two insights I liked in this video:

1. Overstrategizing can hinder success, and it's crucial to simplify your strategy and allocate your budget effectively.
2. Many people fail in their marketing plans because they lack clarity on why they are pursuing certain strategies and goals.

This should be a good complement to the OKR framework:

Hope that helps you get clarity on the planning for 2024. See you next week for the last post of the year. Until then, stay Super, Marketers!

Gen

PS: In Southern California for the holidays, unfortunately it’s been grey and rainy but when you haven’t seen the beach in a while, there’s still fun to be had!