What’s Holding Your Publication Back From Going Digital?

July 06, 2015 at 01:00PM

Few things are more frustrating than pouring your time and effort into creating a great publication for your business, only to find that your hard work isn’t translating digitally.

To effectively push your content through multiple channels - online, mobile, social, or email - you’ve got to put a lot of thought into the technical components that support your publication’s strategy. To help you get to the root of the problem, we’ve identified five of the biggest mistakes that publishers make in getting their publication to go digital successfully.

5 Reasons Digital Might Be Getting the Best of You 

You’re Not Paying Attention To Your Website Traffic

Your audience is your livelihood, your bread and butter.  If you’re don't understand who they are and how they tick, you’re missing a big opportunity to flex your digital muscles by serving users personalized content that matters to them. 

You have little to no insight into how a person reads your print magazine or journal. With a digital publication however, you can track audience behavior online to gain insight into their interests, how and why they’re making decisions, and even how they got to your site in the first place.

Use this data to segment your content and ads. You’ll be able to monetize your audience better for your advertisers if you’re pairing content with a reader's interests to increase the likelihood that they will take action. These more accurate “matches” between content and reader are a major differentiator for advertisers looking to sponsor content online. 

You Aren’t Offering Enough Variety To Your Advertisers

Are you only offering advertisers banner ads, with no other options? If you aren’t providing differentiation in your media kit, advertisers may go elsewhere, especially if your one limited option isn’t quite the right fit.

Be sure to have a wide variety of digital products to choose from, ranging from simple to more complex. Banner ads are a great fit for advertisers who want something quick, easy and fairly inexpensive per click or impression.

But for those advertisers who want to invest in more powerful down-funnel options, and are willing to pay for more tangible results, it would be beneficial to offer them sponsored content options with more precise targeting capabilities.

You’re Lost In Mobilegeadon

The mobile world isn’t the easiest to navigate, but it’s becoming crucial to learn how to do so. People are reading way more content on mobile—magazines saw a 65.3% growth in their mobile web audience in 2015, compared to print and digital at 0.2%—so you can see the opportunity you’re missing if you don’t invest in this area. 

And with 27% of consumers ready to leave your site from their phone if it isn’t mobile-optimized, without responsive or mobile-friendly design, you won't be able to keep people on your site long enough to keep them engaged, let alone get them to subscribe.

Look into options to make your website and email mobile-friendly (content offers included!), it’s well worth the effort.

Your Data Lives In Silos 

Do you have all of your data in separate, unconnected databases?  If so, you’ve gotten yourself into a situation where it’s nearly impossible to get a complete or clear picture of your readers. While you can theoretically market based on website behavior, subscription information, or any other data you might have on a particular reader, combining this data is a manual and very tedious process that doesn’t allow you to see more cause and effect or big-picture behavioral patterns. You’re really missing the opportunity to have much more powerful and relevant marketing automation.

When you can combine all the data on one person and look at it as a whole, your chances of providing them content that’s the best fit increases a lot. But this is hard when those data sets aren’t talking to each other!

For instance, let’s say you have subscription information in a database with your sales team, and reader site behavior in another database with your marketing team. By combining them, you could serve customers a series of targeted emails leading up to their renewal date so they’re reminded of the value of your publication right as they need to take action.

Watch Our On-Demand Webinar Unifying Your Publishing Database

You Haven’t Cleaned Out Your Email Lists 

If you’re still sending out generic, untargeted emails that lack personalization or contextual content, you’re guaranteed to see poor performance across the board—low open rates, abysmal clickthroughs, few conversions, and probably a lot of unsubscribes.

Additionally, if you’re using paid lists to deliver content, you run the risk of throwing content at people who don’t actually want to see it.

Instead of making these mistakes, pay attention to what actions your readers are taking with your email outreach, and clean out the low-performing portion of your audience, you’ll end up with a list that might be smaller, but will be significantly higher-performing.

The other problem with email lists? Especially if they’re siloed, you may be sending too many emails to your readers—subscription renewals, newsletters, events, special publications, etc. Combining these lists or creating coordinated email schedules will minimize this and reduce the risk of reader fatigue.

Don’t get stuck making a great publication that you aren’t able to deliver to the right people online. If any of the above sounds familiar to you, a quick fix could prove the key to connecting with a relevant audience and making your hard work pay off.

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10 Things to Double-Check Before You Begin Your Next Campaign Analysis

July 06, 2015 at 12:00PM

I've made my fair share of analytics mistakes in the past. In fact, I even wrote an article about it so that you don't have to learn them the hard way too. 

And while I knew it would be helpful to address the mistakes people commonly make during their analysis, I realized that list left out the things that you can mess up before your analysis even begins. I'm not talking about how you analyze your information, but rather how your marketing software gathers the data in the first place.

In order to properly collect data, there are certain things that you need to set up a certain way. Some of these considerations are specific to your company, and can skew your data if you forget to do them (or do them wrong). Others involve how you set up your software to gather data in the first place, and can have equally as frustrating consequences if done incorrectly. 

Check these things off your list, and you are home free. Forget to do them, and you're stuck with incorrect data (and a headache). 

To help you avoid a big miss, I've compiled a list of little things to look for before you dive into your next analysis.

10 Things to Double-Check Before You Begin Your Next Campaign Analysis

1) Do you have the right domain selected?

You may have multiple domains that you need to track throughout the month. Maybe you have one for your main website, one for your blog, and another for your landing pages. No matter how your domains are set up, it is important to make sure that you are reporting on the right one.

If you are an international company, you may have domains for different countries or languages. When you do your reporting, it can be difficult to keep track of which domain has which goal. To make sure your goals and results are aligning, pay close attention to which domain you select each time. 

2) Do you have the right time period selected?

After you have the right domain selected, you should also make sure the right time period is selected. While it's a natural instinct just to report on what appears on the dashboard without checking the time, that could easily lead to careless mistakes.

For example, many of us do end of the month reporting on the first day of the next month. At that point your reports have probably shifted from the previous month to the current month. With that said, you'll want to make sure that you adjust the time range to reflect the previous month that you want to report on. (This rule applies to end of the week reporting too.)

Additionally, if you are comparing this month's progress to the previous month, make sure that the accurate month is reflected before you begin your analysis. 

3) Do you need to exclude certain sources?

If you own a specific channel of marketing -- such as paid or email marketing -- you may only want to report on one source instead of all of your sources as a whole. (At HubSpot, the different marketing channels we use to execute our marketing campaigns are known as Sources.) When sources are all presented one page, it can be easy to mistake the numbers from one channel with the numbers from another. To avoid any confusion, I suggest filtering your sources to hone in on one specific channel at a time. 

4) Have you excluded your company’s IP?

It's considered a best practice to regularly monitor how much traffic you get to the pages on your site. And while you certainly want this number to be high, you don't want it to reflect the page views that come from your colleagues and employees, as this will skew your data.

For example, imagine that you have 10 employees at your business, and each of them looks at different pages on your website an average of five times a day. That means that they are contributing an additional 50 views a day, 350 views a week, and up to 1,500 views a month. That data can completely change your progress toward your monthly goals. 

To avoid this, your website should be able to exclude your company's IP. If you are a HubSpot customer, here are some instructions on how to do it.

5) Are you tracking visitors who aren't in your target geography?

Not every business can market to every country in the world. This means that you need to pay close attention to the visitors who are in your target geography.

Let's say your target geography is North America, and you are getting 1,000 visits a month to your website from North America. However, you also find that you are getting another 1,000 visits a month to your website from Europe. If you are reporting your visits as 2,000 instead of 1,000, you are going to skew your data because you can only work with and nurture the people from North America.

To ensure that you're reporting on the right audience, take a close look at the IP of all people coming to your website. You can then start to segment based on people who are in your target geography to avoid spending time and resources on those who are not. 

6) Are you using UTM parameters to tag certain promotions?

When you run any marketing campaign, it is important to track how every single person is interacting with your marketing -- even if the interaction occurs outside of your website. For example, let's say that you are running a promotion on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to your website. Some tools may automatically bucket that as social media, leaving you with no indication of which social platform generated more traffic. 

Enter UTM parameters.

In this situation, UTM parameters would serve as tags that allow you to differentiate the traffic generated between the two sources.

If you are a HubSpot customer, you can use the Tracking URL Builder to achieve this. The Tracking URL Builder will walk you through exactly what information you need in your UTM parameters to ensure you are not making a mistake when creating yours. It will also let you know where your information will be bucketed in the Sources Report.

If you are not a HubSpot customer, Google offers a similar tool that you can use. 

7) Did you forget to put necessary tracking code on your site?

Before you start placing links to your website anywhere, you need to make sure you have the proper tracking code installed on your website. This will ensure that you are tracking traffic coming to your site, gathering proper lead intelligence about visitors coming to your website, and turning up insight to help you improve the amount of traffic you get to your website.

Depending on where you host your site, you may not have to worry about this step. For example, if your website is hosted on the HubSpot Marketing Platform, you will automatically have the proper tracking code on all of your pages. However, if your website is hosted elsewhere, you will need to put tracking code on your pages. Here is more information on how to install tracking code.

If you have been working on marketing campaigns that drive traffic to your site and do not see an increase in traffic, that may be a good indication that you do not have your tracking code set up properly. Without this information, it will be really hard -- if not impossible -- to segment your database to deliver more personalized marketing experiences. 

8) Do you have a plan for tracking an offline campaign?

It may seem hard to track an offline campaign -- how are you supposed to know how many people came to your trade show booth?

As a result, we sometimes just bucket this into the "other" campaign and think very little about how to track it. However, without knowing how many leads and customers we generate from these offline campaigns, it becomes difficult to allocate resources appropriately. 

The next time you are about to do a trade show, consider making a plan for how you can track people coming to your website. This can be as simple as putting a tracking URL on all of the resources you hand out instead of just using your regular homepage URL. That way whenever anyone visits your site, it will be attributed to the trade show. (For more on how to do this, refer back to #6 on this list.) 

9) Do you have a clear understanding of what your metrics mean?

Before you even begin to do your analysis, you need to decide which metrics you want to report on. Furthermore, you need to decide what the metrics actually mean and how to interpret them. Many times we report on metrics that we think represent success, however it's possible that they might mean something entirely different. 

For example, Google Analytics will report on the time someone spends on your website. And while we often equate a long visit to an interested visitor, this isn't always the case. Although you'd like to believe that someone who has clicked around on several of your pages is liking what they're seeing, it could also mean that they are struggling to find what they are looking for. 

As you analyze your metrics, dig deeper to understand what they mean. It may not always be what it seems at first glance.

10) Did you attach tracking code to all the proper assets? 

One of the hardest things for marketers to remember is to put your tracking assets in place before your marketing campaign launches. This may include -- but is not limited to -- creating tracking URLs, putting them across the different platforms, or tagging your pieces of content.

If these tasks aren't done ahead of time, you could lose some of your analytics forever. For example, if you plan on using a tracking URL on your Facebook post but forget, you will miss out on all the clicks that your visitors took to get from Facebook to your site. If you edit the post and add it in, you will be able to get some of that back, but you will still not have everyone.

Moral of the story?

Before you publish all of your assets, check (and double-check) to make sure you have everything in place.

What else do you need to remember to avoid an analytics mistake? Let us know your best tips in the comment section below.

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21 of the Most Inspiring Ad Campaigns of the Last 12 Months

July 05, 2015 at 02:00PM

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.

A great idea can inspire.

But it can also made you jealous of its simplicity, humor, emotion, and elegance.

And no other event in the marketing and advertising industry brings so many jealousy-inducing ideas together as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The event recently wrapped at the end of June and this year’s top winners -- the Grand Prix recipients -- provide us with another list of interesting and inspiring work.

To review all the work that impressed the judges, check out the lineup below. 

21 of the Most Inspiring Ad Campaigns of the Last 12 Months

Film

1) 100

For Leica, F/nazca Saatchi & Saatchi recreated 35 iconic photos in a visually stunning short film. 

2) Family

Geico released a series of innovative pre-roll ads that highlighted the message in the first 5 seconds, before the skip button appears. The Martin Agency and Park Pictures were responsible for the work. 

Mobile

3) Cardboard

Google’s virtual reality reader made from cardboard won in the mobile category because it would enable consumers, brands, and agencies to innovate with virtual reality at a low cost. 

Cyber

4) I Will What I Want

This memorable campaign featuring Gisele Bundchen for Under Armour has her fighting off a onslaught of negative comments from social media. The campaign was created by Droga5.  

PR

5) Never Stop Riding

For the City of Buenos Aires Public Bike System, the community (or la comunidad) created a campaign to promote the 24/7 cycling program.

Radio

6) The Berlin Wall of Sound

 To mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soundcloud and Grey Berlin created an acoustic reconstruction of the Berlin Wall. 

Product Design

7) Lucky Iron Fish

Geometry Global created a no-tech, simple product to help the people of Cambodia prevent iron deficiency. The fish-shaped piece of iron, which symbolized hope and good luck in the community, is cooked in the person’s meal for 10 minutes and can contribute 75% of a person’s daily required iron intake. Results from the campaign showed that there was a 55% reduction in iron deficiency in the market wtihin nine months.  

Creative Effectiveness

8) Live Test Series

This seriesfrom Forsman & Bodenfors took home theGrand Prixin Cyber and Film at the 2014 festival. Volkswagon to submitted it for this year’s Effectiveness award with details on how the campaign had produced profit and changed consumer behavior.

Film Craft

9) Monty’s Christmas

This short film for retailer John Lewis was a favorite of the holiday season, featuring the special friendship between a child and a penguin. The campaign was created by adam&eveDDB London.

Integrated

10) Emoji Ordering

Crispin Porter & Bogusky created a way for people to link their Twitter accounts to their Domino’s account and order a pizza by tweeting the pizza emoji. 

Titanium

11) Re2pect

 Wieden+Kennedy created this ad for Jordan to celebrate Derek Jeter’s final season with the Yankees. 

Promo & Activation

12) Life Paint

For Volvo, Grey London created a reflective spray that shines in the glare of car headlights at night. 

PR

13) #LikeAGirl

MSLGroup and Leo Burnett worked on this famous campaign that was re-released as a Super Bowl ad.  

Media

14) Red Light Application

Y&R Istanbul created an app for Vodafone that allowed women in a domestic abuse situation to seek help from three pre-selected friend. But the app couldn’t be mass marketed, so it was promoted within makeup tutorials, on clothing tags, and when the person copy and pasted an offer code. 

Glass

15) Touch the Pickle

BBDO India created this campaign for Whisper to challenge women to ignore the taboos surrounding menstruation. 

Outdoor

16) World Gallery

TBWA\Media Arts Lab and Apple created a series of billboards that featured photos submitted by iPhone 6 users. 

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Direct

17) Interception

For the Super Bowl, Grey New York asked people to tweet who they would give a Volvo to during car commercials. 

Lions Health & Wellness

18) Intimate Words

Created by Leo Burnett Mexico, this campaign from Always wanted to change the behaviors of women in Mexican communities to prevent cervical cancer, a leading cause of death. 

Lions Pharma

19) Take it From a Fish

For AstraZeneca, DigitasLBi created a YouTube series to educate men on the benefits of consuming triglycerides.

Grand Prix for Good

20) This Girl Can

 For Sport England, FCB Inferno created an ad that highlighted women who get moving. 

Lions Innovation

21) What3Words

To address the problem of the more than 4 billion people around the world who do not have a reliable address, what3words founders divided the world into 57 trillion three-meter squares. For each of those squares, they assigned three words, such as table.tickles.spoon. 

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How to Persuade People by Asking the Right Questions [Video]

July 04, 2015 at 02:00PM

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

As marketers, it's our job to be convincing ... but that doesn't mean it's easy. In fact, persuading someone to complete a certain action requires a lot of careful consideration. 

For example, I'm willing to bet at least one person that's reading this has a child with a messy room. How do you get a kid to clean their room?

You beg and plead. You offer rewards. You threaten punishments. You create checklists. You offer to pitch in. You might even just forget the whole thing, and make peace with the disaster behind the door.

But all of these approaches come from a single perspective -- why it's important to you that your child cleans her room. Wouldn't it be more effective to help the child to realize the benefits of a clean room?

In the following video, Daniel Pink uses this very example to set the record straight on persuasion.

"We tend to think persuasion or motivation is something that one person does to another," Pink says. "But what the social science clearly tells us it's really something people do for themselves."

Watch the clip to discover the power of counterintuitive questions in persuasion (and finally get a no-fail room cleaning remedy).

By the way -- Daniel Pink is set to grace the stage of INBOUND 2015. To see him speak in person, register here.

Daniel Pink: How to Persuade Others with the Right Questions from Big Think

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How to Use Vine: A Simple Guide to Building an Effective Social Video Strategy [Infographic]

July 03, 2015 at 02:00PM

Vine, the video-looping app released back in January 2013, has proven itself to be much more than a passing fad. As a result, many brands across all sorts of industries continue to use the platform as a visually creative way to connect with fans and followers.

But, for some marketers, Vine is still somewhat of an unknown.

The time limit is intimidating: For each Vine video, you have just six seconds to convey a message to your audience. What are best practices for planning out a six-second video? What equipment should you use? Which formats work best? How can you incorporate a call-to-action? How can you cross-promote on other social media networks?

To help answer these questions and more, check out the infographic below from SurePayroll. It'll help you perfect your Vine strategy so you can enhance your social media presence beyond photos and words.

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How We Increased the Conversion Rate on Our Mobile Landing Pages [New Data]

July 03, 2015 at 12:00PM

Is your website ready to attract and convert mobile website visitors into leads? 

According to Adobe, companies with mobile-optimized sites triple their chances of increasing mobile conversation rate to 5% or above.

If that's not enough to sell you on the importance of delivering a mobile-optimized experience, Google recently announced that more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 different countries including the United States and Japan. 

All this talk of mobile got me thinking about how website visitors were accessing our offers. And after a closer look, I discovered that conversion rates on our landing pages were 20-30% lower from visitors coming from mobile. (As a lead generation geek, you can imagine how psyched I was to uncover such a huge opportunity for gathering more leads.)

With this information in tow, I set out to solve this problem -- and I think you'll be intrigued by what I found. 

The Methodology 

The hypothesis of this experiment was that by making content more easily digestible on mobile devices, it would increase conversion rate. However, getting inside the heads of our mobile visitors took a bit of reflection. I had to ask myself, "What would cause someone to bounce?"

Some answers I came up with were:

1. The form is too long.
2. There is too much text on the landing page to read.
3. The design isn't formatted for a mobile phone.

When presented with information that is not super mobile-friendly, a visitor won't hesitate to bounce from your landing page.

Why?

Not only are poorly formatted pages time-consuming, but they also don't appear very reputable, which often causes visitors to lose trust. With that decided, we knew we needed a way to condense all the information on the landing page to fit the size of a mobile screen. 

The Experiment 

To give you a better idea of what we were working with, check out what our landing pages looked like initially:

As you can see, it was quite long with a lot of content. So in order to improve the user experience on these landing pages, we leveraged smart content to shorten the display for mobile users. (To learn more about how smart content works, check out this resource.)

The first step we took was shortening the content and formatting the images for mobile: 

Once that was completed, we tackled the form:

Voilà! With the help of smart content, mobile visitors are now shown a shorter, more digestible form.

The Analysis

With the changes in place, we decided that measuring the page's bounce rate would help us determine if the mobile smart forms helped improve our conversion rates. Essentially, bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who only viewed a single page -- it's the number of people who visit our landing page and then "bounce" without converting on a form. 

For this experiment specifically, we needed to figure out how many people filled out the form that came from a mobile device. Here's a step-by-step explanation of how we approached this:

1. We used Google Analytics to find the number of "new users" to hubspot.com. I measured new people to hubspot.com on mobile (and not repeat visitors) because existing people in our database would not be net new prospects (which is what I'm solving for). 
2. I used HubSpot to determine the number of new prospects from the mobile smart form. 
3. I calculated the conversion rate using the following formula: Conversion Rate = New Prospects / New User PVs 
4. I calculated the bounce rate using the following formula: Bounce Rate = 100% - Conversion Rate

The Results

Results from Mobile Smart Form Test

By switching to mobile smart forms, we managed to decrease bounce rate (and therefore increase conversion rate) on each landing page tested by an average of 27%. Bounce rates that were previously between 50-90% are now between 20-50%.

Visitors now have a smoother experience and are less likely to leave the page before viewing and completing the form. 

Results from Mobile Optimized Content Test

After optimizing the mobile smart forms, we tested shortening the content and optimizing the images for mobile. This produced a 10.7% decrease in bounce rate. (We expect this number will keep decreasing with continued optimization.)

The Takeaways

Through this experiment, I learned to solve for the user. I also learned the importance of placing myself into the shoes of the user to better determine why and how conversions happen (or don't happen) in the first place.

While marketers don't always think of UX, this experiment proved that there is no denying its importance. If your website is slow to load, visitors might leave. If the user has to scroll through six screens worth of content to reach a form, they might leave. If the form they arrive at has 10 tiny fields, they might leave.

See my point here? To improve the odds of a conversion actually taking place, always solve for the user.

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10 Businesses With Enviable Company Cultures

July 02, 2015 at 06:00PM

Free beer and foosball tables serve as a nice addition to any office, but do they really have an impact on employee engagement? Is that really what company culture is all about?

While it's likely that no one will complain about these perks (they're awesome, after all), many companies are shifting their focus to prioritize intrinsic motivators such as peer-to-peer recognition and frequent feedback as a way to improve employee engagement. 

Why the emphasis on engagement?

For one, companies are working harder than ever to attract the best of the best talent. Employees have come to expect certain perks, leaving companies with a need to get creative in terms of how they sell potential talent on their brand. Not to mention, engagement has direct connections with bottom line profits. 

To further validate the importance of employee engagement, I've combined some interesting research with a roundup of companies that are nailing the concept of culture to help inspire your company's efforts.

Why Employee Engagement Matters

Before we go through examples of companies that get engagement right, let’s quickly look at some of the research behind why engagement matters:

• A study of 64 organizations found that organizations with highly engaged employees achieve twice the annual net income of organizations whose employees lag behind on engagement.
• A group of U.K. researchers say they've provided the first scientifically-controlled evidence of the link between happiness and productivity. (The study found that "happy people" are about 12% more productive than "unhappy people.")
• Companies with high employee engagement see 37% lower absenteeism, according to Gallup.
• Employees with lower engagement are four times more likely to leave their jobs than those who are highly engaged.

10 Businesses With Enviable Company Cultures

I’ve been very fortunate to have had an opportunity to speak with leaders from some of the greatest companies in the world for Officevibe’s CultureTalks series. 

One of my favorite questions to ask is how they approach creating an environment of engagement at their company. And the one thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a few common themes across all of these companies -- I hear words like autonomy, transparency, and trust over and over again.

I don’t think this is just a coincidence.

You see, these companies just get it. If you want employees that are productive and engaged, you have to treat them right, and you have to help them grow. There are many companies that do employee engagement right. And while we’ve all read about Zappos and Google, I’d like to focus on a few that are doing incredible things that you don’t hear about as often.

1) Morning Star’s Self-Management

Not every great example of a company culture is a tech startup.

Morning Star is the world’s leading tomato processor. Morning Star’s goal is to make all of its employees “self-managing professionals, initiating communications and the coordination of their activities with fellow colleagues, customers, suppliers, and fellow industry participants.”

It might seem like a radical idea to have no managers giving anyone direction, but Morning Star employees are so focused on the company's mission that they all know what their orders are. The company’s goal is to “produce tomato products and services which consistently achieve the quality and service expectations of our customers,” and each employee is responsible for creating a personal mission statement that outlines how he or she will contribute to that goal.

2) NextJump’s Culture Of Wellness

NextJump serves as a great example of a corporate wellness program that worked. 

At its core, NextJump helps other companies offer perks and benefits to their employees. As a benefit for its own team, NextJump invested a lot of money into gyms and wellness initiatives, however, they found that no one was really using them. Aware of the importance of such initiatives, the company decided to gamify its wellness offerings by turning it into a weekly competition with $1,000 as the prize for whoever saw the most success.

Their CEO Charlie Kim spoke about it at the GSummit a few years ago:

3) Campbell’s Turnaround

Campbell’s Soup is a great example of a company that leveraged employee engagement to turnaround declining sales.

When CEO Doug Conant joined the company back in 2000, it had lost 54% of its market value, and employee engagement was at an all time low. In fact, at the time, it was the lowest for any Fortune 500 company ever polled.

He’s quoted as saying, “To win in the marketplace ... you must first win in the workplace. I’m obsessed with keeping employee engagement front and center.” And after a decade of focusing on employee engagement, Campbell's stock price rose by 30%.

For more on Campbell's Soups' story, check out its feature in Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman's book, Closing the Engagement Gap: How Great Companies Unlock Employee Potential for Superior Results.

4) Shopify’s Peer Recognition

Employee engagement, productivity, and customer service are about 14% better than in organizations where recognition occurs than in organizations where it does not, according to research by Deloitte. The research goes on to explain that recognition from peers is much more valuable than recognition from senior leadership.

My favorite example of this comes from Shopify -- a Canadian ecommerce platform that developed an internal tool called UNICORN. Not only does it use this for employee praise, but it also use the peer recognition to determine bonuses.

“The UNICORN system is now capable of tracking every aspect of a typical performance review. Managers (or wizards) can communicate with their direct reports (apprentices) prior to the meeting, fill in goals (or quests) and incorporate other information that will be used in a more formal review,” explains Shawn Graham in an article from FastCompany detailing the tool. 

Pretty impressive, right?

5) Moz’s Core Values

Moz is a great example of a company that lives its core values and exercises radical transparency. Founder Rand Fishkin is incredibly open and transparent, to the point where he even felt comfortable being public about his battle with depression. 

Not to mention, the company's core values (TAGFEE) have helped guide it to becoming an authority in SEO -- and one of the most trusted brands online.

6) Telus' Employee Trust

With over 40,000 employees, Telus is one of the biggest telecommunication companies in the world. And while I first thought that it would be an incredibly corporate environment with a bad culture, but I was wrong.

I had the opportunity to interview Telus' Chief Envisionist Dan Pontefract, and this was what he said about how they trust and empower employees to make decisions:

“We’re not interested in call handle times. If it takes a long time to handle a problem our people are empowered to do so. And they’re empowered to fix it in the right way where they might actually have to do something that they haven't done before, and that’s okay because we trust our people to do what’s right, and that starts with putting our customers first.”

7) Treehouse’s Four-Day Workweek

Treehouse is a website where anyone can learn to code (I’m a student), and they have such an incredible culture. The company has a flat hierarchy, and they only work four days a week.

When I interviewed CEO Ryan Carson, I made it a point to inquire about how the flat hierarchy and four-day workweek influenced the company's retention.

“When you work a four day week, you don’t have a boss, you get paid really well, and you get medical and dental benefits, I mean, it’s just like gosh, where else can you go?”

Not surprisingly, when you treat employees with respect and promote a healthy work-life balance, employee retention is high.

8) Atlassian’s Focus On Customers

Atlassian is a software company that makes products like JIRA and HipChat. The company is known for its transparent approach, collaborative environment, and focus on customers. Dan Pink wrote about the company in his book Drive and spoke about its “Ship It” day in his famous TED talk The Puzzle of Motivation.

The company's "values page" on its website serves as great inspiration for any business to model itself after. With values like “open company, no bullshit” and “don’t #@!% the customer,” you can tell that Atlassian has fun and respects its employees.

9) Buffer’s Radical Transparency

Buffer is redefining what it means to be a transparent company. It publishes everything -- revenues, salaries, how your money is being spent (down to the cent), etc. Buffer even uses Gmail filters internally to make sure everyone receives every email, without overstuffing their inbox.

The company even has an entire section on its blog called “Open," which contains posts about its culture and the team's journey to being more productive and happy. It shares this with everyone in the hopes of becoming more authentic.

In the words of CEO Joel Gascoigne, “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork."

10) Wix’s Autonomy

Wix is a website creation platform that makes it easy for anyone that doesn’t know how to code to set up an online presence. The company is headquartered in Israel -- which is often referred to as Startup Nation -- and is known for its entrepreneurial spirit.

When I spoke to Wix's director of communications, Eric, he told me that during the onboarding process they make it a point to make everyone (no matter what department you’re in) learn more about the product. This is important because it gets everyone deeply immersed in the company to ensure that all employees can talk intelligently about the product.

What are some other examples of great company cultures? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

 

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