By Grier Allen

Eight years ago, nine of us were working out of a cramped office attempting to create a revolutionary product for the real estate industry. Fast forward to the present, and we now have over 200 employees with 20,000+ product users.

And the secret to our growth is simple: We learned as a team to operationalize our culture. Culture wasn’t a “thing” when we started out. But when any business begins to hire aggressively and also tries to maintain the startup vibe at the same time, there needs to be a system in place.

Experiencing exponential growth will make anyone realize culture simply does not just happen. You have to put pen to paper and operationalize your company experience. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create the Anchors of Business Expansion

Begin with the team that built your company. Together, put pen to paper and decipher what culture means in your business. Zappos’ Tony Hsieh’s “mountains and valleys” exercise is an excellent place to start for this.

Our experience with this exercise resulted in the eight “core values” below:

• Create amazing experiences.
• Communicate openly and honestly.
• Do the right thing.
• Spread some laughter and have fun.
• Go for it.
• Do more with less.
• Stay humble.
• Seek and share knowledge.

Much like a great idea, it’s easy to become excited and want to open the floodgates to release your newly minted cultural tenants. But when it comes to instituting company culture, be intentional.

2. Hire With Culture in Mind

Culture starts with your company’s leadership team. When you need more people to fuel success, your leadership has to prioritize core values on an equal playing field with experience.

Consider doing so by adding culture interviews to your interview process. These interviews serve as a hangout session of sorts for the interviewee to get a feel for your company, and visa versa.

And after a new hire joins your team, don’t stop there. Amazing experiences are harder to maintain when a business is broken off into silos of people who don’t communicate. To avoid this, make sure every new addition to the team is well versed in the operations of each team and department. This can be easily done in a new hire “onboarding” process. Weave informational sessions into the process where new hires are able to meet, greet, and learn about the people and processes surrounding your business.

3. Implement Culture Into Daily Operations

The next step to operationalizing culture is working to have an organic culture. A business culture shouldn’t feel forced or awkward if it comes from the people who built and branded your particular breed of company culture.

It is much easier to overcome obstacles if everyone in the company is aware and working toward success together. But to do so, people must stay informed. Share successes, failures, obstacles, and mistakes with everyone. This can be easily done through monthly company-wide emails and quarterly all-inclusive gatherings.

Another way to keep an organic culture will come from how you conduct meetings. When differing opinions or approaches take center stage, time can easily get away from you. Instead of allowing disagreements to derail the train of progress, bring up a company core value such as “communicate openly and honestly” to get it back on track. Mentioning a core value in the middle of a meeting may sound corny, but it will instantly diffuse emotion and bring everyone back to the meeting’s focus.

4. Measure the ROI of Company Culture

How do you tabulate cultural contributions to overall ROI? Company culture cannot be bottled and sold, and it is not interpreted by every person the same way. What you can prove is how it serves as a release valve for a growing operation.

An unfortunate side effect of expansion is more pressure: the pressure to get things done, the pressure to fund your growing venture, the pressure to track and measure success. When you lessen the pressures of your growing company, team members will automatically generate more amazing experiences. In other words, culture creates quality from people wanting to create great work. If you want to measure the return on your culture investment, look no further than the time your business saves when people actually want to get work done.

In a booming industry like real estate technology, nothing is more valuable than time and talent. The ability to efficiently solve problems, reach conclusions, and move on to the next big thing is invaluable. Whether it is brainstorming an email marketing campaign, formulating a product development road map, or helping a client adapt to a new website, operationalizing culture empowers employees to go for it with gusto. When your mission aligns with the goals of everyone in the company, you get results.

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By Aaron Agius

In the 2003 film Paycheck, Ben Affleck’s character is paid a huge sum of money to be locked in a clean room where he reverse engineers products, breaking them down into individual components to determine how they were made. He not only replicates processes, but he also discovers ways to create newer, better products.

You can utilize the same approach with some of the most successful marketing campaigns, minus the conspiracy, gun play, and Hollywood special effects.

Fortune 500 campaigns aren’t successful just because of the messaging or images, or because they have millions of dollars behind campaigns that are produced by agencies like Grey or Ogilvy & Mather. It’s the individual components of those campaigns that come together to create a high return. When you break those campaigns down, you can examine the separate components to see how your startup might benefit from similar strategies.

Here’s what you should pay attention to:

1. Get the messaging right. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at a marketing campaign. If the messaging is wrong, you’re going to severely limit your chances of succeeding.

I don’t want you to think that it’s just black and white, though. It’s a lot more like Skee-Ball. Sink the ball in just the right place and score big. Miss it by just a bit, and you still get some points. Miss the mark by a long shot and you don’t get squat.

Another important factor is the scale of the message. Some of the most effective campaigns from major companies say more with a single sentence or word–or even just an image–than with content-heavy ads. It’s not really what they say, it’s how they say it. The picture the messaging creates, or the story behind it and the emotional connection it makes, likely contributes to the success of these campaigns.

Focus on painting a big picture around the value proposition to get your messaging on point.

2. The role of distribution. Not all of the best and biggest Fortune 500 campaigns were rolled out in traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, and print. Old Spice’s most successful marketing campaign, in fact, was done with online video.

Look at how Fortune 500 companies distribute their content, and you’ll begin to see patterns in how they focus on specific channels. Some target video, others leverage written content, and while many have a diverse network of channels, they might not use all of them.

The channels and distribution tools they use aren’t arbitrary; they’re based on research. Fortune 500s know where the majority of their audience can be found, and they know what types of content are most likely to get the most engagement.

Instead of trying to replicate the success of Fortune 500s, take a cue from their research and find out where your audience is spending their time. Look for missed opportunities and watch for untapped channels where audience segments may be hiding.

3. How the campaign is promoted and carried. The process through which content is promoted and carried is one aspect that you can try to replicate with your own marketing, especially if larger brands are in a similar industry. When big campaigns take off, pay close attention to how the content is being carried and promoted across the web. Whether it’s a landing page, a video, a blog, or a social post, you can follow the conversations throughout social media to see how fans share it with one another.

Likewise, trace the backlinks on campaigns to find out who is talking about them in articles and blogs. When you run your own campaigns and start publishing content, you should contact these sources to try and boost the signal.

4. Perfecting the timing. There are two aspects to consider with timing when you’re trying to reverse engineer marketing success.

The first has to do with the timing of an event. Some campaigns are time-sensitive and play off of trending topics, fads, one-off or annual events that would be nearly impossible to replicate once the campaign is live.

For Mother’s Day in 2012, P&G launched a “Thank You, Mom” campaign that featured athletes training from a young age to become Olympic athletes. The video emphasized the impact mothers had on their children as they struggled, overcame obstacles, and went on to become winners.

It was a step outside of P&G’s norm since the company’s products don’t really relate to sporting goods, but according to Hubspot, each of the “Raising an Olympian” videos received close to a million views, and the main “Thank You, Mom” video received nearly 53 million views, resulting in more coverage than Nike. The campaign was immensely successful thanks to a combination of timing and understanding the lifestyle of the audience.

Another aspect of timing comes in when content gets released. Buffer published research about the best times to post content through various channels, painting a clear picture about the rise and fall of engagement based on time of day and day of the week.

Look at the most successful campaigns from major companies and you’ll begin to see patterns in the timing and frequency of content publishing.

5. The audience is key. There’s a recurring theme through each of the above points: the audience. When you reverse engineer any successful marketing campaign, whether it’s for a Fortune 500 company or a small startup, it’s always going to end with the audience.

Audience research is critical for any campaign and it provides you with a road map for moving forward including:

• What they want or need to hear
• Their pain points
• How they like to consume content
• Where they gather online
• How they socialize and share content
• When they’re most active

Break down any successful campaign into those components and search for opportunities to do it better, especially in how the audience is targeted. By doing so, you’ll see tremendous growth in your startup’s marketing campaigns.

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