Intuit Engages Small Businesses Both Within and Outside of the Financial Industry
A lucrative prize and expanding reach with a social entry program helped Intuit’s small business engagement go big.
Challenge
Companies are often known for one thing, but strive to change consumer and marketplace perception about the width and breadth of their services or products. Intuit didn’t just want to be the company that does TurboTax for consumers nor did it just want to be known for engaging only accountants and other tax professionals. So, Intuit partnered with us to change consumer and marketplace perception.
Approach
We helped Intuit build and launch interactive campaigns to support small business as a whole, as well as to drive engagement with small business owners and employees. Below are two examples.
Canada Small Business Contest #MyQBSuccess
To drive advocacy two years in a row, we collected user generated content from current and future small business owners for Intuit. Both groups shared how their business would grow and succeed with seed money from QuickBooks. There was a separate experience for each segment with a $5,000 contest prize for entrepreneurs and $15,000 for existing customers.
Participants used #MyQBSuccess to post to Twitter and Instagram and to be featured in the #MyQBSuccess social gallery.
Because the contest was in Canada, it was also available in French.
$100K App Showdown
To extend its reach within the developer community and increase the number of new small business apps on the QuickBooks apps platform, Intuit partnered with us three different years to engage developers to build new apps and publish them on the platform.
Each year featured a gallery of app submissions where consumers voted on their favorite to determine the ten finalists.
Finalists competed at the QuickBooks Connect event and attendees were encouraged to share finalist apps on social media.
Results
A rise in engaged entrepreneurs and business owners drove advocacy for Intuit’s suite of small business tools
Increased number of small business apps on apps.com
Drove awareness of Intuit small business tools
Keys to success
- Aligning program mechanics and the awarding of seed money as an incentive to capture attention of busy entrepreuners.
- Expand reach of the program and drive incremental awareness with social entry option.
- Lucrative prize of $100,000 to incentivize developers to submit quality apps for small business owners.
- Leverage insights from previous year’s programs to perfect each program in subsequent years.
