Winning Future SMB Owners

QuickBooks is one of the most widely used accounting platforms for small businesses around the world. But with new cloud-native competitors like Xero and FreshBooks gaining traction with startups and digital-first businesses, Intuit needed a long-term strategy to protect and grow its market share.

They saw a unique opportunity in higher education. If future business owners and accountants learn QuickBooks in school, they’ll be more likely to choose it later in their careers. The strategy was simple: make QuickBooks free for educators and easy to adopt in classrooms. To build on the foundation already in place, Intuit needed a fresh approach to reach new audiences and expand educator adoption.

Our strategy focused on a single point of entry: university and college educators.

These faculty members are the influencers. If we won them, they’d bring QuickBooks into their classroom, shaping student familiarity and preference long before a purchasing decision is ever made.

We crafted a precision-targeted digital campaign, with a particular emphasis on LinkedIn. We used custom audience lists and lookalikes to reach educators in accounting, finance, and business programs.

To reach our audience with both visibility and credibility, we combined sponsored content (images and videos) to build awareness with direct message ads sent from the Intuit Job Readiness Team. This two-pronged approach helped establish trust and drive conversions.

The campaign dramatically outperformed expectations, delivering a 21% growth in educator registrations—more than four times the original growth target.

LinkedIn emerged as the top-performing platform, driving significantly higher conversion rates—2 times more than X and 3 times more than Facebook. Its performance far exceeded other channels, proving to be both high-volume and high-intent.