Intuit wins educators to get QuickBooks into the classroom
An integrated digital campaign that gave educators the proof they needed to adopt QuickBooks
New competitors, new approach
Intuit makes one of the most popular accounting software in the world, QuickBooks. It powers hundreds of thousands of small businesses. But new competitors like Xero and FreshBooks were gaining traction with young startups, and these modern, cloud-native rivals meant Intuit needed to respond.
Intuit made a strategic pivot. To win the future of small business customers, they needed to start engaging them before they were business owners looking for accounting software. So they looked at the university and college segment, where students were learning accounting skills. The strategy was to make QuickBooks free for educators so they would download it and use it in their classrooms, embedding QuickBooks into the curriculum so that students entering the workforce would be looking for QuickBooks.
Get into the classroom
Educators were the influencers. Win them and they would bring QuickBooks into a class of 30 to 150 students as a hands-on way to develop accounting skills. An integrated digital strategy reached them through niche media and paid social, under the line “Build skills. Launch careers.”
Finding the proof educators wanted
Audience research came first. Focus groups with educators showed one point very clearly, that educators wanted to see proof it worked. They did not want to take a chance in their classroom.
Statistical proof and social proof
One-to-one interviews with educators already using QuickBooks became snackable quotes featured in the creative. Past data collected from educators about the impact QuickBooks had on helping their students become career-ready bolstered the proof points.
Adding the power of LinkedIn
Facebook and Twitter were the two obvious channels. LinkedIn was added to the mix as a greenfield opportunity to tap into a new pool of educators Intuit had not engaged before.
A jab-cross combination on LinkedIn
The jab was image ads and video ads to let educators know QuickBooks was ready for their classrooms. The cross was message ads with a direct call to action, sent from the Intuit Job Readiness Team.
Straight to the CEO
Based on its success, Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s global CEO, took a personal interest in expanding this strategy to win the future of small business owners.
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