The Situation:  With 3.7 million loyal business customers, Intuit’s QuickBooks has long had a leadership position in the small business accounting software market.  However, with 10 million Americans thinking about starting a business each year and half actually doing it, Intuit saw an untapped opportunity to help aspiring and newly-minted small business owners better prepare for success and showcase the benefits of all their business productivity software to this audience in the process.

The Challenge:  Design a campaign that would drive new customers into the QuickBooks franchise via free downloads of QuickBooks Simple Start – and in the process enhance Intuit’s brand as a small business advocate

The Plan: Intuit created the “Just Start!” campaign, built on the aspirations of Americans eager to pursue the entrepreneurial dream.  The foundation of the campaign was a call-to-action to encourage aspirants to “just start!” on the path to small business ownership.  The campaign had four key elements:

1. Free software – To help budding entrepreneurs succeed, Intuit made QuickBooks Simple Start software available for free download
2. A $50,000 small business grant – The contest calling for written or video submissions describing the entrant’s business dream and how they would use the grant to help achieve it;
3. The www.IWillJustStart.com online community – the site offered free tips and resources as well as access to an online community of entrepreneurs;
4. In-market, “pop-up” events in Seattle, Chicago, New York and Boston that provided aspiring and new entrepreneurs with quality one-on-one interaction and advice from local experts, together with a demo and free copy of QuickBooks Simple Start

Access designed a media relations strategy supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis (the anchor element being a commissioned survey of 1,000 Americans on their views of entrepreneurship and business ownership) a  that would leverage each of these elements and encourage broad participation on multiple levels. We executed in three phases:

Igniting the Fire:  To kick off the campaign with a national splash, Access secured an exclusive with USA Today small business columnist, Rhonda Abrams, offering a first look at the survey results, the opportunity to ask additional questions of respondents, and exclusive access to executives and customers. The result was an in-depth feature on USA Today.com syndicated in 12 daily newspapers across the country.

Fanning the Flames: With the official launch, Access began a comprehensive regional and national media outreach focused on targeted pitches featuring real-life stories of budding entrepreneurs, designed to resonate with an array of demographics and across a wide spectrum of consumer media.  Access supported this with aggressive social media engagement, targeting key influential bloggers and community sites.

Taking Off, Like Wildfire: To drive visceral and emotional attachment, Access took the revolution to the streets and hosted four in-market events in key small business growth cities, to provide hands-on demonstrations of the product, face-to-face meetings with small business experts and, via on-site video kiosks, the opportunity to “just start” immediately, by recording a contest submission.  To ensure proper attendance, Access engaged with regional small business groups online and through Facebook and conducted regional surveys for each market and leveraged the results with local media.

Success Metrics: Media coverage results exceeded client and agency objectives by more than 600%:

• 218 unique pieces of coverage
• 60 national hits and 80 blog postings
• More than 400 million impressions, with 95% message pull-through

The business impact was equally impressive:

• The national contest attracted more than 1,500 contest entries and 2,500 pledges
• The “Just Start” web site drew more than 100,000 unique visitors
• More than 279,000 copies of Simple Start were downloaded in the first three months

Intuit increased its online community membership by 333%