Parting ways with a long-term provider can be difficult; however, in the case of Intuit and social agency, the decision was simple. After a performance review, Intuit discovered it was spending £10k/video for an average of 10 views/video – equating to a £1K spend per view! Overly generic content was to blame, and in trying to appeal to everyone, Intuit was appealing to no-one.

In Dec-19, Intuit ended the agency partnership and brought social media in-house. The new strategy involved having an in-house team produce content specifically for SMBs. The resulting campaign, Backing You, saw the team travel the UK, meeting customers and creating videos about each owner’s business.

But that’s when COVID-19 changed everything.

Intuit instructed employees to self-isolate and cancelled QuickBooks Connect, its major annual event. Now that Backing You was untenable, the team asked itself, ‘If we can’t run Backing You, what can we do instead?’

From the outset, the team agreed that Ask the Expert would be a multi-channel campaign, involving all major social media platforms and leveraging all opportunities for engagement.

Social media would be leveraged in the following ways:

1. Live-streaming platforms: Ask the Expert episodes would stream via Facebook and YouTube.

2. Interactivity: Audience members would be encouraged to post questions via Twitter using the hashtag #QBATE or direct messaging. Instagram would be used alongside LinkedIn Elevate to encourage sharing internationally.

3. Podcasts: Nine podcast platforms would be utilised, encouraging on-demand viewing/listening.

Armed with these insights, the team developed the ‘Five Pillars’, a selection of topics that would best serve SMBs:

1. Government: Explaining support for small businesses/self-employed, eligibility, access.

2. Financial planning: Financial preparedness, continuity planning, digital skills, cashflow and bookkeeping, delaying leases, pivoting workstreams.

3. HR: Remote working, furlough, employee morale, hiring and training remotely.

4. Wellbeing: Health and wellbeing, diet, fitness, mental health.

5. Parenting: Advice for SMB owners and employees with children at home.

To ensure content remained relevant, live polls would be used to allow viewers to determine what questions they wanted answered, as well as allowing viewers to interact with experts during the Q&A.

From the outset, the team agreed that Ask the Expert would be a multi-channel campaign, involving all major social media platforms and leveraging all opportunities for engagement.

Social media would be leveraged in the following ways:

1. Live-streaming platforms: Ask the Expert episodes would stream via Facebook and YouTube.

2. Interactivity: Audience members would be encouraged to post questions via Twitter using the hashtag #QBATE or direct messaging. Instagram would be used alongside LinkedIn Elevate to encourage sharing internationally.

3. Podcasts: Nine podcast platforms would be utilised, encouraging on-demand viewing/listening.

The ATE campaign far exceeded all performance expectations:

Facebook

- Achieved a total of 500k minutes viewed before within 1 year (vs. target 50k )

- Achieved 15m total views within 1 year (vs. target 100k)

- Achieved 400M impressions within 1 year (vs. target 5M)

- 1300% improvement on FB’s average view time (2secs) (vs. target of 100%)

YouTube

- 1650% improvement on YT’s average view time (20secs) of 5m31secs (vs. target of 200%)

- Achieved 1m total impressions within 1 year (vs. target 125k)

Audience engagement:

- Achieved 450M impressions across all platforms within 1 year (vs. target 5M)

- Engaged a global audience of 8m SMB owners within 1 year (vs. target 500k)

- 8M Instagram impressions within 1 year (vs. target of 2M)

- 8.9M LinkedIn impressions before within 1 year (vs. target of 2M)

- 0.8M Twitter impressions before 1st Aug-20 (vs. target of 0.5M)