QuickBooks creates smarter business tools for Small Businesses and self-employed workers.

One of the key challenges for QuickBooks in 2019 was to be seen as a champion of small business owners and the self-employed who represent more than 98% of U.S. businesses.

Our “Backing You” campaign reminded those who work for themselves that it’s easy to get what they’re owed for all the hard work they put in—namely, more time and more money.

Or audience represents a broad target audience: 50 million people, mostly comprised of millennials. TV viewing habits are changing. People are “cutting the cord” and consuming media through streaming and online. This is especially true for our hard-to-reach millennial target.

We needed to find a way to break through with our message and stay culturally relevant.

First, we needed the right partner. In order to build immersive ads that not only promote the brand and build a sense of community among the small business world, but also allow our audience to share our emotionally driven and fun, bite-size content, we turned to one of the fastest-growing search platforms: Giphy.

We knew that celebrity gifs outperformed the rest. To tap into the power of the celebrity gif, we needed to create content that we were certain would be engaging. What better choice for QuickBooks than to offer to its audience the first-ever library of gifs for the small business community starring social and millennial pop culture icon Danny DeVto?

We created over 40 branded gifs and stickers and empowered our audience to share their emotions and feelings through the gifs.

Our research tells us that 69% of people feel more connected to those who are expressing themselves using visual expressions, as well as words ,as opposed to those who only use words.

Additionally, more than half of people of all ages said they embed gifs in their messages.

Unfortunately, before our gifs, SEO keywords associated with Small Business were rare, mostly built around negative facts and definitely not built to be shared by any community.

We worked with Giphy to identify the most popular keywords: “money” = 1M searches a day and “work” = 700k searches a day. Then, we created a set of business gifs and stickers for our audience to use, articulated around the following:

Their work environment: “work” and “business.”

The QuickBooks product benefits: “Saving Time,” “Saving Money,” “Smarter.”

Positive community driven gifs that we can use within the community: “You deserve it.” and “You're the best.”

When users typed in popular keywords they instantly found our QuickBooks celebrity Danny DeVito within our gifs. They were free to use the gifs in their conversations with friends, family or other small business owner via text, IM or social media.

The gifs were searchable on several key platforms including:

Social media: Facebook, Instagram Stories, Twitter, Snapchat

Messenger apps: iMessage, Facebook & Instagram Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Tinder.

Giphy.com

Tenor - in an organic way (a competitor of Giphy, owned by Google and available on all Android ecosystems, as well as LinkedIn).

We launched the campaign organically in January 2019. We promoted the keywords and gifs. We even had one of our gifs trending on Giphy’s homepage for a week.

We also used social media to invite people to use our gifs, and even got Danny DeVito to share them with his community.

As of today, we have 250M gif views and counting (only 4% of which were paid). Nearly 96% of the views were earned organically within 8 weeks of launch.

On Instagram Stories, our “GENIUS” gif was organically trending during the Oscars, one of the most popular moments in pop culture.

QuickBooks gifs generated significant lift (+10%) in purchase intent (47% v 37%.)

Across the board, gifs caused a lift in brand attributes, 3/4 of respondents agreed that “Quickbooks is a modern brand that is forward thinking about technology.”

Drove ~10 times more engagement than any other branded and non-branded gif on the platform.

This complemented the overall strategy making QB the champion of small business across all channels where our customers engage.