We produced a series of stop-motion call-to-entry videos that ran on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube featuring businesses that saw significant business growth, despite not winning during the program's first year. To kick off the program in June 2015, we embraced the idea that "you don't have to win to be a winner," which showed small-business owners the benefits of simply participating in the program.
By signing up for the program, entrants also received the benefits of the network – driving them into a platform where conversations continued long past the contest itself. To obtain our new objective of sustained engagement and address a new insight around the value of small-business owners connecting with other small-business owners, we designed to live within the OWN IT network. In our second year, we set out to capture the effectiveness of the program's first year by keeping the meat of the program the same – small businesses would enter online, entries would be narrowed by votes and one small business would win a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl 50. Solve year one's biggest challenge – keeping engagement up throughout the program and beyond Refresh the program to remain as buzzworthy and shareable as year one Reach 17,000 program entries/OWN IT network sign-ups, a 15% increase from year one
We set our sights on success with three key objectives: Integrating Small Business Big Game with the OWN IT network meant participants joined OWN IT upon submitting entries, and could come back regularly to complete activities that would foster growth and connections with each other. In 2015, we redesigned the program with the objective of fueling small-business success and driving sustained engagement by integrating it into our newly launched social community, the "OWN IT Small Business network." This community was built specifically for small-business owners to learn, connect and share with each other – with the support of QuickBooks' institutional knowledge and industry experts. We achieved our goal of increasing brand awareness and improving brand sentiment during the program, but noticed a drop-off in participant engagement once it ended. By putting a small business in an arena typically reserved for only the biggest corporations, we gained visibility and credibility with our customers while living out our mission to fuel small-business success. We launched Small Business Big Game, where one small business earned the opportunity of a lifetime: an all-expense-paid Super Bowl commercial. In 2013, Intuit QuickBooks designed a program to empower small businesses and fuel their success while increasing brand awareness and positive brand sentiment.