Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses (10KSB) is an investment to help entrepreneurs create jobs and economic opportunity by providing access to education, capital and business support services. To date, the program has reached small business owners in all 50 states and has over 7,800 graduates.
On February 13th & 14th, Goldman Sachs hosted the 10,000 Small Businesses Summit: The Big Power of Small Business in Washington, D.C. This Summit was the largest-ever gathering of small business owners in the US focused on charting a path to help small businesses grow and compete successfully, and brought together more than 2,000 small business owners who are alumni of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.
Through the Summit and its accompanying marketing efforts, we aimed to:
1. Generate awareness of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and highlight the positive impact of 10,000 Small Businesses on the economy.
2. Elevate the voice of small business owners by connecting them directly to their senators, congressmen and other government officials.
3. Highlight our efforts to convene small businesses and key influencers around topics such as job creation, and to drive tangible progress in removing barriers to small business growth. The marketing efforts around the Summit are detailed below.
To build awareness and excitement around the Summit, we executed a targeted cross-channel media campaign (TV, social, print, newsletters, radio, digital, custom partnerships) that launched a month prior to the Summit, and continued running post-event to distribute the content that was captured on-site, such as podcasts, videos and photography.
Leading up to the Summit, we leveraged display and social promotion to drive a high volume of impressions and initial engagement with content to help spread the word about this unprecedented gathering of small business owners. Knowing that our influential audience turns to newsletters as one of their first news sources in the morning, we sponsored three e-newsletters (Axios PM, Washington Post's Daily202 and Politico Playbook) the week leading up to the Summit. We used TV (Meet the Press) in New York and D.C. to drive further awareness in these key markets, and print (NY Times, Washington Post) for additional reach. Social media was leveraged heavily before, during and after the event to drive awareness, amplify the larger conversation, and extend distribution of the content captured at the event.
The campaign, centered around a TV spot titled Dear America, served as a rally cry for small business owners across the country, reminding our audience that every small business owner has a voice and all of those voices matter. Assets across channels highlighted a number of 10KSB program graduates, elevating their voices as they shared how small business is shaping the US economy, along with statistics showcasing how 10KSB graduates stack up against small business owners nationwide. This stat-focused content aimed to increase the awareness of the fact that revenue growth and job creation for 10KSB program graduates surpasses the national average.
These two approaches (highlighting program graduates as well as program effectiveness), seamlessly integrated into one campaign, helped achieve our goal of increased awareness of the positive effect the 10KSB program had on both individual program graduates and the collective group.
The 10,000 Small Businesses Summit: The Big Power of Small Business campaign generated 70.1M impressions and 12.7M video views. Goldman Sachs shared 134 social posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat, and developed five custom partnership posts with Cheddar (including TV segments) and TicToc x Bloomberg. Ten videos, five animations and fifteen static assets were created and promoted over the course of the flight.
We utilized YouTube to promote The Dear America TV spot which garnered 230K YouTube video views and 850K impressions. The "Highlights from the 10,000 Small Businesses Summit" video received 500K YouTube video views and 1.5M impressions.
Not only did media efforts drive awareness, but people were highly engaged with the content as well, indicating a greater interest in the messaging. While getting people to GS.com was not a primary goal, people who did land on the 10,000 Small Businesses page spent an average time of 2+ minutes on site.
The campaign hashtag, #MakeSmallBig, was the #1 trend on Twitter in Washington, D.C. (the location of the live event) and #5 nationally.
