Small business owners know QuickBooks, but some know it only as an accounting tool, not as a platform that fuels growth across the entirety of their business. “Own Your Growth” set out to change that, repositioning QuickBook as an all-in-one partner that helps entrepreneurs navigate every stage of building and scaling their company.
The reality is, being a small business owner is no easy feat and it’s quite emotional. For small business owners, wins rarely come without worries. The thrill of landing a new client or opening a second location is often followed by the stress of whether their systems, cash flow, and operations can keep up. “Own Your Growth” was built to meet them in that moment by surfacing real stories of growth, friction, and resilience, then show how QuickBooks helps transform chaos into clarity. The idea was to lead with emotion and lived experience, while reframing QuickBooks as their go-to trusted partner through every step of their journey.
The goals of “Own Your Growth” was to shift perception of QuickBooks from a back-office necessity to a business growth platform, deepen emotional relevance with small business owners, and drive both awareness and consideration among this audience. Success was defined by resonance and efficiency with KPIs including impressions, CPM, landing page views, cost per view, engagement rate, comment relevancy, and net sentiment.
To bring “Own Your Growth” to life, we made QuickBooks’ promise tangible through the real stories of real entrepreneurs. The plan centered on building an integrated influencer program where creators became the narrative voice of the brand’s own business growth story.
We began by assembling a cohort of 11 creators who were entrepreneurs first and creators second. Each ran a real business, from beauty and food to design and niche services. And each had experienced the highs and lows of growing a business. They were diverse across industry, identity, and audience, which was intentional to ensure that small business owners across backgrounds could see themselves in the campaign.
With this group, we developed a storytelling framework built around a shared emotional arc. We heard about their excitement of growth, the stress of the new complexity, and the relief of finding a system that restores control. Creators produced content for Instagram and TikTok, shared pivotal moments in their journey, and effectively shared how QuickBooks helped them regain clarity and momentum.
What made the execution distinctive was how deeply creator stories were embedded across the large media ecosystem. Creator content appeared on their own channels, as well as across QuickBooks social, a national television spot, owned channels, and even a Times Square billboard. The Curls TV commercial featuring Julissa Prado, founder and CEO of Rizos Curls, and a Times Square activation with Julissa and chef-entrepreneur Joe Sasto, turned individual creator stories into high-impact, culturally visible moments.
TikTok Pulse placements positioned creator videos alongside top-performing business and finance content. Search ads extended the storytelling to high-intent moments, capturing small business owners actively seeking financial and operational solutions.
On social, we built interactive extensions to convert passive viewing into participation. Instagram’s “Add Yours” sticker invited entrepreneurs to share their own growth milestones under the “Own Your Growth” umbrella, seeding user-generated stories that echoed the campaign’s core narrative. On TikTok, followers who commented “money” received an automated DM with QuickBooks educational content. This feature encouraged deeper audience consideration and brought performance metrics typically reserved for paid content into an organic context. Our AI test generated 82 comments – nearly 5x more than similar features used in prior campaigns – demonstrating strong interaction and relevance.
One of our biggest challenges was creatively translating nuanced, emotional stories into a soundless, high-traffic billboard format for Times Square. Without voiceover or captions, that work had to grab attention instantly. We collaborated closely with Julissa and Joe to design something visually expressive that communicated entrepreneurship pride, relief, and momentum at a glance.
In the end, throughout every stage of the campaign, the power of Own Your Growth wasn’t just in where we showed up, but in what it made entrepreneurs feel - that with QuickBooks, their growth was something that they could finally own.
QuickBooks “Own Your Growth” significantly outperformed across awareness, engagement, and consideration. With 372M paid impressions (1.7x our goal) and 4.1M organic impressions, the work broke through in a crowded B2B landscape. At the mid-funnel, 3.7M paid landing page views exceeded our goal by 48%, delivered at $1.01 cost per LPV, which was 1.4x more efficient than our benchmark.
The quality of our engagement was as strong as scale. Comment relevancy reached 45%, double the benchmark, and net sentiment landed at 94% positive, which showed us that the content resonated with our audience. Our AI-powered comment-to-DM feature generated 82 comments, nearly 5x more than similar executions in prior campaigns.
Hero moments that reinforced the Own Your Growth story like Julissa Prado’s “Curls” TV spot delivered a strong engagement rate with 95% positive sentiment, as audiences celebrated seeing a small business owner championed on national TV. The Times Square activation garnered 19.9M OOH impressions. Plus, creators captured behind-the-scenes content of this activation, driving 4.48% engagement (more than 2x our benchmark), a 6.5% view rate (1.3x benchmark), and 100% positive comments.
Own Your Growth did exactly what it set out to do. Creators helped shift how small business owners see QuickBooks – from back-office software to an all-in-one platform and growth partner that helps them truly own their growth.
