Case Study about CalCPA on LinkedIn: Building membership with partner messages Visit marketing.linkedin.com for more success stories.

1. Marketing Solutions
CalCPA
Case Study
Building membership with
LinkedIn Partner Messages
“ The ability to carefully choose who receives our
messages helps us raise awareness of the value Challenge
of CalCPA membership with the right people. • Drive membership among hard-to-reach students
LinkedIn targeting is playing an important role • Reach specific demographic group by region and
industry
in helping us emphasize these benefits with an
• Identify targets before they have completed degree
audience that is traditionally hard to reach.” program
• Deliver in-depth messages about membership benefits
Matthew Koontz
Communications and Marketing Director, CalCPA
Solution
• Targetmembers of finance, accounting, and CPA
exam groups on LinkedIn
• Use one-to-one Partner Messages to cut through
message clutter
• Provide membership benefit details to increase
Reaching out to desirable market impact of message
The California Society of Certified Public Accountants, or
CalCPA, is the country’s largest state accounting organization Why LinkedIn?
and the largest CPA association in California. CalCPA has • Ability to precisely target by professional interests
40,000 members in public practice, private industry, as well as region and industry
education and government. A key to the organization’s • Professional audience receptive to messages about
future growth is attracting student members, who will career growth
become active participants in the association as they • Members self-identify interests and future career plans
mature into their careers. • Partner Messages offers one-to-one communication
In a bid to boost its student membership, CalCPA removed
yearly membership fees for students, allowing them to join Results
CalCPA for free if they are full-time or part-time students • 40% open rate for best-performing Partner Messages
and have not yet received a bachelor’s degree. “We want • CTRs up to 15%
to make student membership a priority,” explains Matthew • Helped contribute to a 47% growth of student
Koontz, communications and marketing director for members in three months
CalCPA. “By bringing them in as students, they can help • Allowed Linkedin to be one of the top 20 of all web
spread the message about accounting as a career choice to referrals to all of CalCPA.org
their fellow students and we can also connect them to job
opportunities.”

2. The challenge for CalCPA was getting out the word about the Partner Messages offer more ways to connect
free membership. “We have 14 chapters in California, and
CalCPA created a Partner Message with six key reasons for
we’ll have two to three events per week with each chapter,”
students to join CalCPA, and a link to a landing page where
Koontz says. “Signing up students at events can be hit or miss
students could sign up for membership. The Partner
– sometimes they’re very successful in terms of attracting
Message was delivered to members of LinkedIn groups
students, sometimes they’re not. This led us to seek out other
ways to connect with students and tell them more about the relating to finance and accounting, as well as CPA exam prep
benefits of CalCPA membership, like finding a job or getting groups. The combined open rate for the Partner Message
help with the CPA exam. We need to help them understand was 40%, with a combined clickthrough rate to the landing
the value of the membership, even if it’s free.” page of 15%. Combined marketing efforts, including the
LinkedIn campaign, CalCPA signed up about 1500 new
student members between February and April of 2012.
Targeting helps identify new-member prospects “The ability to carefully choose who receives our messages
Koontz, working with interactive agency Colsky Media, helps us raise awareness of the value of CalCPA membership
decided to test online marketing for the first time in a bid to with the right people,” Koontz says. “LinkedIn targeting is
reach more students. “Students can be hard to track down,” playing an important role in helping us emphasize these
Koontz explains. “They’re often in classes and have irregular benefits with an audience that is traditionally hard to reach.”
schedules, so trying to bring them to events is difficult.”
However, tracking down the specific subset of students
CalCPA needed – that is, California undergraduate students
with an interest in the accounting profession – was another
hurdle to overcome.
“It’s very difficult to find people in this age range in
California, studying this particular subject,” explains Justin
Colsky, managing director of Colsky Media. “We also
advertised on Facebook, but since the site does not offer a
context of professionals, we didn’t know if our message
was even reaching the right audience.”
LinkedIn, on the other hand, offered a professional audience LinkedIn Partner Message for CalCPA
in tandem with targeting capabilities, Colsky said. “The
professional focus was more attractive to us, especially since
we wanted to build a long-term relationship with students LinkedIn Partner Messages, which are delivered individually
who would soon be pursuing accounting careers.” to LinkedIn members, also help boost impact for marketing
campaigns, says Colsky. “We can layer in more details, and
LinkedIn’s personalized marketing solutions, such as Partner offer more ways to connect with us,” he explains. “And for
Messages, also appealed to Colsky and Koontz. “With a campaigns aimed at a younger demographic, it can cut
Partner Message, we could go into detail about the benefits through the clutter, since they are not perceived as
of joining CalCPA, which would be more difficult to get advertising.”
across in a display ad,” Koontz says. “We could be
informative while also using an informal tone, since it’s a Visit marketing.linkedin.com to learn how other marketers
one-to-one message.” have successfully met their marketing objectives.
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