Rho

Turning a Partner-Marketing Mandate Into My Proudest Campaign

I was leading marketing to an accountant audience at a digital banking company, and the mandate wasn't to bring in new partners. It was to get more out of the ones we already had. We had enough relationships, but we didn't have depth. So instead of spreading budget across a dozen small tactics, I wanted to go deep on a few. I teamed up with a media company and my internal team to build a recognition series celebrating women in accounting: live podcast recordings, in-person events, and content built through the partnership. Because it was this focused, I could actually go deep with each person instead of wide across a list. We ended up nominating and honoring four women. What made it so memorable for the women themselves was how far past a typical awards dinner we pushed it. We made the entire process an experience. I reached out to each woman's coworkers, firm leadership, and clients for testimonials and brought them on-site to the events. Guests wrote personal notes at the celebration, and I mailed those out to each woman over the following months, so the recognition kept arriving all year instead of ending that night. We set up an annual flower subscription for the same reason. We booked salon makeovers, hair and makeup, before the events. And when I read those notes aloud at the celebrations, the room went silent, then you'd hear people crying. A marketing campaign turned into something genuinely touching for the people it was about. What made it so powerful for the business was that every one of those personal touches was also doing strategic work. I brought my sales team into the events themselves, so they were building those relationships in the room with me instead of hearing about the results secondhand. I timed the flower deliveries and the note mailings to land right before each firm's monthly and quarterly business reviews, so we stayed top of mind at exactly the moments that mattered for the relationship. I built a real case for the spend, the way anyone would have to, and I kept hitting my normal blog and social deliverables the whole time. This wasn't instead of the core work, it was on top of it. Sales came back and told me flat out we'd cracked the code, and it turned into internal lunch and learns and enablement tracks built off what we'd done. The moment I knew it landed: at one of the events, a woman thanked her mother, who was in the room, for giving her the opportunity to do the books for the family's small business, the reason she became an accountant in the first place. You could hear a pin drop. The results were the clearest I've ever gotten as a marketer. The content went viral inside our corner of the industry, and people still list the recognition on their resumes, Women in Accounting Leader of the Year. Firms we hadn't selected started asking how to get nominated the following year, which widened the pipeline well beyond the four relationships we went deep on. And personally, it reset my own bar. It's still the standard I measure my work against.