The accounting market is saturated with competition and service commoditization is causing prices to go down. These changes make it difficult for firms to showcase their value and expertise. To counter this, accountancy is going digital and rolling out webinar programs to scale, reach and communicate effectively with current and future clients.
So what do these digital programs look like? We’ve scoured our customer base to examine what kind of webinars accounting firms are running and why. We’ve consolidated those findings in our report, “High Growth Report for Accounting,” but when it comes to actually delivering webinars, we found that these five formats tend to be the most popular among accounting firms.
Continuing Education
Accountants and most tax professionals require continuing education credits to maintain their licenses. So it’s no surprise accounting firms use this fact to their advantage and create their own regular series of CE-accredited webinars. CE webinars draw in large crowds of CPAs. This provides firms with a channel to showcase their expertise and recognize new business. Because ON24 is designed to meet certification requirements set by most governing bodies, our customers can adjust credit allotments based on viewing time and auto-generate certificates for attendees upon completion.
Niche Topic Series
We’re seeing firms build thought leadership in their communities by producing a weekly or monthly cadence of niche webinar topics. A topical webinar series provides firms with a channel to respond to industry news and trends, showcase the expertise of their partners and build and maintain client relationships. Companies can maximize the life of their programs by repurposing live webinars and using them in content hubs for on-demand consumption.
ABM Experiences: Portfolio Updates
The latest tax updates and regulations can be difficult to understand and clients will turn to their accounting firms for guidance on how to move forward. Firms are using this as an opportunity to provide personalized webinar experiences for top clients. How they do this is by running webinars for a specific private equity firm and their subsequent portfolio companies to share how the latest update affects those companies specifically. ABM programs such as these are a great way to retain customers by providing a white-glove experience for high-value clients.
Podcasts
Podcasts are incredibly popular in the accounting space and are a great way to broadcast a firm’s voice to busy financial executives. Firms can have partners host regular podcasts that share their perspectives on industry topics of interest to their target audiences. In addition to webinars, ON24 Webcast Elite can be used to record podcasts with the option of including video and additional resources.
Employee Skills Development
Every company needs to ensure employees are educated on company positioning, can identify upsell opportunities and know how to use company technology — especially accounting firms. For this reason, many accounting firms  use webinars as a tool to facilitate employee training programs. Webinars provide the ability to scale to global workforces and the flexibility for employees to watch at their own convenience. Organizing training content using Engagement Hubs is a great tool to simplify employee onboarding.
To see peer examples and hear a deeper explanation into these programs, check out the webinar Digital Engagement for Accounting Firms.