Plante Moran, one of the nation’s largest certified public accounting, tax, consulting and wealth management firms, is no stranger to webinars. In fact, the organization has produced webinars and digital events for nearly a decade.
But, when the business world pivoted to digital in 2020, the company realized it needed to enhance its digital experiences with a full-fledged digital-first strategy.
With its experience and history of producing virtual events and webinars, the firm had a certain advantage. With the ON24 platform, Plante Moran was able to:
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- Boost audience engagement by 25% with on-demand experiences
- Drive new subscribers and meeting requests with attendees
- Boost reach by 7x at a third of the cost
So, how did Plante Moran do it? Let’s take a look.
How Plante Moran Expands Client Reach with Virtual Events
Like many organizations, Plante Moran uses in-person events to directly engage clients. For the wealth management firm, however, one summit is of particular importance: its annual Wealth Management Summit, which helps it build trust and attract high-net-worth individuals.
Traditionally, its one-day, invitation-only summit catered to a select group of clients and prospects at a single location once a year. But, when the firm realized its usual in-person event wasn’t going to be possible in 2020, it began planning a virtual experience.
Engaging Clients with a Digital-First Mindset
The first thing the event planning team had to do was find a way to incorporate traditional face-to-face features into a webinar.
The event needed to include:
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- Educational components for attendees
- Networking opportunities that provided face-to-face engagement
- A stellar design to enhance the Plante Moran brand and provide attendees with a visually engaging experience
To make this virtual summit a reality, Plante Moran turned to the ON24 platform. In particular, the wealth management firm made expert use of ON24 Webcast Elite and ON24 Target to engage its valuable audience.
To organize its virtual summit, the Plante Moran team created multiple components like keynote addresses and breakout sessions in addition to typical in-person activities like networking. But the team had to ensure that each piece of content delivered was polished and professional.
So, the team pre-recorded its virtual sessions and aired them as simulive experiences.
Driving Client Personalization with Webinars
When it comes to attracting high-net-worth individuals, providing a white glove experience is essential. To create that bespoke experience online, Plante Moran ensured it included content relevant and interesting to its valuable attendees.
The team did this by making use of ON24 Intelligence, which gave Plante Moran insights into how valuable attendees engaged with it and what content they consumed in the lead-up to the summit.
From there, the marketing team created personalized content tracks with on-demand content using ON24 Target.
To make sure its different content tracks were fresh and unique, the wealth management team used different target personas based on various asset classes of the company’s clients. The content tracks included information on:
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- General economic outlooks
- Retirement
- Legislation impacts and explanations
- Estate planning
And, to ensure attendees actually interacted with these pages, the team included CTAs and buttons within its summit webinars. Once clicked, these CTAs whisked attendees to the appropriate Target page.
How a Killer Promotion Strategy Expands Client Reach
Finally, the team designed an integrated promotional plan to bring its current and would-be clients into its virtual summit.
Plante Moran’s promotional plan leveraged multiple channels and tactics, including:
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- Organic social media posts
- Pay-per-click Google ads
- LinkedIn promotions
- Retargeted ads
- Personalized invitations from the sales team
After the event, the planning team created unique and personalized emails detailing how attendees could take the next step in their journey with Plante Moran. These emails took care to invite attendees to consume on-demand content from the summit, subscribe to the firm’s newsletter and schedule a call with a sales team member if they wanted.
As a final tactic, Plante Moran took the engagement and follow-up data and synced them with the firm’s martech stack. Doing so empowered different teams to see the summit’s results and know what engages clients and prospects.
The Results of Plante Moran’s Success
One of the many benefits of virtual events is how easy they are to scale to a larger audience. Plante Moran took a face-to-face invite-only event and turned it into a three-day digital experience with almost seven times as many attendees.
The virtual nature of the event allowed the company to expand its reach to new customers and prospects without the geographical limitations of physical meetings, all at one-third the cost.
By including on-demand viewing options, the event increased engagement by 25% compared to its traditional live event alone.
Additionally, the wealth management team had 26 new subscribers to its newsletter and 14 new requests for meetings with members of the team.
All in all, the event was a huge success for Plante Moran and the wealth management team solidifying digital events as part of their future.