How Professional Services Marketers Are Driving Results With Webinars

Marketing in professional services is often a balancing act. You need to deliver real value to clients while proving the ROI of your efforts internally — all without the luxury of big consumer-style budgets or flashy brand campaigns.

But some firms are finding ways to break through those barriers. They’re building consistent webinar programs, personalizing engagement at scale and using data to drive smarter decisions — and they’re doing it without hiring extra headcount or burning out their teams.

Here are four tips, straight from the field, based on how real professional services firms are getting results with ON24.

Use engagement data to drive better webinar decisions

If you’ve ever wondered whether your webinars and virtual events are actually landing with your audience, you’re not alone. Without the ability to collect meaningful first-party data and the integration capabilities to quickly send that data to the right people, your team is flying blind. 

Plante Moran had been running virtual events for a while, but like many firms, they didn’t have great visibility into how those events were performing beyond basic registration and attendance.

Once they adopted ON24, they were able to see much deeper insights using performance analytics — including how long people stayed, what they clicked on, how they interacted with polls and resources, and more. That data didn’t just sit in a dashboard. It informed which topics were resonating, how to structure sessions to hold attention longer and what to do differently in follow-ups.

Armed with these insights, Plante Moran optimized their webinar content and delivery format — and saw a 40% increase in audience engagement as a result. Instead of guessing what worked, they had the data to guide their content strategy and improve performance.

✅ Tip takeaway: Stop treating webinar metrics as a vanity report. Use engagement data to refine content topics, session format and even which speakers get invited back.

Build a repeatable webinar process

If your marketing team supports multiple departments or service lines, you know how messy webinar management can get. Different formats, inconsistent branding, ad hoc promotion… it’s hard to grow when you’re always starting from scratch.

Grant Thornton Australia faced this exact problem. They had strong internal demand for webinars across five service lines, but no repeatable process to support each team efficiently.

So they built one.

By standardizing templates and using ON24’s platform to coordinate webinar production, they gave each team the ability to launch webinars quickly — while keeping branding consistent and centralizing analytics. Marketing could now track performance across the entire firm and individual teams didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

The impact was immediate: webinar registrations increased by 40%, as the consistent experience and more strategic promotion helped attract larger audiences.

✅ Tip takeaway: Create reusable templates and centralized processes to help internal teams run webinars faster — without compromising brand or quality.

Track value through certification programs

Not every webinar needs to be a demand gen tool — sometimes the value is in education. And for firms offering Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits adds a powerful incentive for audiences to show up and stay engaged.

But managing certifications manually? That’s a headache.

The team at RSM automated their certification process — from tracking attendance and engagement to issuing certificates to attendees. This made it easier for the marketing team to deliver value to their audience while proving the impact of their programs internally.

In fact, the team saw a 25% increase in certifications issued, showing how streamlining the experience made it easier to scale their offering without adding administrative burden.

✅ Tip takeaway: If your audiences need certifications, make it simple for them — and for your team. Automating tracking and delivery saves time and boosts attendance

Get more mileage out of your webinars

One of the toughest parts of content marketing? Keeping up with demand. Your team can only create so many whitepapers, blog posts or videos in a given month.

Envista solved this by getting more out of the content they were already creating — especially webinars.

Using content hubs, they turned every live session into a discoverable, on-demand resource. Sales reps could share it with prospects. New visitors could binge older content. Marketing could continue promoting valuable webinars long after the live date.

This approach didn’t just improve content accessibility — it allowed the Envista team to scale their content program without hiring more people. They focused on quality live sessions, then repackaged and reused that content across channels.

 ✅ Tip takeaway: Treat every webinar like a long-term content asset. Reuse the recordings, promote them on demand and build a content hub that works around the clock.

Virtual events and webinars have become one of the most effective ways for professional services marketers to engage audiences, deliver value and show measurable results. But success doesn’t come from just hitting “go live.” It takes the right mix of strategy, structure and tools to scale programs, keep audiences interested and turn engagement into real outcomes. Whether you’re focused on lead generation, education or content efficiency, a few smart changes can make a big impact.

Want to see how your webinar and digital event programs stack up? Download the ON24 Professional Services Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report for insights, data and trends from across the industry.