Grant Thornton streamlines webcast process to scale thought leadership with ON24

Watch Webinar

200%

Increase in webcasts produced

20,000

Fewer emails sent while achieving higher webcast attendance rates

20%

Click through rate on weekly digest emails

3X

Tripled webcast audience size

About Grant Thornton

Name: Grant Thornton LLP

Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois

Founded: 1924

Employees: 8,500+

Industry: Accounting / professional services

Name: Grant Thornton LLP

Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois

Founded: 1924

Employees: 8,500+

Industry: Accounting / professional services

Grant Thornton LLP (Grant Thornton) is one of the world’s premier organizations of independent audit, tax and advisory firms. With more than 50 offices around America and revenues in excess of $1.9 billion, Grant Thornton prides itself on its people-first approach to business.

Introduction

As a leader in the financial industry, Grant Thornton takes an innovative, collaborative approach to helping its clients drive excellence in their businesses. The company’s digital strategy supports revenue growth by delivering inspiring and informative thought leadership content through webcasts. These experiences showcase the firm’s expertise, build brand awareness and promote services to clients and prospects.

Grant Thornton’s webcasts must always reflect changing industry trends and regulations to deliver the best experience possible for their audience. To stay ahead of their competition and ensure relevant content is produced in a timely manner, Grant Thornton had to streamline and scale its webcast production. The company needed a solution that could increase efficiency across all business units and grow audience engagement. Grant Thornton wanted to enhance its digital experience with branded webcasts that featured strategically delivered content.

Problem

A siloed approach to webcasts puts a strain on resources.

Before implementing the ON24® Platform, staff in different business units at Grant Thornton were creating webcasts on an ad hoc basis, working in silos without a solid strategy. This lack of communication caused unnecessary work, and because webcasts were produced based on whoever wanted topics created, certain topics became overdone. This put a strain on resources, especially for Grant Thornton’s learning and education teams that developed most of the content.

In addition, Grant Thornton didn’t have a centralized calendar for events and email sends. If a customer or prospect was on several email lists, they could receive multiple invites to different webcasts in a single day. “Before we created the webcast center of excellence, a central process and team for standardizing and executing webcasts, everyone was feeling the pain,” Megan Conheeney, Senior Associate, Digital Marketing at Grant Thornton said. In an effort to address these challenges, Grant Thornton decided it needed to find a better way to support marketers’ needs for webcasts across all business units.

With ON24, we’ve increased our webcast production and tripled our audience size—all while reducing the amount of email marketing touches. We’re seeing all of our other KPIs go up, too. And that’s a testament to getting people interacting with our brand in ways that aren’t just in their inbox.

MEGAN CONHEENEY
SENIOR ASSOCIATE, DIGITAL MARKETING

Solution

A webcast center of excellence via the ON24® Platform.

Grant Thornton already knew that its webcasts were an excellent source for building brand awareness and lead generation.
The company decided the best way to maximize the benefits from this marketing channel was to create a webcast center of excellence with the ON24® Platform. This solution enabled Grant Thornton to centralize digital marketing operations and deliver a branded digital experience.

Grant Thornton worked with ON24 to ensure that every experience was consistent and impactful. They created beautiful, functional webcast templates with customized backgrounds, icons, resource sections, speaker bios and more. “We created a cohesive feeling that you’re within Grant Thornton’s environment and not on someone else’s platform,” Megan Conheeney, Senior Associate, Digital Marketing at Grant Thornton said.

Grant Thornton can now be flexible with webcast content creation and execution thanks to ON24.

A webcast center of excellence via the ON24® Platform.

Grant Thornton can now be flexible with webcast content creation and execution thanks to ON24.

The team that produces webcasts deals with various subject matter experts and often needs to adapt quickly to address timely conversations and regulation changes. This ability to be agile is crucial to the success of Grant Thornton’s webcast strategy.

Most importantly, the ON24 Platform enables Grant Thornton to provide valuable webcast content for its audience in a strategic way. The company personalizes each weekly digest email so that every individual recipient gets industry content that is pertinent to them. This has resulted in an improved click-through rate of over 20%.

The data Grant Thornton gathers from the ON24 Platform helps the company evaluate how important webcasts are to its brand and its KPIs. Grant Thornton has been able to continuously optimize its program with the information ON24 provides, such as the best time to run a webcast or the impact of serialized content on registration numbers.

Results

Grant Thornton has drastically scaled digital marketing operations with the ON24 Platform. The company has increased its webcast production by 200% over the past year. Creating a webcast center of excellence has enabled Grant Thornton to produce more strategic content in a branded environment and triple its audience size as a result.

Grant Thornton has harnessed the data from the ON24 Platform to gain internal buy-in to its webcast program. Marketers who viewed the old production process as a burden now experience the benefits of a webcast center of excellence and enjoy smoother workflows.

“We’ve beat all of our internal KPIs by at least 10% since we centralized our webcast experience,” Megan Conheeney, Senior Associate, Digital Marketing at Grant Thornton said. “That’s a testament to the fact that because operations are streamlined, we’re now able to focus on our data and optimize our content.”

The ON24 Platform’s scale and customization has been key to Grant Thornton standardizing, optimizing and reporting results from webcasts across all business units.