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How Merrill Corporation Leverages ON24 Data for Content Creation and Distribution

Watch Webinar

75-80%

Of content comes from webinars

7%

Of total opportunities sourced from webinars

$60

Average cost per win from webinar leads

About Merrill Corporation

Name: Merrill Corporation

Headquarters: St. Paul, MN

Founded: 1968

Employees: 1,000–5,000

Funding: Private, Acquired

Industry: Cloud Services

Merrill Corporation is a leading global SaaS provider for participants in the M&A lifecycle. Clients trust Merrill’s innovative applications, excellent customer service and deep subject expertise to successfully navigate the secure sharing of their most sensitive content. Merrill’s flagship product, DatasiteOne, helps dealmakers in over 170 countries close more deals, faster.

Introduction

The financial information industry is full of a wealth of information and complex subject matter that requires deep expertise to navigate. As a SaaS provider in the M&A arena, Merrill Corporation ensures that it always provides an outlet for its clients to gather the proper insights and education.

For Merrill, these insights came mainly from internal and external industry experts as well as internally sourced data. And, like many large global corporations, Merrill sought to save time and money it had traditionally spent conducting formal research to source this data across global regions — an effort that typically costs organizations multiple thousands of dollars a year and months of labor.

Merrill started utilizing webinars to support these efforts. Through webinars, Merrill hypothesised that it could not only deliver valuable information but also use the data to gain better insights into trends and themes. It could then use this proprietary information to produce even more content to support its entire marketing and PR strategy.

As it began thinking about how to repurpose webinars for on-demand multimedia consumption — everything from podcasts, blogs, white papers and beyond — it turned to ON24® for support.

Name: Merrill Corporation

Headquarters: St. Paul, MN

Founded: 1968

Employees: 1,000–5,000

Funding: Private, Acquired

Industry: Cloud Services

Merrill Corporation is a leading global SaaS provider for participants in the M&A lifecycle. Clients trust Merrill’s innovative applications, excellent customer service and deep subject expertise to successfully navigate the secure sharing of their most sensitive content. Merrill’s flagship product, DatasiteOne, helps dealmakers in over 170 countries close more deals, faster.

The financial information industry is full of a wealth of information and complex subject matter that requires deep expertise to navigate. As a SaaS provider in the M&A arena, Merrill Corporation ensures that it always provides an outlet for its clients to gather the proper insights and education.

For Merrill, these insights came mainly from internal and external industry experts as well as internally sourced data. And, like many large global corporations, Merrill sought to save time and money it had traditionally spent conducting formal research to source this data across global regions — an effort that typically costs organizations multiple thousands of dollars a year and months of labor.

Merrill started utilizing webinars to support these efforts. Through webinars, Merrill hypothesised that it could not only deliver valuable information but also use the data to gain better insights into trends and themes. It could then use this proprietary information to produce even more content to support its entire marketing and PR strategy.

As it began thinking about how to repurpose webinars for on-demand multimedia consumption — everything from podcasts, blogs, white papers and beyond — it turned to ON24® for support.

Problem

Merrill Corporation was dealing with a global diverse customer base that had an appetite for relevant and timely content. While on one side of the coin, younger entry-level financial analysts responded better to entertaining and interactive content, Merrill’s external senior managers and partners sought factual and educational content.

Ultimately, Merrill needed a way to create different types of interactions within its webinars that would address all of its audiences in a desirable, cost effective way. It could then extract relevant data from these interactions to support further content efforts – marketing, PR, thought leadership, etc.

Polling our audience with ON24’s building in functionality is a key part of our strategy to not only engage our audience, but to gather market data that is the foundation for creating content after the fact.”

Axel Kirstetter
VP of Content Marketing, Merrill Corporation

Solution

ON24 allows Merrill to easily conduct research that it then uses to produce custom content like Market Trends Reports, Press Releases and more across its entire marketing and communications strategy. Its “just in time” webinars with integrated video serve as a way to generate content, engaging clients with real people speaking in real-time. Merrill runs all of its webinars with an output first approach, building each event around its desired data or research outcome. ON24 tools help facilitate this process:

  • Real-time Analytics with ON24 Webcast Elite. Live webinar capabilities produce immediate insights and analytics and let Merrill adapt in real-time to customer responses. The ability to quickly shift focus is pertinent to sourcing better data and higher engagement.

ON24 allows Merrill to easily conduct research that it then uses to produce custom content like Market Trends Reports, Press Releases and more across its entire marketing and communications strategy. Its “just in time” webinars with integrated video serve as a way to generate content, engaging clients with real people speaking in real-time. Merrill runs all of its webinars with an output first approach, building each event around its desired data or research outcome. ON24 tools help facilitate this process:

  • Real-time Analytics with ON24 Webcast Elite. Live webinar capabilities produce immediate insights and analytics and let Merrill adapt in real-time to customer responses. The ability to quickly shift focus is pertinent to sourcing better data and higher engagement.
  • Engagement with Live Q&As, Polls and Surveys. Merrill integrates all of these tools into its webinars to tailor to its different client types, uses cases and buying centers. At multiple stages or levels of understanding in the buying or selling process, different ways of engagement ensure optimal response and data collection. Merrill makes polling and Q&A a part of the natural flow of conversation and involves expert panelists so that audiences feel connected.
  • Infinite Scale. Merrill’s webinars with ON24 host thousands of people at a time across EMEA, APAC and North America. ON24 seamlessly supports this volume with high traffic capabilities and enterprise scalability.

Results

With ON24, Merrill both collects and delivers data and content to its clients in a natural and valuable way. While it only produces approximately 10 webinars per year, Merrill has attracted more than 3,500 registrants and 1,400 attendees for a single webinar and is sourcing a higher volume of data than ever before. It’s MQLs are up and it now finds 7% of its total opportunities from webinars alone at an average of $60 per final win. As a result, ON24 webinars are now a key way for Merrill to go to market.

“It’s really quite extraordinary, a cost per win, it’s not per lead, not per opportunity, not for inquiry, but the cost per win at about $60 bucks is staggering.”

AXEL KIRSTETTER
VP OF CONTENT MARKETING, MERRILL CORPORATION

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