Plante Moran Builds a Wealth of Engagement with ON24 Target

Plante Moran is a tax consulting and wealth management firm. The nearly 100-year-old company has offices throughout Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio.

Like many other professional consulting firms, Plante Moran had been producing webinars for its clientele for many years, but when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down physical seminars, user conferences, and trade shows, the market for webinars became much more crowded.

“When the pandemic struck, we recognized, along with the rest of the world, that we really needed to push the envelope. We couldn’t be in the sea of sameness with everyone else,” says Kelly Turner, Plante Moran’s marketing content manager. “We had always had our wealth management seminar as an in-person event. We wanted to make sure that [as an online event], it had that same personalized, white-glove feeling and approach.”

Plante Moran started its due diligence shortly after the pandemic shut everything down in early March 2020 and eventually selected ON24’s Target solution. Plante Moran already had a relationship with ON24 as a user of its Webcast Elite product, but still wanted to ensure ON24 Target would meet its needs.

“We were looking for the best solution,” Turner says. “We wanted to stand out; we wanted to give our audience the best, engaging them, making them feel connected to something still meaningful and valuable despite the fact that we weren’t able to be in person anymore.”

Turner adds that it was important that the solution be able to offer branded experiences, that events be available live or on-demand, and that Plante Moran could embed links, videos, and documents during the events.

Though much of the platform is plug-and-play, Plante Moran was thankful for ON24’s support to get as much out of the solution as possible.

“We were able to build content experiences into the webinar experience. We were able to provide content along more stages of the buyer journey within one event,” Turner says. “This means we are now maximizing the webinar touchpoint to the fullest extent, taking advantage of the opportunity to engage the audience in a Plante Moran experience before and after an event, all while keeping the audience in the driver’s seat.”

Turner adds: “Convenience is a commodity. We were able to provide the value of relevant, impactful content married with the value of convenience. It’s a winning combination that our audience responded to and received well.”

A GOOD PARTNER

“ON24 partnered with us along the way,” Turner says. “There were multiple times when we reached out and asked questions about anything from the experience from the audience side when they register for a webcast to the step-by-step experience the audience was having. ON24 was there along with us, answering the questions that we had. Without that level of support, I’m not sure that we would have been as successful as we have been.”

The success includes an increase of 700 percent of attendees at the Plante Moran summit; an estimated 25 percent increase in customer engagement at about one-third of the cost; 26 new subscribers to the Plante Moran wealth management newsletter; and 14 new meeting requests from event attendees.

Though some in-person events have started again in some industries, Plante Moran has had only one major physical event so far, opting instead for a limited number of hybrid events, according to Turner. “We are still leveraging the ON24 platform. We are also looking at how the platform could be used in a campaign experience.”

As an example, Turner foresees using the ON24 platform to offer customized experiences for top prospects.

“It works perfectly for our needs, so we are getting more and more use out of it than we had initially planned,” she says.

In addition, with hybrid offerings relatively new for Plante Moran, the firm is working with ON24 to explore virtual breakout rooms and other ways to leverage the technology for those events.

The Payoff

After deploying ON24 Target, Plante Moran has seen the following results:

• attendees at its annual summit increased by nearly 700 percent;
• customer engagement improved by an estimated 25 percent at one-third of the cost;
• 26 new subscribers to its wealth management newsletter; and
• 14 new meeting requests from event attendees.