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Workiva | Case Study | ON24

Ready for webinar success in 2025? Get your roadmap 🗺️ on Nov. 12. Register Now

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How Workiva scaled their demand generation engine and increased sales results by 30%+

  • 85%

    time saved from webinar setup

  • 35%

    YoY SAL increase

  • 33%

    increase in influenced bookings

Capabilities

Industry

Use Cases

Number of Employees

  • 1,000-5,000

Introduction

The team at Workiva focuses on creating strong, engagement- focused content that provides value to their customers. As they were planning their demand generation strategy, Alison Frederick, Director of Demand Generation, and Rachel Behrens, Senior Event Marketing Manager, realized there was an opportunity to optimize their webinar programming and evolve from executing webinars as one-off tactics and turning them into an ongoing pipeline channel. That led them to rethink their webinar plan and make it a critical pillar of their integrated demand gen strategy, enabling their team to save time, increase pipeline and drive revenue growth.

Problem

Before ON24, Workiva’s webinar process involved hours of manual effort to produce a single webinar. Speakers would need to physically travel to an audio studio and spend hours recording. Audio editors would then spend valuable time editing — timing audio to slides without any video. Multiple teams and stakeholders had to review and finally, after 10 hours of work, the team would get the webinar out the door.

Even more frustrating than the hours of effort needed to produce one single webinar, was the difficulty in creating a content strategy. The team was trying to keep up with their webinar creation process which left them little time for data collection and analysis. They were left operating ad-hoc, moving from one webinar to the next without the capability or time to assess the bigger picture.

“Previously, it had been a very scattered approach, not very planned out,” said Rachel Behrens, Senior Event Marketing Manager. Team members would request a webinar to be executed in four to five weeks, a nearly impossible task considering the time it would take to complete each webinar.

There was no time to track success metrics or consider the overarching content strategy, let alone scale the program.

“Something that used to take 10 hours now takes me an hour and a half at the most, so it’s pretty cool to see how far we’ve come”

Rachel Behrens, Senior Event Marketing Manager

Solution

Once Workiva made the transition to ON24 Webcast Elite, they cut their manual effort from 10 hours to 1.5 hours per webinar through utilizing templates and ON24 automation capabilities. “Something that used to take 10 hours now takes me an hour and a half at the most, so it’s pretty cool to see how far we’ve come,” said Behrens.

Workiva is now able to widen its lens and focus on how webinars can support larger campaigns, scale its reach and assist customers throughout the entire buying journey.

Templatization allows the company to use existing consoles to quickly scale up programs, while easily localizing programs which allows the team to transform previously one-off webinars into global campaigns.

Additionally, an integration between ON24 and the team’s CRM and MAP systems (Salesforce and Marketo, respectively) made it possible to automate sales lead handoffs and data flow, empowering the teams to follow up with sales qualified leads more quickly and effectively.

“Probably my favorite feature is the ON24 link within our Salesforce record, where sales can learn more about a prospect or customer for targeted follow-up,” said Behrens. “The other cool thing is that within that ON24 profile you can suggest additional content to that person. That integration is key.”

Using ON24 engagement tools (like polls, Q&A and surveys), the team was able to capture audience interactions to better understand the unique needs of each target audience

“We have a survey in every webinar. One of the questions we ask is, ‘what did you enjoy about this webinar?’” said Behrens.

The answers help the team determine what topics to cover in future webinars. This valuable information determines the next phase of their content strategy.

The ease of learning allowed the team’s NA and EMEA colleagues to become self-sufficient — creating content and analyzing data on their own.

“Just being able to easily templatize, copy and move on to the next event helped our small team scale the webinar program, even with limited resources,” Behrens said. “I rely on my templates a lot.”

The team additionally uses ON24 Engagement Hub globally to create a single, convenient location to direct their customers to. Here, customers can access a strong, segmented library of on-demand content, and get more life out of their programs with always-on evergreen content.

In an effort to continue to innovate within their digital engagement programs, Workiva has recently started using the new ON24 AI-powered ACE solution to deliver personalized experiences to their audiences and repurpose their high-value content, developing an end-to-end campaign.

For example, in a top-of-funnel webinar with content that is relevant to multiple audiences, Workiva used AI-powered ACE to develop two unique journeys for three key audience segments – Sustainability, audit & risk, and financial reporting professionals. Through AI-powered ACE, Workiva was able to target each segment with different content and calls-to-action, increasing the relevance to each audiences’ specific needs and solution areas, and enabling more educational touch points through one experience. Before AI-powered ACE, Workiva was only able to serve up broad content within their top-of-funnel webinars and had to rely on email nurtures to deliver their more specific assets. Now, they can scale their reach through webinars while precisely targeting critical audiences. 

With the ability to offer a more personalized webinar experience, Workiva is seeing more engagement. And with AI-powered ACE, they can use that audience engagement to understand which parts of the long-form webinar presentation were most compelling to their audience, automatically extract them as video clips and automatically publish them alongside the original on-demand webinar  on a dynamically personalized landing page. This provides a new opportunity to engage no-shows, and a way to nurture attendees with even more personalized content.

Results

With ON24, the Workiva team has gone from spending 10 hours on a webinar to 1.5 hours. Fewer hours spent on production means more webinar execution: webinar production on average has increased from one or two a month to eight to 12 globally. That’s nearly a 500% increase.

“Webinars are now part of some of our largest, most strategic campaigns,” said Alison Frederick. The team has also seen 33% increase in influenced bookings and a 35% increase in SALs, YoY.

“I was just really impressed with how ON24 allowed us to scale our overall programs, expanding our reach and automating our follow-up process to create a global program.” Alison added.

“Just being able to easily templatize, copy and move on to the next event helped our small team scale the webinar program, even with limited resources.”

Rachel Behrens, Senior Event Marketing Manager

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