Why you Need a Killer Case Study and 10 Tips to Create one

  • June 20, 2019

There are many ways to secure the trust of potential customers and one effective means is a case study. Demonstrating your ability to deliver on the promises of your products and services is a potent way to make a pitch for their patronage. And there’s no better way to do this than let them know about your previous successful dealings through compelling and persuasive case studies.

Sure, telling them about how great your business is in plain text is a good way to go. You can make your pitch by iterating and reiterating that you’re good at this or that, but these will remain in the category of mere “claims”. With a case study, you’re providing hard, cold proof that you walk your talk.

When executed in fine, compelling fashion, these success stories about your work can recount how positively your business has impacted your existing customers. They even go beyond mere testimonials from your clients because they detail real-life occurrences and give prospective customers a deeper insight to how your business works, and how good it is.

You can reap from your previous successes by leveraging the power of case studies. If you have delighted your customers in the past, you have surely created a powerful tool to expand your business in the future, because people love success stories.

However, a case study is as effective as its execution. It has to be done correctly if it is to earn the trust of your leads and turn them into customers.

We are going to be covering the excellent methods to follow when creating an impactful, compelling, and persuasive case study. But first, let’s briefly cover the concepts of case studies, and why you really need them.

Conclusion

If you don’t have a case study telling prospects about how awesome your business is, now is the time to have one. If you already have one and haven’t touched it in years, now is the time to update. People love stories, they are reassuring and comforting, and the story of your business’s success might be the nudge that makes your newest customer pick up the phone to call you.

Hire an expert if you can’t go at it alone

Most businesses already have marketing agencies behind them, taking care of their promotion needs. Another effective category of experts are copywriters. Copywriting agencies with integrated SEO services can both come up with comprehensive and compelling copy for your case studies, and promote them through various web channels.

Promote them

Sometimes, simply tucking your case studies on a website page may make it inaccessible. Chances are people won’t even know you have a case study to begin with.

With a bit of SEO and social shares your case studies might enjoy a bit of publicity and prospects will begin to see your business for what it truly is.

Pursue different formats

Your case studies don’t necessarily have to come in blog-style formats. They shouldn’t even be limited to just texts. You could try an interview format or a feature post written solely by your customer (detailed with every element of the story).

There are also other mediums to pursue. They include videos, podcasts or image infographics. People learn in different ways. Some people are more likely to watch a video, some love to read, and others just prefer image representations.

Update regularly

Don’t just do case studies and get done with them. You should revisit from time to time. If you have done something for an existing client and continue to conduct successful dealings, include them year after year. This will tell your prospect that you follow up on your customers.

Updating regularly is not just for effect. It chronicles the fact that your business don’t just provide successful one-offs but can deliver again and again.

Include real statistics and numbers

Facts are the lifeblood of case studies. For one, when making a case study, make sure it’s real and make use of a business that checks out. Customers are more than likely to confirm that the business you’re sampling actually exists. It’ll do you great good if they find them out easily, and backfire if they don’t.

Another thing that should check out is the numbers you use. If you increased profits or revenues for your sample customers, represent them in statistical numbers. Visual graphs would also be helpful. Did they grow by %2 or %200? Include it.

Employ a concise, easy to read format

While you have collected a thorough and detailed story of your dealings with the candidate you have chosen, you might be at a loss on how to arrange the data into a meaningful story.

The truth is, readers are easily put off by a poorly formatted and badly written piece of text whether the story is real and superb or not.

Ensure you make use of great formatting elements and arrangements. Make sure to utilise:

  • Headers
  • Relevant images
  • Short sentences
  • Short paragraphs
  • Billeted lists
  • Italicised and bold texts

Remember to take carry the readers along as it happened chronologically so they can be engaged, digest your entire story, and be confident enough to use your brand.

Be thorough – never leave any detail out, start from the beginning and carry the reader to the end

You don’t want to cut through corners, rush things up, and omit even the slightest details in a case study. Your readers are contemplating on whether to use your service or not. They will be interested in knowing everything that has occurred. Letting them fill in blanks is a move that has the potential to backfire.

A few number of things to highlight include:

  • A profile of the sample customer and what they do
  • How they got to learn about your brand (important to include it they switched from a competitor)
  • What the customer’s goals was when they approached your business
  • The difficulties they were facing at the moment
  • How you helped solve their problems and met their goals

 

Make a proper case study pitch to candidates

Getting your client on board for the case study ensures it comes off as purely original. You have to hit the ground running by setting up the stage for open and clear communication. What this entails is creating an expected timeframe for the whole project in order to cut-through time wasting elements.

Apprise your candidate for the case study on what you might need for the project, like permission to use brand names and share the case study information publicly, the member (or members) of the company you wish to interview for the project, and the timeline they’d be comfortable with.

Choose the best client and the best story

When picking the particular client to be featured in the case study, you should go for the ones with great knowledge of your products and services. Since they’ll be speaking about how they’ve done business with you, you’d want them to explain out terms to create confidence in your prospects that they’d be carried along when they do business with you.

Secondly, choose a client that has enjoyed the most from your services. This way, you’ll get a story filled with enthusiasm and happy gratitude.

Another thing to factor in is the size of the client. Bigger brands tend to close in leads quicker. If you could handle so big a brand, then it shows you’re worth their trust.

Finally, you should consider clients that switched over to your side from a competitor (without mentioning the competitor of course) and got exactly what they’ve been missing satisfactorily. This will boost your competitive edge and tell prospects that looking elsewhere than your business might just not be a good idea.

Identify the perfect case study for your ideal customers

First of all, you have to understand who is reading the case study, then you can use this to choose the success story to sell.

You have to know the kind of customer you are looking to land, the kind of product or service they need, and the category they fall into. For example, if you’re targeting people shopping for insurance, make a case study on how your firm provided and payed insurance successfully to a client. If you want to target prospects from the care industry, provide a detailed event where your services helped out a care home (one they would likely know) solve an urgent need.

People get confident knowing that someone has found a solution similar to their exact problems.

Tips on creating a compelling case study

Now to the good part. To fuel a prospect’s desire to do business with you, you need a case study that works. Here are 10 great tips to create one.

 

Where are case studies used?

Primarily, you should have a page dedicated to case studies on your website. You can name them what you like, but make them easily accessible to your prospects.

Why are case studies needed?

Case studies are powerful marketing tools geared towards convincing prospects that you are experienced at what you do and they can trust you with their problems and money.

People love to go out of their way to find even the smallest shred of proof that a company is worth their salt. According to a 2014 survey, 9 out of 10 prospective customers embark on review-hunting before they engage any business.

So, to capture the trust of a prospect, you know they need to understand your customers are satisfied with your business.

Expert marketers have also identified case studies as effective marketing tools. The content marketing institute reported that UK marketers utilise an average of 12 different marketing strategies and case studies rank fifth and the most popular.

What is a case study?

A case study in the marketing sense, is a detailed chronicle of past dealings with previous or existing clients. It features real life details of transactions you have handled in the past, with in-depth particulars on how the transaction began to how it ended, the problems you looked to solve, and how successful it was.

Previous

Next

Most Read