Case studies are a great way to showcase your brand’s authority to the rest of the world. Simply put, a case study shows how your product or service has been crucial in solving a B2B client’s real-world problem in the most effective manner. This is persuasive advertisement because it comes with the power of storytelling. Everyone loves to hear a great story, and you are doing exactly that. Companies often name case studies like “Customer Stories” or “Customer Success Stories”.
Why Should You Create Case Studies?
Case studies are meant to build .your brand’s credibility by highlighting your expertise or offering in a particular area. Its goal is to grow confidence in the minds of prospects who might be looking for a solution to a similar or even the same problem. In that sense, case studies can make great content for the consideration phase of inbound marketing. In fact, according to a 2020 State of Marketing Trend Report from HubSpot, 13% of marketers consider case studies as one of the primary components of their content strategy.
How Do Case Studies Look Like?
Typically, case studies are freely available from a company’s website under the “Resources” section. However, in some rare cases, a business may decide to share gated case studies with its existing customers only.
Some businesses may have many case studies on their website. Canva is one example. Others may not have any or only a few. Depending on how much potential your story has for conversion, you can highlight it on the home page or a landing page.
Some case studies can be downloaded like an eBook in PDF format, while others are available as web copies. This case study from well-known data management software company Talend is a dowloadable PDF file that shows stories of seven of their customers, written in a concise form. The same company took a unique approach by incorporating video in this featured customer story.
What Should Case Studies Contain?
The way you want to present your case studies will depend on what type of information you want to convey to prospects. We will talk about case study structures shortly, but effective case studies are backed by data. Such data can be supplied by the customer, collected by you, or even be available in the public domain. You can present the data using charts, graphs, numbers, infographics, bulleted lists, or screenshots. For example, if your marketing agency specializes in SEO service, your case study can include screenshots of your client’s website traffic behavior from Google Analytics—before and after your changes. But here’s what you need to remember: the information you include must be verifiable, proven, and collected from a respectable authority. This case study from the [M]System Agency is an excellent example of using data in your stories.
There’s no hard limit to the length of a case study. However, since these are targeted at decision-makers, overly long content can easily distract readers or cause them to abandon reading before reaching call-to-action (CTA). We recommend keeping case study lengths between 1,000 to 1,200 words.
What Should You Consider Before Writing Case Studies?
The number of case studies you should publish, or the type of content you should include in those will depend on a number of factors. For example:
- Who’s your target audience, and what information could they seek in a case study? Will they want to see your product or service’s performance in the market? Will they want to see why other companies are choosing your product or service?
It could be difficult to know, but this is where your sales team can help because they will have some insight into customer inquiries. If you have no such information, write your case studies for the buyer personas you created for your ideal customer profile. - Do you want to highlight one product or service or more in your case studies?
- How well do you know your customers, and how well do they know you? Do you have a business relationship close enough that even your customer will highlight the story on their social media channel or various events?
- How willing are your customers to share their stories with you for publishing? Some clients may have regulatory requirements which prohibit vendors from disclosing any information.
- Was your story with the customer already published or talked about elsewhere? Do you want to highlight it as a star use case?
- Did your product or service play the most pivotal role in solving the customer’s problem, or was it a small part of the solution?
- Was it a once-off solution from your product or service line, or the product/service was used by multiple customers in different situations? A flagship product or service is always a good candidate for case studies.
Ideally, you would want to hight the best of your customer stories where the solution played a huge role. Many companies highlight case studies of their well-known and often famous customers.
As you can see, planning for case studies can take some time, but once you have set some basic reference rules, you can start creating case stduy templates and workflows your content creators can use. If you want to get started quickly, you can try out HubSpot’s case study templates.
How Do You Gather All the Information for Case Studies?
The central part of any case study should be the customer you helped. That’s why you first need to discuss with your client if they are happy for you to highlight their story on your website. Nobody likes negative coverage, so you must assure your clients—and ensure—the case study you want to write does not show them in any way that hurts their reputation.
Once you have the go-ahead, you need to set up times with their key stakeholders for interviews. You should interview those who were directly involved during the project and those who can talk about the impact your solution has made on the company. People consider their time valuable, and you will probably get only one appointment with your subject, so make sure you are asking the right questions.
For the interviews, start by asking questions your subjects are most familiar with, and then build upon the answers. Ensure all the questions are open-ended. Also, make sure you are recording the interviews with their consent.
Here’s a sample list of questions you may want to ask.
The Business
- Tell me about your company—what industry are you in, and what does your business do?
- Can you please provide figures about your organization, like turnover, number of staff, office locations, type of clients you have, or similar?
The problem
- What was the business problem you were trying to solve?
- Was there a particular trigger that made you decide it was time to act?
- What were the key challenges you needed to address?
- How was the problem affecting your business? Can you give some quantitative figures?
The solution
- What were your project objectives?
- When did the project begin and end?
- Why did you choose our company?
- What technologies, processes, and workflows were used?
- What was the process for developing the solution? (If you’re an IT company, provide the technical details of the solution yourself. Don’t rely on your client to provide this information, as they may not be aware of the depth/breadth of your work).
- Were there any extra challenges during the project that our company helped you solve?
Results
- How is the solution now being used?
- Has it achieved the project objectives?
- What quantifiable benefits can you attribute to the solution (e.g., return on investment, dollars or time saved, dollars earned, customer happiness index, number of enrolments, etc.)?
- What other business benefits have you experienced as a result of this solution?
- How does this compare to how you were doing things previously?
- Who are the main users, and what changes has it made to their roles?
- How have the users reacted?
Future plans
- Do you have plans for future development on this solution?
- Off the back of this project, are there any other projects either underway or in the pipeline?
- Will you be considering our company for future projects? If so, why?
Testimonial
- If you were to recommend our company, what would you say?
- How would you describe your relationship with our company?
This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. The basic rules of interviews apply here: you need to be on top of your questions to get all the answers within the allocated time, but you also don’t interrupt people when they are talking about the project passionately.
Depending on how in-depth you want to go with your case study, you may need to interview stakeholders from your company too. They can be salespeople who closed the deal, presales engineers (if you are a technology company), support staff, or project managers.
How Should You Structure Your Case Studies?
Once you have gathered all the information and data for your case study, it’s time to write it is in a structured manner. A case study structure should include the following:
The Problem
This is where you describe what challenges your customer faced and how those impacted their businesses. Relevant figures and insights can be a powerful driver here. For example, the problem can highlight the money the company was losing daily, the time it took to complete a business process, or the number of opportunities the business was losing.
You, the Solution Provider
This is where you describe how your business was involved and why. Did the client approach you? Did you apply through a bidding process and win the work? Why did the client decide to hire you? More importantly, why did you feel confident you could help the business?
Your Magic Formula
This is the crux of the content. This is where you describe how you approached and solved the problem. Describe in detail:
- What products and services you used for the solution?
- Why you chose that path as the best possible solution?
- What problems did you and the client face when adopting this solution, and how you overcame those hurdles?
- How long did it take?
Once again, you can use figures and insights to back your points. For example, the client was using an older class of machine that could churn out only X widgets per hour. Knowing the customer’s industry well, your company recommended the newer generation Y machines, which could be easily calibrated to produce more or less than X widgets per hour, giving the customer the benefit of scalability. In doing so, you found many existing pipelines integrated with the older machines could not interoperate with the Generation Y version, so you created a custom integrator in record time.
Points like these not only prove your brand’s expertise but also shows that you care for your clients and are prepared to go the extra mile.
The Happy Customer
In this part, you describe what the client got in the end and how it affected their businesses. As with other parts of the story, figures and charts are a great means of communicating your findings. Side-by-side comparisons of before and after states are a powerful way to show prospective buyers that they, too, can get such benefits by hiring you. As an extra bonus, you can add client testimonials here. Nothing assures prospective buyers more than great testimonials from buyers who have done business with you.
Call to Action (CTA)
This is the last part of the case study, where you ask prospects to contact you if interested. This section should be fairly small and not look like you are making a sales pitch. The CTA should briefly introduce your company and what it offers and include a link to an online contact form or provide other details like an email address or phone number.
Letting the World Know
To ensure your case study is discoverable by organic traffic, it should follow all the basic rules of SEO. These include things like title length, meta descriptions, keywords, headings, and so on.
But you also want to tell the rest of the world about it. As we mentioned before, sometimes a case study can be so important your marketing department may want to highlight it on the home page or a landing page of the website.
You should also run a social media campaign once the piece is published. Another great way to promote is to run an email campaign to let your leads and clients know. If available as a web copy, the case study page should also include social share links.
Final Words
So there you have it: our tips for creating great case studies for effective and successful B2B marketing. Although it may seem complex, writing effective case studies mainly depends on getting the right information from the right people and presenting them in a compelling way.
Here at Professional Data Skills, we are really passionate about telling great stories about our customers, and we would love to create great case studies for you. If you want to know how we can tell your story, why not drop us a line?