Tips For Creating An Effective Case Study
What makes a Bad Case Study Marketing?
It’s helpful to highlight what makes case study bad: most are painfully boring. What they have in research and detail, they lack in a cohesive, consumable story. They list numbers and contain data, but the reader isn’t sure what it all means or why it’s relevant to their problem. They end up existing as technical documents that do little to persuade or excite anyone—and that’s unfortunate because they have the potential to be a powerful sales tool that can help you close big deals in the decision-making phase.
Tips For Creating an Effective Case Study
Be choosy when possible
When you are selecting a case study to write, choose a customer who will tell your story well. Find a customer who has significant, quantifiable results in an application that is relevant to the most people that will show other potential customers the value of your product or service on website.
Do the work
If you want a case study that showcases the benefits of your products or services, you’ll need to write it yourself. By writing it yourself, you can easily include key messages that you’ve defined for your company.
Write an outline of your case study and then conduct an interview with your customer to fill in any gaps. Make sure you can articulate:
- The problem your customer was trying to solve
- Other solutions they considered before choosing to partner with your company
- The new functionality or solution they now have because of your product.
- The results they’ve seen as a result
Get to the specifics
Write your case study in a way that relates to other potential customers and shows a quantifiable result. The case study for NASDAQ shows Charles Schwab’s success after switching to the NASDAQ Exchange. Although the case study is about a financial institution, NASDAQ conveyed Schwab’s successes in a way that made them relatable to any publically-traded company, showing that with NASDAQ, Schwab received a superior market model, lower trading costs and listing fees, and greater liquidity.
Provide compelling first-glance content
Draw readers in with quantifiable, results-focused headlines. Use prominent content in your case study to catch a potential customer’s interest. In this case study, a headline with a quantifiable result quickly catches a potential customer’s attention and draws them in. A reader wants to know how they were able to do a system migration with a small amount of downtime.
Make approval easy
After you draft your case study, you’ll want your customer to review it. When sending it for review, highlight specific areas for them to look at, and include all images or screen shots you want to use, so that you can get all of the content reviewed and approved at once.
In addition, draft a specific quote that they can review and approve so that you can use that quote and its attribution on your website, in a flyer, or in a news release in the future.
Create a finished document
Make sure you have all the necessary elements for a compelling, effective case study. Elements you need, are well-written, customer approved content and additional images or graphics, laid out in a finished document that clearly communicates the customer’s challenge, solution, goals or key factors, implementation, and results.