Building an effective content marketing strategy that can take your prospects through every stage of the buyer's journey means creating a variety of content.
From relevant, informative blog content to engaging webpages, landing pages, whitepapers, and emails, a comprehensive content marketing strategy should run deep.
One powerful, but often underused, piece of content is the case study.
What Is a Case Study?
A case study acts a narrative, featuring real-world situations where certain products or services are used in a way that demonstrates thier value. They are a special type of thought leadership content that brands can use in marketing and sales to guide their target audience to the decision stage of their buyer's journey. Engaging case studies walk prospects through how a real life customer identified a specific pain point, started using your product or service, and overcame that pain point while reaping additional benefits.
A case study is a special type of thought leadership content that tells a story.
Case studies are narratives that feature real world situations or uses of products or services to demonstrate their value. A well written case study will follow a customer as they define a problem, determine a solution, implement it, and reap the benefits.
Case studies offer readers the ability to see a situation from the customer's perspective from beginning to end.
Why Case Studies Are Important
A marketing case study is one of the most compelling content items in your sales funnel.
It’s the perfect way to guide people into and through the decision phase, when they have the best options laid out on the table and they’re ready to puzzle through that final selection.
Because of this, case studies are uniquely useful as bottom of the funnel content.
By the time prospects are ready to read case studies, they have a nuanced grasp of the problem in front of them. They also have a good selection of potential solutions and vendors to choose from.
There may be more than one option that’s suitable for a given situation. In fact, there usually is. But there’s just one option that fits the prospect best. The challenge is figuring out which one.
Since B2B decision makers aren’t mind readers, they need content to bridge the gap between “what they know about your solution” and “what they know about their own business.” The case study does that by showing how a similar customer succeeded.
The more similar the prospect is to the customer in the case study, the more striking it will be.
For that reason, you might want to have a case study for every buyer persona you serve. And naturally, case studies pertain to specific products or services, not your whole brand.
So, you could find yourself with multiple case studies for each buyer type.
However, the effort is worth it, since case studies have a direct impact on sales figures.
How Long Should a Case Study Be?
via GIPHYHonestly, the more to-the-point you can be in a case study, the better.
Great case studies should pack a lot of meaning into a small space. In the best examples, your reader can grasp the single main idea of each page in a short paragraph or two.
Each detail should build on the next, so they’ll keep moving forward until the end without getting distracted.
Sure, it’s no Dan Brown novel, but if you do it right, it’ll still be a real page-turner.
Note: Some businesses will have a brief case study in PDF form to use as sales collateral then a longer form, more in-depth version of the same case study on their website. In this case, it can be normal to write a lengthier case study.
Where Should I Put My Case Studies?
via GIPHYAnywhere you want, really!
Ideally, you should upload case studies somewhere on your website so new leads coming to your site have the opportunity to see just how kickass your business is at driving revenue and results for your current customers.
Whether it's an online case study or a PDF version, making your successes available to the public can prove just how valuable your efforts are.
Plus, make sure every member of your sales team has access to your case studies so they can use them as sales collateral to send to prospects and opportunities! A quick PDF attachment to a sales email can be very convincing.
The Best Case Study Format
- Introduction: Provide context for the story.
- Challenge: Describe the primary issue being faced.
- Solution: Identify the product or service being used.
- Benefit: Emphasize the most impactful advantages.
- Result: Detail the specific outcomes the customer earned.
Like press releases, case studies often fall into a certain specific format.
While it’s not required that you have all of the possible topics in a particular order, picking a consistent format will help you accelerate production down the road. It also makes your content easier to read.
Many B2B businesses use the following approach:
- Introduction: sets the stage by providing context for the situation.
- Challenge: discusses the key problem that the customer was facing.
- Solution: a basic overview of the product or service the customer used.
- Benefit: recaps the solution’s top advantages – why it was the right choice.
- Result: the positive business outcome arising from the solution and benefits.
This formula gives you enough flexibility to highlight what’s most important about your enterprise, solution, and the customer you’re showcasing.
At the same time, it ensures that your team will know exactly what information they need to compile to design case studies in the future.
It also serves as an intuitive trail of breadcrumbs for your intended reader.
How to Write a Case Study
1. Ask Your Client/Customer for Approval.
This first step is crucial because it sets the layout for your entire case study.
If your client or customer gives the ok to use their name and information, then you can add as much detail as you want to highlight who they are, what you helped them do, and the results it had.
But, if they would rather remain anonymous or want you to leave out any specific details, you’ll have to find a way to keep your information more generalized while still explaining the impact of your efforts.
2. Gather Your Information.
Like any good story, a marketing case study has a beginning, middle, and end. Or, you could think of it as “before, during, and after.”
Before: The Problem
Your case study will always open by presenting a problem suffered by one of your clients.
This part of the study establishes what’s at stake and introduces the characters – your company, the client company, and whichever individual decision makers speak for each side.
During: The Solution
Once you define the problem, the next step presents your offering, which serves as the answer to the dilemma.
Your product or service is, in a very real sense, the hero of the story. It catalyzes the change, which you describe in terms of your features, advantages, and other differentiators.
After: The Result
In the final step, you discuss the “happy ending” brought about by your solution.
Returning to the “stakes” you established at the very start, you expand on how much better things are thanks to your intervention. You want prospects to imagine themselves enjoying that level of success.
3. Get a Quote.
via GIPHYOf course, a study about two corporations isn’t very interesting on its own. The best case studies personify the protagonists, including the vendor and the client company, by having plenty of quotes peppered throughout the entire story.
Naturally, the business problem to be solved is the big, bad villain here, so you want the client (and preferably, your own team as well) to weigh in on that problem: How complex it is, what solving it would mean, and what not solving it would cost.
Then, as the situation turns around, testimonials become essential.
Naturally, the longest, most emphatic testimonial should come from the top decision maker. But you should aim to include a glowing quote from many different stakeholders – representing the full cast of “characters” who might be making consensus buying decisions around your solution.
Note: Don’t use a testimonial or quote if your case study is anonymous.
4. Find Some Compelling Graphics.
A case study isn’t a whitepaper: You shouldn’t be trudging through page after page of text.
In fact, some of the most powerful case studies establish their own vivid, graphics-heavy style – looking a lot more like an infographic, or even a magazine, than traditional B2B marketing collateral.
Color blocks, strong contrasts, skyscraper photography, and hero shots are all on the table when it comes to case studies. The more data you have to convey, the more creative you should be in presenting it so it can be understood at a glance.
