Case study: Case studies
Your prospective customers are looking for examples of how others overcame the same challenges they have. Case studies are simply stories of your customer’s experience. You’ll usually write them to illustrate how your customer overcame a challenge or took advantage of an opportunity. Here’s a quick summary of the how and why.
What
It’s about your customer.
You should develop case studies to specifically address customer concerns and highlight opportunities you can unlock for your customers, which they may not be aware of. The topic of your case study should also align to a specific part of your sales funnel.
For example:
Say you’re trying to raise awareness, maybe you could inspire your customers with a case study about a problem their competitor dealt with using your product.
Maybe you’re trying to convince them to adopt your product vs a competitor. Why not use the story of a customer of yours that used to use the competitor you’re up against so they can sing your praises?
Perhaps your customer is sold on you, but their IT team or some other critical decision-maker isn’t on board because they’re worried about integration with existing systems. Why not write a story using one of your customers about how easy it is to integrate your platform?
WHAT
Social Proof
Case studies serve as social proof and help readers alleviate concerns they have about using your new products or services.
One of the key things to remember to try and do is use companies that have a bit of clout in your industry. If you’re working with a market leader and part of the reason of their success is you - that’s something you should talk about to your other customers!
Remember though, the customer’s success is the focal point of the story. The role you played in that success should largely be implied or enabled through the use of your products or service.
How
Linking to your proposition
Telling a cool story about your customer is great. And look, if they’re getting benefit from what you do there’s merit in talking about that in its own right. If you can though try and make sure the benefit the customer attained relates to one of your business’ value propositions.
Case studies are about your customers succeeding with your help. So if there’s an area you’re awesome it, it’s preferable to link to that so other customers see it too!
How
Writing a case study
Hopefully you get why case studies are important and how you can use them.
So you can get started we’ve developed a template with a series of questions you can ask and assets you can pull together to write your own.