The Case for Case Studies: Use Your Customers to Get More Business!
Are you capturing your success stories, and using them to proactively leverage further sales opportunities? Case studies are a powerful way to showcase your projects, the customers you work with and the results you get for them.
Case studies are:
- Versatile: You can use them in both digital and hard copy formats to support a wide range of marketing activities. Link them to your website as downloadable pdf’s, use them to support e-shots and direct mail campaigns, as leave behinds for new business presentations, and giveaways at events.
- Dynamic: Because a case study brings your business to life through a real-life story, it is far more emotive than a list of products or services will ever be!
- An independent endorsement: A third party endorsement is an extremely powerful validation of your expertise, and can tip the balance in converting a prospect into a customer.
What should a case study look like?
There are no strict rules, but most case studies will follow a similar format and break down into 4 key sections:
- About yur customer: A brief introduction to your customer, explaining a little about who they are, what they do, their sector, their vision, and what makes them different.
- About the challenge: Set out the story of the challenge your customer faced, and the ‘hurt’ their business was feeling before you helped them.
- About the result: Detail the outcome you were instrumental in bringing about, and explain how your customer’s position has improved. The more evidence you can introduce to qualify how successful the outcome has been, the better. If possible, express results as real, specific measurables – ‘a saving of X £’, or ‘an improvement of X %’ for example.
- Customer testimonial: Finish your case study with a short testimonial from your customer, summarising how pleased they are with the work you did. You should have no problem extracting this – your client will welcome any free publicity. If they’re especially busy, offer to save them time by creating a testimonial they can simply review and approve. Ideally, the testimonial should come from a senior contact – and make sure you include their name and job title.
Keep your case study reasonably short – somewhere between 500 – 1000 words is a good rule of thumb – and use good imagery to add impact to your words.
Each time you deliver a project that highlights a different aspect of your offering, or a new market sector, get into the habit of capturing the appropriate words and images – drop them into your template to keep your portfolio of case studies fresh and right up to date.
Can we help shine a spotlight on your work?
At Deep, we create case studies for many of our clients. We can propose a template, interview your customer by phone or Skype, and turn their words into a powerful piece of marketing collateral that will help you to get more business.
Contact us now to request examples of our work or to discuss your project. Call us on 07801 192552 or email us at hello@deep-mc.co.uk.
