Case Study: How to Properly Write and Use It
What is a Case Study?
A Case Study is a document where the company’s expertise in a particular industry is described with the help of text and graphic materials.
Why make a Case Study?
Case studies are made to convince the client that you have the necessary experience in a specific business domain or technology.
How can a Case Study be used?
Case Study can be used in several ways:
- in email and LinkedIn mailing;
- during phone calls and as presentation materials;
- at exhibitions and personal meetings (as printed promotional materials);
- on the website in a specially created section, or by simply posting it as an article on the blog.
You can read more about lead generation methods and lead sources in our blog.
What makes a Case Study work?
Creating a portrait of the ideal client is the most important thing, which starts every marketing strategy. You can read what a portrait of an ideal client is and how important it is in our article.
Here we will give a very simple example: imagine that you are a promoter, your “workplace” is located near a store that sells goods only for women, and you need to attract customers to this place. Will your work be effective if you distribute all your brochures to men? How much more effective would it be to distribute brochures to women only?
The portrait of the ideal client makes it possible to accurately describe your ideal client and make the marketing tools you use a dozen times more effective.
At what stage of the sales funnel should you use the Case Study?
A Case Study can be used during the lead generation and (necessarily) in presale activities.
How to create an effective Case Study?
Here, we will answer the basic questions that will allow you to create an effective Case Study:
- If possible, always use industry-specific and relevant cases.
- Do not go into the technical details of the project if the portrait of your ideal client suggests that your clients are mainly not technical people.
- Describe from the user’s point of view what business problems you solved with your product/service.
- Show financial performance if your work had an impact on this indicator.
- Always combine textual information with graphical information (screenshots, performance graphs, visual comparison of results before and after, etc.). Many people are visual in nature and perceive information accompanied by graphs much better.
- Add your clients’ feedback. The best options are those clients ready to provide you with recommendations in a call/an email.
- Choose the perfect format for the Case Study document (we suggest A4 vertical PDF since this format avoids the limitations of mailboxes by the size of attachments – it has the highest possible compression).
- Provide concise and brief information: don’t exceed three pages, but ideally, present the information on one sheet. With more information, the client loses focus, and there is a risk that the most important things you wanted to emphasize will be overlooked.
A Case Study is a document where the company's expertise in a particular industry is described with the help of text and graphic materials.
What does the structure of an ideal Case Study look like?
About the client – a block that tells about the client’s company, industry, and the specifics of the company that contacted you. It is also essential to briefly describe the project in general terms.
Challenges that you had to face. This is the most important block where you need to describe the challenges faced on the way of the company. The next block – Decision – should show exactly which decisions were implemented on your side. It is better to place these two data blocks horizontally (Challenges on the left and Decision on the right).
About the project – a block where you need to indicate general information about the size of the team and its structure, the number of hours/months of work.
The next block is the Results. Here, you need to focus on the maximum possible detail of the results: increasing the customer base, increasing the speed of transfers, the percentage of increase in the number of registrations, etc.
Client testimonials – a short block where the client shares their opinion about your company and cooperation within the project. We suggest posting a photo and, if the client agrees, their contact details.
About the company – a very short description of your company and your contact information. This information will let the client find your contacts at any time, even if they have lost the correspondence and only have a Case Study left on their computer.
By using a powerful tool like the Case Study, you will have additional reasoning to convince the client to choose your company.
If you need help preparing a Case Study or marketing strategy, you can always contact our company.
