As a content creator, I love case studies and customer success stories. They’re fun to write and, I hope, interesting to read.
But how do you get to the stage where you can actually get one written? The “you” I’m addressing here is the hardworking person who must do all the spadework before a word even hits the paper. Sasha LaFerte, marketing manager at Curata and Content Marketing Institute columnist, has put together a set of steps that may make things easier or at least more systematic. (We must always remember that we’re dealing with people here—customers, a possibly recalcitrant internal team, legal departments, etc.)
Here, according to Ms. LaFerte is what you do, with an editorial comment or two from me:
Put a formal process together
Creating a formal process allows you to build a case study pipeline. This is a good idea, because—my thought—it will probably always take longer than you’d like to get a study going. Your customer may have to get approval from legal or senior management. And you may need to sell your way-too-busy colleagues across your organization of the benefits of doing case studies. So it makes sense to build a pipeline.
Ms. LaFerte offers marketing case study statistics and case study request templates that internal teams can use to communicate with customers. She also suggests creating a document for your colleagues to use to submit case study opportunities.
I’m guessing that the more formal you can make things, the more likely your effort will be taken seriously. As we know, once something is on paper, it begins to take on a life of its own and is perhaps less easily dismissed.
Incentivize
Offering a monetary incentive to colleagues to recruit customers may work in the short term, but you want to devise a long-term approach and communicate it across the organization, says Ms. LaFerte. She suggests that you use the short term to get the support of relevant department heads.
My thought: In larger organizations, you may have less trouble simply because you may be able to get the customer reference folks on your side. Or you may have more trouble because they’re jealously guarding their referenceable customers. (I’d be really interested to hear what readers of this post think about that.)
Offer customer value
Make sure customers know how they will benefit. And, my thinking, you need to make sure you’re offering tangible benefits—social media exposure, etc. —that you can deliver on. It would be pretty embarrassing or worse if you talked up all the good reasons to do a case study and then discovered that someone in your organization had gotten balky about coming through.
Find a way around
Sometimes, there’s just no way you’ll be able to do a case study. (I’ve encountered this situation on a number of occasions.) So you need to get ingenious. Perhaps you can write a study that doesn’t mention the customer by name. Ms. LaFerte also suggests doing a group case study that presents average results across companies. I’m guessing that a group case study can be anonymous or not. If you have several customers in the same industry and can’t use their names, I think you can still create a strong study based on industry results. Ms. LaFerte also notes that you can start small with a short quote or permission to put a customer logo on your website.
Don’t dilly dally
Case studies can be enormously persuasive. “Case studies provide proof of concept to potential buyers and drive your audience further down the funnel. (Italics mine) They also serve as a powerful sales-enablement tool.”
Yes, case studies and success stories take time and effort. But they’re credible with prospects and customers you’re trying to cross-sell or upsell. And besides that, they’re establish you as a story teller rather than a producer of collateral.
bakhtiarzein / 123RF Stock Photo
Leave a Comment