Making the Most of Your Case Studies

If you’re not currently using case studies as part of your content marketing strategy, you’re really missing a trick. Research from HubSpot (2018) states that in the B2B setting, ‘case studies help convert and accelerate the most leads’ and they’re effective because they help your prospective clients and customers better understand exactly how your business can help them.

In marketing, a case study is a document, often a fairly lengthy one, which provides an analysis or an account of a project, campaign or business service that your company has provided to your client or customer. The aim of the case study is to prove to your prospects that your business can provide the solution/s to their problems in a non-salesy way and that you’re experienced in providing that solution.

Case studies can be relatively cheap and easy to produce but can have a BIG impact on your sales; read on to learn more about how you can make the most of your case studies.

1) Place case studies on your home page.

Your business website home page is an excellent place to host a case study. Visitors to your website will be looking for proof that your product or service can help them, and linking to a case study can be a great way of providing this evidence. If you don’t fancy linking to a case study on your homepage you could always take a customer quote or testimonial from the case study and publish this instead.

To make the case study or the testimonial as relevant to your audience as possible, link to a case study which provides the solution to one of the biggest problems that your prospects face. If your prospects can see that you’ve successfully solved this problem for other people, they are much more likely to want to work with you and/or purchase your products and services.

Make sure that when you publish case studies or testimonials on your homepage you keep the page up to date by refreshing the content regularly. Rotate the case studies on a monthly basis so prospects can see that you offer a range of potential solutions to their problem.

2) Write blog posts about your case studies.

Once you’ve spent time and money creating your case study you want to maximise its reach by exposing it to as many people as possible. One easy way to do this is to create a blog post about your case study. To make the blog post engaging re-frame the content of the case study so that your blog is focussed on a single, specific issue or problem that your client had and how this was overcome.

Make sure that your client is the focus of the blog post and not your product. Remember, you’re not writing a sales pitch. By putting the client at the centre of your blog you will also build and maintain excellent client relationships as your client will appreciate the mention and will be grateful for the back-links to their own website.

3) Post about case studies on social media.

Another easy way to maximise on your investment and increase the reach of your case study is to share it on social media. You can tag the customer in the post to increase the post’s reach and you should make sure that you write a snappy headline that ‘sells’ the case study to your audience by giving an idea of what benefit your customer experienced eg ‘90% increase in profits’.

4) Place case studies on your landing pages.

When prospects visit your services or product pages they are likely to already be thinking about making a purchase. By strategically placing relevant case studies on your landing pages there’s a good chance that you will convert a prospect into a lead. Publishing customer quotes and results, and/or linking to a case study on your landing page might just help seal the deal.

5) Include case studies in your newsletters and email marketing.

If you publish regular newsletters one easy way to show your newsletter subscribers how much you care about your clients and customers is to incorporate a case study into your newsletter. Case studies provide a human story and by nature are interesting to read so they’re useful for re-engaging past clients and generating enquiries from new ones.

6) Create sales resources

Case studies can be published as a stand-alone content marketing resource to be handed to prospects at conferences and exhibitions. They can also be incorporated within a lengthier sales brochure which your salespeople can refer to when closing a deal. Your sales reps will need up to date, relevant and proven evidence that your products and services work, and having a range of case studies to hand which demonstrate the benefits that your business provides to your customers will help your salespeople swing the deal in their favour.

Case studies will also educate your salespeople about the benefits of the product and/or service which means they will feel better equipped to deal with questions from prospects.

Also, providing case studies for your prospects to take away with them is a good way to keep your business at the forefront of your prospect’s mind once they leave the exhibition or conference.

7) Include a link to a case study in your email signature

Email signatures are not just a place to publish your contact details! Linking to a case study, or including a customer testimonial in your email signature is another very easy way to boost your case study’s visibility and prove to your contacts that you can provide the solution to their problem.

8) Create a content library of case studies

Once you’ve published your case study, don’t just forget about it. Create an accessible content library of case studies on your company’s intranet so that your salespeople and employees have a useful bank of content that they can refer to when helping prospects or training new team members.

9) Create videos from case studies.

People are now consuming more video content than ever before and your potential customers and clients might be more likely to watch a video than read a case study. If you can create videos of your clients talking about the problem that you helped them solve, and how you did it, you might find you get even more interest in your business.

Videos can be published on your website and on your social media platforms and can be really helpful in showing the personal side of your business.

10) Write a LinkedIn article about your case study.

Articles published on LinkedIn can have a huge reach and it’s worth taking advantage of this and publishing your case studies on this platform. LinkedIn is a networking platform for professionals and if you position the article in a way that demonstrates your expertise to other businesses and individuals within your industry, you will reap the rewards of having a more engaged network and potentially multiple new clients.

Publishing case studies regularly on LinkedIn will also help to increase your authority within your sector and demonstrate your industry experience.

So there you have it, ten easy ways to make the most of your case studies.

Case studies are an excellent marketing tool and when they’re used properly you can extract a huge amount of value from them. So, if you’re not already producing case studies, now is definitely the time to start.

If you’re not sure what a case study is, or how to go about creating one, you might find this article useful [LINK to my previous IFP case studies article]- not sure if you want to include this?

About the Author

Victoria Doxat is a freelance copywriter and lecturer from Petersfield UK, and specialises in producing thought leadership communications for businesses. You can read more of Victoria’s articles by visiting her website at www.victoriadoxat.com.