Why You Need Case Studies

In writing classes, “show, don’t tell” is a mantra. Offering details that bring the reader into the story, rather than simply narrating it, are always more powerful. But this guidance is not just applicable to writing—it’s valuable advice for businesses as well.

How often have you gone to a company’s website and find a list of several prominent companies as their clients? Impressive, right? After all, those companies must know what they’re doing. Maybe that’s enough to get a request for more information. But at some point, your prospect is probably going to want more proof of your product’s value.

Marketing case studies are the “show, don’t tell” of the business world. They’re an effective and engaging way of not only showing the results of your service or your product, but illustrating how it works. Instead of just saying, “We helped Acme Anvils increase sales by 23%!”, you can go through how exactly that happened, step by step.

Case studies (which can also be called “customer success stories”) are an effective marketing tool to have on your website and sales brochures. You can tout your wins all day long, but a well-written marketing case study can be a game-changer for prospects that need a little more convincing.

Typical Case Study Format

A professional case study typically consists of a challenge, a solution, and the results.

• Challenge: The pain point your customer was experiencing that led them to your company’s offerings.
• Solution: Your product or service, and how the customer used it to eliminate the pain point.
• Results: These could be increased sales or conversions, time saved on manual tasks, greater employee productivity, increased customer satisfaction, etc.

There is plenty of room for variation—you can add an intro paragraph or two, or add graph, charts, and/or icons. As for length, case studies can be 600 words or 1200. It depends on the complexity of the story you want to tell.

Hard numbers are always the most effective proof points when it comes to results, but case studies are good for highlighting qualitative data too. Quotes about how your product made someone’s job easier or enabled the company to focus more effectively on its core tasks can be incredibly powerful.

Where Can You Find Case Study Subjects?

This is where those client relationships are more valuable than ever. Talk to your sales reps and find out which clients or customers were particularly pleased with your offerings. Ask if they’d be willing to be part of a case study, and make sure that decision-makers at the company are on board—you don’t want to do all the work and then find out that someone objects to the project after the fact. Interview them, making sure to get all the interesting details that really make a story as well as some juicy quotes you can run as pull quotes. (This is where having a skilled interviewer really comes into play.) Then write it!

I enjoy writing case studies because I like interviewing people and because they’re so satisfying. How often in life do you get to see a problem neatly resolved from point A to point B? Which is all the more reason they can be so effective. Remember: your customers aren’t necessarily interested in your product: they’re interested in fixing a problem. Case studies show prospects how you can do that for them.