Aaron Hoos

Marketing is all about telling stories and a case study is a type of story about a customer who had a problem until they bought your solution. Case studies are very effective ways to market your business because the prospective buyers in your sales funnel see themselves in these stories and it helps to convince them to buy from you.
Here are 5 ways to use case studies in your marketing:

1. Case studies as separate, formal documents

If you have a great story about a customer who had a problem until they bought your product or service, you can write up your case study into a separate document – a nicely-designed one-page PDF is perfect! – and add it to your marketing collateral. Make them available on your website for download and send them to prospective buyers from time to time.

2. Case studies as informal stories

These are easy and fun to write and you should make it a point to write this kind of case study for every customer you have. Just create a one-paragraph story about the customer’s previous problem and the benefits they received when they bought from you. It’s very similar to the more formal version (above) but these stories can be used more broadly – in blogs, in emails, in conversations, in your sales letters, in your brochures, in your ebooks, etc. Keep these case studies in a file so you can pull from them whenever you need to.

3. Testimonials

Testimonials are a type of case study… from the customer’s perspective. When you work with a customer, ask them for a testimonial and post it on your website. (Check out testimonials from my clients). Use these testimonials everywhere!

4. Fictional case studies

The idea of using fictional case studies might upset some readers but they are a very common technique in marketing and sales copy writing. The famous sales copy headline “They laughed when I sat down at the piano but when I started to play!” is a case study… it’s just a fictional one. These types of case studies should be truthful, even if they are fictional. (That is, they shouldn’t be that different from the real benefits experienced by real customers). Be careful when using these case studies… they are acceptable as highly valuable marketing and sales copy techniques but they shouldn’t be presented as real case studies.

5. Case studies of NON-customers

Here’s a great way to use case studies: You can write case studies but they don’t have to be about your customers. Typically, these case studies are negative case studies, highlighting situations where the person or business didn’t follow through with a solution and suffered the consequences. These are frequently used in business books where the author wants to compare a positive case study and a negative case study. In a financial book I’m reading right now, the author highlights Bre-X as a company that did not use proper accounting methods. It’s a negative case study. Note: Don’t identify specific prospects who didn’t buy from you!

Case study tips

• Categorize your case studies by problem and also by industry so that you can find them quickly and send them to the right targeted prospects.
• Not all of your case studies need to have your customer’s name in them. Sometimes a customer doesn’t want their name in a case study. However, you can say something like “A customer who is a leader in the automotive sector…” or “A customer who is a multinational insurance company…”. Some of your case studies SHOULD have a customer name, though, just to add credibility. Your most formal case studies and your testimonials should use the customer’s name, especially if they are well-known.
• Your case studies will be the most valuable to you when your prospects see themselves in the case study. Therefore, make sure the problems are realistic and the benefits are achievable. One case study with amazing results will be less valuable to you than three or four case studies with realistic results.

The following is a case study derived from working with a client: BizTrade, the Community-Powered Business Exchange.

PROBLEM: The client approached me because they were dramatically changing their business. For several years, they had worked in the highly competitive business brokerage industry, helping business owners who wanted to buy or sell a business. But they were changing to a community-driven model and were figuring out what it looked like, how it worked, and how to communicate it.

SOLUTION: First, we worked through how the business was changing and we created numerous information assets to communicate it to all parties — essentially communicating that the current business brokerage model was broken and that a new model was required. This work included press releases, web copy, and ebooks. Next, we worked through the business model itself and this went through numerous iterations before finally settling on the model you see today. My role throughout the process was to provide the assets to be used to inform and instruct key targets (including clients and related professionals) and to create content strategy that would feed this model with high-value business content to attract and engage users.

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORK: Content strategy is a key activity of the Business Diamond Framework. Each part of the Framework needs information assets to communicate to those outside of it. BizTrade’s Leadership Function Diamond needed content to keep stakeholders up to date. BizTrade’s Support Function Diamond needed content that would instruct users on how to buy memberships. And BizTrade’s Value-Add and To-Market Function Diamonds were the basis on which I created the content strategy that would move them out of their old business model into their new business model.

The following is a case study derived from working with a client. To preserve confidentiality, I am only describing the problem and not the client.

PROBLEM: A client approached me with a problem. Their organization had invested thousands of dollars to hire a company to create 3 five minute training videos for their new product. Unfortunately, the result (after pre-paying for the work) was extremely poor quality and insufficient for their needs. They had potentially lost thousands of dollars for worthless videos.

SOLUTION: We talked about what their needs were for these videos (ultimately to train their sales people) and I analyzed the content in each video and redeveloped a storyboard that salvaged significant elements of the videos. I also developed a script that was read by a professional voice artist. Collaborating with other professionals, we recrafted the video by chopping up and repurposing the videos, and then adding a new voiceover. For a small additional investment, the client was able to salvage what was once lost.

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORKâ„¢: I’ve done this kind of work (in various media) with other clients, too, and I’ve found that the most frequently wasted assets are in the Support Diamond — typically training material intended to help different areas of the organization. A lot of investment is put into the content and then it goes unused.

The following is a case study derived from working with a client. To preserve confidentiality, I am only describing the problem and not the client.

PROBLEM: A client came to me with their need to raise prices. They’ve had prices set for a while now and it was time to raise them to keep up with inflation and the cost of hiring qualified staff. I had been hired to simply write an email to announce it, and the email was going to be a quick statement (like pulling a bandaid off as quickly as possible). However, I proposed an alternate idea that they used which involved some strategic changes in their offering followed by a more detailed marketing effort.

SOLUTION: We created tiers of service designed to express their value in different ways. We upped the ante on each tier so that the new levels of service offered additional compelling value to each customer (thus softening the impact of the increased price). While there will always be some backlash when raising prices, the message can be configured in a more positive tone by adding value at the same time.

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORK™: This was very much a Value Chain Axis effort because it meant an across-the-axis shift in thinking. However, it did require some Leadership Diamond work (in communicating the  overall positioning) and it involved some work in the Support Diamond (in delivering on some of the value-added changes).

The following is a case study derived from working with a client. To preserve confidentiality, I am only describing the problem and not the client.

PROBLEM: Recently, a client approached me with a problem. He was overbooked. He has a popular, in-demand B2B service and his phone was ringing off the hook. Outsourcing is an option but only in a limited capacity due to the demanding and legislated qualifications of the service. So my client instead wanted to be more selective in taking on customers and needed a process that would allow them to “weed out” undesirable customers.

SOLUTION: We worked on turning them from an “attracting organization” to a “qualifying organization”, two very different kinds of marketing. An attracting organization uses marketing to magnetize clients and draw them in. It’s the most common type of marketing for businesses because most companies need to attract clients. But for those companies that have plenty of prospects, a “qualifying” type of marketing needs to be used to demonstrate why not everyone can get the product or service offered.

Consider 2 restaurants in the same town: One has a lot of empty tables and offers buy-one-get-one-free coupons to attract consumers. The other has a line-up around the block each night so its marketing needs to qualify its clientele by talking about exclusivity and quality. No “BOGO” here!

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORKâ„¢: A lot of the work here is in the To-Market Diamond, since most of it is marketing related. However, there will be some Leadership Diamond changes as an organization switching to become a “qualifying organization” makes some decisions at the upper levels to change processes and vision. And, the Support Diamond is impacted because many support roles will need to change, either to assist in the qualification process or to deliver flawlessly each and every time. The Value-Add Diamond is impacted only in the sense that relationships with high quality suppliers will need to be strengthened to enable flawless delivery of the product or service.