We all know the importance of great reviews for your business. They show other consumers that your product or service is worth their money. But case studies can take business reviews a step further and provide your potential customers with an engaging and persuasive story of how your business brought success to others. This will make potential customers want to become your customers too.
If you’re still not convinced, keep reading.
Why do you need a case study?
Case studies are important pieces of content that help guide prospects through the buyer’s journey. There are three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. When a user lands on your website and starts reading your blog, they’re in the awareness stage. When the user signs up for your newsletter or a free webinar, they’re now in the consideration stage. The next stage is the decision stage, where you’ve got to get users to buy.
So how do you turn users in the consideration stage into buyers? You do it with case studies.
There’s no better selling point to potential customers than to see real, live, social proof of how your product or service has helped another customer or business.
Get ready for more consumers to choose you, let’s dive into how to create a case study for your business.
Pick your case study subject.
The success of your case study partly relies on making sure you pick the right case study subject in the first place. Obviously, you want to showcase your product or service in the best light possible, which is why choosing a case study subject that will allow you to do so is so important.
Most importantly, choose a subject that your ideal audience can relate to. You want your audience to be able to see themselves in the case study — to read it and think “That could be me too!” Choose someone who has also experienced dramatic results from using your product or service. Don’t choose a subject who is still in progress or doesn’t have any results to share.
To find the perfect case study subject ask your sales team and customer support team if they know about any exceptional customers who could be a good fit. You can also take a look through high-praising customer reviews that you’ve recently received.
Don’t forget that you need to ask permission of the case study subject before you start writing a case study about them. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a willing case study participant though because a case study not only benefits you but it benefits the subject as well. They get a bit of free promotion for their company and a link on your post pointing back to their website.
Get the information.
After you’ve picked the perfect case study subject and they’re on board, next you need to get the information you need from them in order to put together the case study. A case study is essentially a story of success, people love to read success stories.
But in order to create an engaging and effective case study, you need to get as many facts and as much information about your subject’s experience as possible. I suggest sending some introductory questions by email to the subject and then getting on a phone call or video chat to get more details.
Some of the questions you should be getting answers to are:
- Who is the case study subject/customer? What do they do?
- What were the subject’s goals? What were their needs?
- What problem did the subject need to be solved?
- What solutions did they try before your product?
- What benefits or results did the subject see over time after using your product?
Your case study needs a beginning, a middle, and an end; what were their problems, how did they use your products, and what awesome results did they get from using your products. Focus on getting detailed information that will help you tell that story.
Write your case study.
After you’ve collected all your information, now is the time to piece all that info together and write your case study. With all the information you’ve collected by speaking to your case study subject, writing your case study shouldn’t take long at all.
The first thing you need for a great case study is a catchy title. Your title should include the name of your subject’s company and show how you helped them reach success. For example, something like “How Company X Boosted Traffic by 660% using Your Product”. This will make your potentials want to click and see how they can get similar results. For the beginning of your case study write a short summary paragraph that describes your subject and their success with your product.
Then write a section about who your case study subject is, what problems they were facing and what their goals were, followed by a longer section on how they used your product to solve their problems and what results they saw. Be sure to use your persuasive writing skills, because remember, you want to convince readers to buy your product too.
Design your case study.
Lastly, before you publish your case study, you need to make it look good. Whether you’re sharing your case study as a blog post on your site, as a downloadable PDF, or in your email campaigns, to be able to catch the eye of your audience your case study needs to be visually appealing. Be sure to break your case study up with headings, subheadings, and bullets and remember that white space is your friend. Include images in your case study and use graphs or charts to display results with important numbers. You can use Canva to easily create stunning visuals for your case study.
If you want to make things even easier for yourself, you can also use case study templates from Xtensio. Their visual and interactive templates allow you to create and customize an awesome case study for your business in minutes that can be shared on a web page, saved as a PDF, or as a digital slideshow.
A great case study will be able to convert readers into customers again and again. Now that you know why you need a case study for your business and how to create one, get out there and show people why you’re worth busting out their wallets for.