5 Reasons Your Business Should Write Case Studies for Marketing Purposes
Before choosing to buy from you, customers want to know two things:
Have you served customers like me before?
Were those customers satisfied with the results?
Answering these questions using case studies is easy and intuitive. The case study serves multiple purposes, demonstrating your company’s thought leadership and domain expertise in a category and detailing your value proposition. Executed well, case studies can signal to prospective clients that other, similar customers covet your services, that you understand their problems, and that you can offer them a very welcome solution.
Here are five reasons you should consider adding case studies to your company’s content marketing arsenal.
Prove your services are in demand
Social proof is a valuable marketing tool. Restaurants with long lines become more popular. Nike sneakers that sell out instantly become even more coveted.
Customers like to know that others are happily buying a product or service before trying it themselves.
A well-executed case study is your opportunity to let them know that not only does your business have clients - a critical attribute of a successful business - but those clients are also seeing results from working with you. Better yet, they’re so pleased with the outcome that they’re willing to share a quote or testimonial, and they’re happy to have their experience detailed on your website. Quotes and testimonials are great, but when they’re applied on their own without context, they often ring hollow - your site’s visitors are left to wonder in what capacity the quoted individual worked with your business and if it was at all representative of the experience they might have. When included in the context of a case study, though, there are no questions, and the trepidations of the reader vanish.
You’ve worked hard to build a stable of valued clients and even harder to ensure they have fantastic experiences - part of the reward is having the ability to let others know about their satisfaction. Thanks to case studies, adding to your existing client roster will be much easier than building it in the first place.
Demonstrate your domain expertise
While your marketing materials or website copy may indicate your company serves certain verticals or industries, they may not do enough to demonstrate your company’s in-depth understanding of those industries: what do its constituents value, and what pain points do they experience?
A case study does all of those things in one tidy package.
Take, for example, a company that provides CRM solutions to banks and financial services companies. These businesses have unique regulatory requirements to follow, and as a result, they might be reticent to purchase solutions from a company with no demonstrated understanding of those requirements. But if you’ve shared several case studies detailing how your company has worked with banking clients in the past, including testimonials about how you understood and worked with the client to satisfy their regulatory needs, then prospective clients in the sector will be vastly more comfortable engaging with you.
Empathize with and understand the customer’s problems and pain points
A little empathy goes a long way.
If you can demonstrate that you recognize and understand a customer’s most frustrating pain points - the things that add misery to their day-to-day business - they’ll feel like you’re speaking directly to them. That kind of connection materially outperforms generic marketing-speak and engenders a greater feeling of trust.
Take Webflow as an example. Webflow understands that having to enlist the help of extremely busy developers to change an image on a webpage is maddening. The developer is unhappy they have to do it. The marketer asking for the change is unhappy that it takes so long to complete, and, worse, they feel like a burden for even asking for it.
Terrible vibes.
Webflow case studies illustrate organizations that were having precisely this problem. The problem is both extremely common and extremely frustrating, and Webflow’s understanding of it has prospective customers eagerly awaiting answers on how to solve it, which the company of course delivers through its platform of scalable and reliable website-building capabilities.
Illustrate real-world applications of your solution
As with domain expertise, generic marketing copy can only do so much to illustrate the power of your solutions. In many cases, these descriptions are vague, abstract, or overly general. They sound great - in theory - but prospective customers can struggle to envision how they work in practice.
How exactly do your services solve their specific problems?
The case study brings your solution to life. Viewed through the lens of another company that experienced the same problem as their own, readers can gain valuable perspectives about the practical applications of your product. They can envision it solving their problems; that’s what the case study enables in ways that more generic copy can’t.
An aside: some organizations will attempt to let third-party press do all of this work for them. Don’t get us wrong, earning favorable press coverage is incredible. But just because others are telling your story doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell it too! Rather, the fact that your story resonates with others should encourage you to amplify it, write it in your terms, make it as easily accessible to prospective customers as possible, and share it with them more often.
Ask yourself: are your marketing materials and website doing enough to lead a horse to water? Or are they just vaguely gesturing in the direction of water?
Call like-minded prospects to action
After providing proof of demand, demonstrating your unique knowledge of the industry, empathizing with the customer’s specific problems, and detailing the solution that will make them a thing of the past, there’s only one thing left to do: call the reader to action. That’s the whole point, right? The end goal.
It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed, lengthy, or detract from the takeaways shared in the case study. Rather, it should build a bridge directly from that a-ha takeaway moment to establishing a relationship. Ask them if the case study resonates, and if it does, implore them to walk the same path. Make it as easy as possible for the reader to express an interest or get in touch.
Who knows - they just might become your next great case study.
Interested in producing some case studies for your business? ThoughtLede works with you to transform customer success stories into valuable marketing content. Get in touch today to let the market know about the game-changing results your business is driving.