Write a Compelling B2B Case Study / Customer Success Story

1. How to Write a Case Study | Intro: If you want to generate more leads and win more deals, learn how to write awesome marketing case studies. A case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieved success with your product or service. The secret to your success is picking the right customer and asking them the right questions. When you pick an awesome customer. And when you get them to give you equally awesome answers to your questions, you end up with, you guessed it, an awesome case study. Hi, I'm Alan sharp and welcome to my course on how to write amazing B2B case studies. I designed this course for salespeople, marketer's, content writers, copywriters, and anyone else who has to generate B2B leads and then nurture those leads with the written word. Sales and marketing leaders consistently rank case studies as one of the most effective pieces of sales collateral in their toolbox. In this course, I teach you step-by-step how to write them. I teach you how to pick the right customer, how to match your case study to your intended reader. How to prepare for your customer interview. How to ask the right questions and follow up questions. How to turn your interview transcript into an outline, and then how to turn that outline into a Powerful, logical, compelling, persuasive case study. In this course, you will learn how to write your case study title, how to write the four mandatory sections, and how to write the four optional extras of every case study. You're going to look over my shoulder as I start with a blank screen and write a B2B case study from scratch, guiding you every step of the way. Learn the things you must do, the blunders you must avoid, and the best practices you must follow to make your case studies Awesome and effective. I have been writing marketing case studies for more than 30 years. I've been interviewing business leaders and turning their answers into compelling case studies since before the Internet was even a thing. In this course, I show you all that I've learned the hard way. Along the way. If you need to write case studies that help you secure more sales appointments and win more deals. Checkout. The detailed course description below, watched the free preview lessons, read the reviews from my many satisfied students than enroll now. 2. Understand the The Who, What, Why, Where, When & How of Case Studies: If you want to write an effective marketing case study, you must first understand the who, what, why, where, when, and how of case studies. You must understand what they are, who they are for, and the goal they serve. So what exactly is a marketing case study? A case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieved success with your product or service. Let's look at that in more detail. A case study is a story. It follows a narrative format, one with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. And a case study is a story about a customer, that customer can be a consumer or a business. A case study is a story about a customer's success. It tells a before and after story that illustrates how a customer had success after buying one of your products or services. So a case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieve success with your product or service. The audience for your case studies is potential customers. Remember this as you sit down to write, yes, a case study involves one of your satisfied customers and yes, it also involves your company, but the most important person in your case study is the reader, and that reader is your potential customer. Case studies typically appear in the middle and end of the buying journey. Buyers are typically most interested in reading customer success stories when they are either at the consideration stage or the decision stage of making their purchase. The goal of all case studies is to prove two things, relevance and results. Your case study demonstrates to potential buyers that you understand their industry and their unique challenges. And it proves that you offer a product or a service that delivers measurable results. Case studies appear in two places, text and video. Text case studies typically appear either as standalone documents or web pages. The documents are usually single-sided or two-sided PDFs. The webpages are usually found on a portion of the website dedicated to case studies. Video case studies are usually two or three minutes long, and they feature the customer talking on camera about the success that they had with your product or service. In this course, you and I are looking at text case studies only, not video. One final thing to note about case studies is that they are not use cases, testimonials, or sales pitches. A use case describes how a customer can use your product or service. It gives an example of what a customer might do, not what a customer has done. A use case does not document customer success. So a use case is not a case study and vice versa. A testimonial is an endorsement from a satisfied customer. In their own words, a customer tells how and why they are satisfied with your product or service or company. Testimonials or short, Not more than just a few sentences. A case study is much longer and is not simply a long testimonial. In fact, a case study is not a testimonial at all. And a sales pitch is a message that you deliver to persuade potential customers to buy your product or service. Sales pitches by their very nature, are subjective and biased. But case studies, they're supposed to be objective and based on facts. So a case study is not a place to pitch your products or services. In short, a case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieve success with your product or service. In the next lesson, we'll examine a case study from top to bottom to make sure you know what you are writing and why. See you there. 3. Anatomy of a Case Study: A marketing case study is a type of content that tells the story of how a customer achieve success with your product or service. When you write a case study, you follow a template that businesses have been using for decades. In this lesson, we're going to conduct an anatomy of a case study. We're going to examine this proven template that you should follow to write an effective customer success story. Let's look at a classic case study. This one is by a company called Dury sales. The resales wrote this case study to showcase their ability to help industrial tool manufacturers, like their customer, monster tool to resales is the vendor or the supplier, the publisher of the case study and monster tool is their customer and the subject of the case study. As you can see, this is a two-page case study. It takes up two sides of a sheet of paper measuring 8.5 by 11 inches. There are seven parts to this case study. At the top you have the title of the case study. You could also call this the headline. Beneath the headline is a paragraph describing the customer. This section is sometimes called the company or simply company. Since this is a B2B case study, this section describes the company that the case study is about. If this was a B2C case study, this section would be called a boat, the consumer or the individual customer, what this case study was about. Next comes the challenge. This section is commonly called the situation. It describes the pain, the setback, the challenge or obstacle that the customer faced that made them go looking for a solution. After the challenge is the solution. Here you read a narrative of what the vendor did to help their customers meet their challenge. In this case, it describes what duree sales did to help their customer, monster tool meet their challenge. Now on the right-hand side of this page you see a pull quote. This is a quote from the customer and works as a testimonial and tells the story. Dory, sales helped the customer monster tool succeed. On psi2. You see the results section. This is where the resales describes the results that it achieved for its customer or put it the other way around. It describes the results that monster tool that customer achieved by partnering with the resales their supplier. Beneath the results section is the seventh and final component of the case study, the call to action, it tells the reader the next step to take. This is the template that you should follow when you write your case studies. It consists of seven components. Title, company, situation, solution, results, pull quote, call-to-action. Now you are ready for the next step in writing your case study. And nope, it's not the writing. It's picking the best customer story to tell. 4. Pick the Best Customer: Marketing case studies are a unique type of content because you don't really write them. Your customers do. A case study after all, is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieved success with your product or service. A case study talks about your customer. They're challenge why and how they bought your solution and the results they achieved. As a result. A case study is all about your customer. Your customer is the hero of the story. In any case study you write, your company looks good only when your customer looks good. Or to put it the other way around. When your customer looks good, your company looks good. This means the most important decision you have to make when writing a case study is whose story you tell. If you want your case study to be awesome, you must pick an awesome customer to write about. The better the customer, the better your case study. Let's look at some criteria you should use when picking a customer. The first thing you must look for is measurable results. Case studies are all about demonstrating that your customers succeed when using your products or services to do that, you must offer proof. And I'm talking about measurable proof. The only candidate for your case study is a customer who has achieved measurable success with your product or service. Remember, a case study isn't a testimonial. It doesn't just quote your customers saying that you are awesome. A case study tells a before and after story. It shows what life was like before for your customer in the past and what life is like today in the present. Thanks to you. This means you should only choose customers for your case studies that have experienced a marked measurable improvement by using your product or service, you need to be able to demonstrate that you improve their profitability by x or boosted their sales amount by x, or increase their productivity by x. What we're talking about here is key performance indicators, KPIs, and other metrics that you can use to demonstrate that your customers succeed in measurable ways. The second thing you should look for in a candidate for a case study is relevance. The audience for your case study is potential customers. These buyers need to know that you understand their industry, you understand their unique marketplace challenges, and you understand the kinds of goals they want to achieve with a product or service like yours. This means not only have to pick a company that has generated results, you need to find one that has generated results in the industry or market or niche that you want to reach with your marketing messages. The ideal candidate for a case study is a customer that is similar to the companies you want to reach and who has achieved measurable results with your solutions. To find the best customer story, find the customer that most closely matches the profile of your ideal customer. Lists the things that your ideal customers have in common and then find an existing customer of yours who meets those criteria. Consider things like the industry they operate in, the size of the company, whether in sales volume or number of employees, consider their annual revenue, where they operate, who their customers are, what their challenges are, and so on. The third and final thing to look for in a case study candidate is a customer that is willing to go on the record. This is one of the hardest things about creating case studies. Some of your customers have policies that prevent them from divulging sales figures or performance metrics and other things that reveal their challenges or level of performance. Other customers have publicity departments and lawyers that prevent them from divulging anything that makes the company look weak or inexperienced or behind the times. Since case studies are all about painting a before and after picture of a company, getting permission to tell a customer story is sometimes tricky. If you help the customer improve their performance in any way, that implies that their performance before hiring your firm was substandard or inadequate. You don't have to state it in those terms in your case study, of course. But some businesses are simply hesitant or dead set against being the subject of a customer success story. So this means you need to find a customer that meets three criteria. They have to have had success with your product or service. They are similar to your ideal target customer and they are willing to let you tell their story in public. By the way, some customers are willing to let you tell their story, but they are so large and have so many levels of bureaucracy that getting final approval to publish a case study about them is next to impossible. The process takes too long. It involves way too many gatekeepers and levels of approval and is simply not worth your while. So look, only for a customer that is willing to go on the record and is also going to do so with the least amount of red tape and delay. Once you have selected your ideal customer for your case study, you're ready for the next step and no, it's not writing. Sorry. It's research. 5. Prepare for Your Customer Interview: The success of your marketing case study depends on two things. The success of your customer and the success of your customer interview. When you have a successful customer and when that customer gives you an amazing interview, you end up with an amazing case study. That's the beauty of marketing case studies or customer success stories. As some like to call them, they almost write themselves. You sit down with a customer, you ask them a series of intelligent questions. They give their answers, and you end up with your case study almost seventy-five percent written. You'll remember that a case study consists of four essential sections, the company, the situation, the solution, and the results. When a customer answers your questions about each of these four areas thoroughly and with compelling answers, you have almost your case study written. Your challenge of course, is to get your customer to give you the answers you need using language that you can use word for word throughout your case study whenever possible. Now this is not easy. In fact, it's somewhat of an art. The success of your case study depends not only on having a customer with a great success story to tell, it also depends on your interviewing skills. If you have an awesome customer and if you have equally awesome interviewing skills, you'll end up with, you guessed it, an awesome case study. One of the keys to conducting an awesome customer interview is preparation. The better prepared you are, the better your interview will go. Here are some tips on getting your customer and yourself prepared for a great case study. Interview. First of all, pick the best person. Not everyone. Their customer account can speak authoritatively about the product, the project, service, or customer engagement that you're writing about. Your first task is to decide who the best person is. For you to interview. If your customer bought a product, the best person to interview will be someone who played an active role on the buying committee. If your customer engaged your firm to provide a service, the best person to interview will be someone who not only helped with selecting your firm, but who was also part of the team that received that service? The key thing you're looking for in an interview candidate is someone who had an active and meaningful role in working with your company. Next, prepare them for the interview. Once you know who you are interviewing, give them a heads-up. Tell them the reason for the interview. Since this might be something that you arrange with their boss and they don't know why you'll be interviewing them. Then prepare the interview subject by sending them your questions ahead of time. Few people are good at thinking on their feet, and most people are not good at answering detailed questions about a purchase or engagement they had with your firm months or even a year ago. The more prepared your interview subject is for your interview, the better they will answer your questions. Next, ask open ended questions. The best questions to ask during your interview are the ones that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. The best questions are the ones that get your interview subject talking and giving you lots of detail. Here's what I mean. A close ended question, looks like this. Were you happy with our product? As you can see, their customer can only answer yes or no or I don't know, which is not helpful. And open ended question, looks like this. If you had to rank your level of satisfaction with our product on a scale from one to ten. Where would you rank it? And why? There's a big difference. When you ask open-ended questions, you get candid, helpful, detailed answers. The kind you need for your customer success story to be successful. Next, you need to have follow-up questions ready. When it comes to drafting your questions, be sure to draft plenty of follow-up questions as well. Some customers give you short answers to draw them out. You need a handful of other questions on the same topic once that explore the issue further just from. A different angle. For example, consider the matter of whether your company met your deadline. Your top question could be, how close that our firm come to meeting your deadline? If the customer says You met our deadline, but offers no more information, be ready to ask some follow-up questions such as, what did we do to meet your deadline? What difference that are meeting your deadlines have for the rest of your project? What would have happened if we had missed your deadline? You get the idea. If your customer says You did not meet the deadline, but offers no more information, ready to ask some follow-up questions in that case as well. What was the primary reason that we missed the deadline? Was the reason we miss the deadline, something out of our control. What steps did we take to remediate the challenges brought about by missing your deadline? You see what I mean? Every question you ask needs a follow-up question or two or three. Now you don't have to give these follow-up questions to your customer before the interview. Otherwise, your list of questions will be way too long and intimidating, but you need to know the follow-up questions you are going to ask before you start your interview. Next, you need to book enough time. You need to have enough time to get the answers that you need in order to write your case study. My experience is that most interviews take at least 60 minutes. Next, you need to test your recording equipment. The best way to write a case study is to work from a verbatim transcript of the recording of the interview. This means you need to record the interview first, then get someone to transcribe the recording. If you have no recording, you have no transcript. If you have no transcript, you have no case study. You need to record your interview for a number of reasons. The first one is that most interview subjects speak way too quickly. You can't possibly write down everything they say unless you know shorthand. That is. Secondly, you need a record of what the interview subject says just in case the company they work for questions your firm later on about a claim that you make. In your case study. If your customer size, dollar figures, percentages, volumes, timelines, weights, and other metrics, you need a verbatim record of what they said. You need proof for everything you write in your case study. And the only way to ensure that you have an error-free interview recording is to test your recording equipment beforehand. If you skip this step, you will regret it. Don't ask me how I know. Once you have prepared for your customer interview, you are ready to conduct your interview. This is the most vital step in writing any case study. To get the information you need from your customer, you must ask the right questions. See you in the next lesson. 6. Ask About the Company: When you write a marketing case study, you follow a simple format that companies have been using for decades. That format has four main parts. The company, the situation, the solution, and the results. You get, the content that you need for your case study by interviewing your customer, you ask them questions. Cover each of these four areas. Your goal with your interview is to get your customer to tell you in their own words how they were successful using one of your products or services. You get them to tell you who they are, the challenge they faced, the solution they bought, and the results that they achieved. The logical place to start your interview is with questions about the customer's company. The company section of your case study is where you introduce the customer that you are profiling. In your case study. You could tell your reader all sorts of things about the company. You will discover that your customers will want you to say all sorts of things about them. But your job is to only put into your case study what your potential customers need to know about your customer. Remember, your audience for your case study is potential customers, and they will only read your case study if it features a customer story that is relevant to their industry and to them as a company. But if you sit down to interview your customer for a case study and simply ask them, tell me about your company. It will tell you all sorts of things that are important to them, but irrelevant to you, your potential buyers. They will tell you things like, we were founded in 1963. We are employee owned. We offer quality, service and value. We have won numerous awards for customer service and they go on and on, if you let them. Your goal during this stage of your interview is to ask questions that get your customer to give you answers that are relevant to your buyers. You must limit your questions to those that establish relevance and leave out all other questions. One thing to keep in mind at this stage of your interview is that you will already know most of what you need to know about your customers company. They are your customer. After all. You know their industry, you know their products and services, you know, where they operate. So you don't have to ask your customer all that many questions about their company during your interview. But you need to have these answers before you start writing your case study. The only way you can decide what is relevant for your potential customers to know about your customers company is to be thorough in your research and your interview. So here's a list of the things you must know before you write this section of your case, then some of these things you find on your own and some of them you uncover during your interview. What industry are you in? What kinds of customers do you serve? What products and services and solutions do you offer? How many employees you have? What is your annual revenue? When were you found it? What is your mission statement? What is your elevator pitch, the sales pitch you can give in thirty-seconds about your company. What is your unique differentiator in the marketplace? What makes you unique as a company? Where do you rank in the marketplace compared with your competitors? What recent awards have you won? When you get the answers you need from these questions, you will have the building blocks you need to write the company section of your case study. But you will discover that the rest of your interview will also determine what you must include in this first section and what you must leave out. For example, you may discover during your interview that the number of employees at the company or the year they were founded are irrelevant. So they told you that in the interview, but you don't have to include that in the case study. You might discover that something else about the company is more relevant. For example, the company might be owned by the employees and that might be an essential part of their story. Or the company might be the first in their category, the way that Tesla was the first major brand in electric cars. Again, you will discover these things during the rest of your interview. But these questions are a good place to start to get you started writing the company section. By the way, one of the best places to find this information is in the immediate releases that the company issues at the bottom of most news releases is a paragraph that describes the company. This paragraph uses the language that has been approved by the legal department, So it is safe for you to use just as it is. Just remember that what you say about the company in your case study must be relevant to your potential customers. A few lessons from now, I'm going to show you how to turn these facts that you discover about your customer into a compelling paragraph that describes the company. Stay tuned. 7. Ask About the Situation: A case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieved success, your product or service. This means every marketing case study you write is a story about how one of your customers overcome an obstacle or solve a problem, or achieve the goal, they were facing a loss, a challenge, and you help them win and overcome. But before you can tell the story of how your customer was successful with your product or with your service. You must first set the stage. You must tell your reader why your customer needed your help in the first place. You do this in the second section of your case study, the situation. You'll remember that every case study features four sections, the company, the situation, the solution, and the results. The second section, the situation section is where you describe the challenge or obstacle or problem that your customer had that made them search for a solution like yours. To write this section, you interview your customer. You ask them to describe the situation they were in that made them reach out to your company for a solution. During your interview, your goal is to get your customer to articulate the pains and frustrations and difficulties and challenges and setbacks that they had. You do this by asking them some open-ended questions and then writing down their answers. Here are the kinds of questions you should ask. What was going on in your industry, or in your company or in the marketplace that caused you to start looking for the kinds of solutions that our company provides. What challenges were you facing at the time? What obstacles were you needing to overcome? What trends were you seeing in the economy, in the marketplace, in your market? What goals were you needing or wanting to reach around that time? What costs were you needing to lower or eliminate? What gains were you needing or wanting to achieve? Was your challenge primarily internal, such as a worker productivity issue? Or was your challenge primarily external? Such as the activities a competitor? Was your challenge influenced by recent events such as new government regulations or a pandemic or a recession. What were these challenges or obstacles costing your company in terms of lost productivity, lost sales, reduce customer satisfaction, and so on. What was the cost to your company of doing nothing to remedy these challenges or overcome these obstacles. How did these challenges or obstacles affect your sales, your revenue, your growth, or profitability? What options do you consider as ways to meet your challenge or to overcome your obstacle? What were you looking for in a solution? And an a provider? Now that's a total of 15 questions that give you an idea of the direction you need to take during this stage of your interview. Just remember that you must be ready to ask follow-up questions whenever your customer takes you in a particular direction, the worst thing you can do is simply work your way down this list of questions like a robot and then terminate the interview. The best case studies are the ones that demonstrate that deployed a specific solution that fixed a specific issue for a specific customer. This means you must describe your customer situation as clearly as possible and in as compelling a way as possible. The strength of your case study will depend on the strength of your interview. So be prepared to follow where your customer leads you. For example, when you ask your customer what the challenge was that they were experiencing that prompted them to start looking for a solution. They might answer. Our sales were down. That's a short answer, and it's true, but it's not that helpful. You cannot just leave their answer at that. You can't simply write your case study by saying our customers sales were down, so they hired us. The end. You have to probe, you have to investigate, you have to encourage your customers to open up and tell you more about their situation. For example, when they tell you our sales were down, that's why we reached out to you. You need to follow up with a series of questions. They get to the heart of their issue. You must ask questions like this. What sales were down exactly? Sales of what product or products? In particular. By how much were you are sales down in terms of units shipped or contracts signed? How much did this drop in sales cost your company in lost revenue? What caused this drop in sales? Was the drop in sales sudden or did it happen gradually? Was the drop in sales something you expected? Or did it catch you by surprise? As your competitors face a similar drop in sales around the same time that you did. Why was this drop in sales a problem for your company? Why couldn't you just write it out? What steps did your company take to fix or remediate this drop in sales? Who else was impacted by this drop in sales such as your suppliers, employees, and shareholders. Why did this drop in sales? Make you look to accompany like ours, to help you? When you did. That's a total of 11 follow-up questions. I think you see by now where this is headed. Your interview with your customer is going to be a free-flowing discussion just like this. They are going to take you down some rabbit trails that you have to bring them back from. But they are also going to reveal vital intelligence that you must ask them to expand on. The follow up on. Remember, the audience for your case study is potential customers. Your potential customer wants to read a case study about a company like there's that had a problem like the one they are facing right now and that you fixed. This means your case study must be both relevant and specific. It can't be generic or vague. The way to make sure your case study is relevant to your potential customers is to be specific about the exact challenge or obstacle or pain that your customer had before reaching out to your customer. The key here is to be specific about things that can be measured. Always, always, always. Ask your customer to give you a mounts and totals, and dollar figures and ratios and percentages that illustrate their pain if they weren't hitting their sales volume by location, for example, what was their sales volume? What was the number? If their gross margin was dropping? Where was it? Where did it drop? Two. And what was that drop in percentage points. If they're planned hours versus actual hours didn't match. How much was the shortfall exactly? If they're rework rate was too high, what was their benchmark rate or goal, and how far short of that goal, or are they falling? And how often you get the idea gets specific with things that can be measured. And you make your case study all that more compelling when you are relevant and specific about their situation. The next section of your case study makes perfect sense. That section describes the solution you delivered. See you there. 8. Ask About the Solution: One of your primary goals and publishing a marketing case study is to prove to potential customers that you understand their industry, their customers, and their unique challenges. You do this in the third section of your case study, the one that describes your solution. By the time your prospect reaches this part of your case study, they will understand who you are writing a boat, that's the company section. And they will understand the challenge that your customer was facing. You covered that in the second section, the situation section. Now you're ready to gather the information that you need to write the section of your case study, typically known as the solution. Now you've gathered this information in two ways. First, you speak with the folks at your company who sold the product or deliver the service or provided the solution. These people include your sales team that was involved in the sale and anyone who was part of the implementation team or the team that delivered the product or the service or the solution. Then you speak with your customer. You interview them to get their take on what your company did to meet their challenge or solve their problem. You speak with your internal team first so that you don't ask your customer a bunch of dumb questions that you should already know the answers to. Your company provided the solution after all. So you should know what that solution was and how you delivered it. And when you delivered it. Then you ask your customer to articulate why they picked your firm and not a competitor. Discover how you got onto their shortlist of suppliers and then how you became the winning team. Get your customer to give you as many reasons as they can. They likely had a checklist to use when comparing your firm against competing firms, asked them to share with you the criteria that they used and where you ranked for each criteria. Next, ask your customer to describe their purchasing process. Essentially a step-by-step accounting of the major things that happened from the time they reach out to you, to the time you deliver the solution and concluded the engagement. For example, get them to outline such things as the initial consultation, the product demonstration, tour of your company, tour of their shop floor, needs analysis, product selection, project planning, product trial, engineering implementation, product customization, product configuration, on-boarding training, technical support, maintenance, and any ongoing after-sales support. Naturally, these steps depend a great deal on whether your solution that was a product or a service. And they also depend on the complexity of the solution. Your goal and listing the steps is to discover from your customer's point of view how and where you help them solve their issues. Every solution you deliver involves more than one step. A purchase isn't just one transaction at a series of steps that you take with your customer from their initial phone call right through to the delivery of your solution. Now, if timelines are important to your potential customers, discuss them with your customer as well. In other words, if the potential customers who will be reading your case study care about how long your company needs to deliver a solution. Then break down the implementation into chunks of time. Get your customer to tell you how long each stage of the solution. To. Remember that the term solution is vague all on its own. You say that you delivered a solution, but you haven't set a great deal. That's because a solution can be a product or a service. Also, a solution could be something your customer buys once, such as a piece of machinery, or it can involve an ongoing contract for maintenance and support of that piece of machinery as well. The same goes for software as a service. It isn't something that your customer buys once as much as it is something that a customer pays for once a month, but uses every day. In that sense, your solution isn't something that you delivered past tense. It's something that you deliver present tense every day. You must be clear in this section of your case study about what you delivered exactly. If your solution is a product or a service or a mix of both, you must be clear about that in this section. Now, another thing to be clear about is any part of the solution that took place after the sale. I've mentioned a few of them, such as maintenance and technical support. This is vital to include in your case study because some solutions by their very nature are commodities, what distinguishes one supplier from the next is their level of after-sale support. So get your customer to articulate how your company helped them after you all signed the contract. One vital thing to remember as you interview your customer is that what you will write in the solution section must mirror what you wrote in the previous situation section. In other words, the product or service you delivered must have solved the challenge or taken away the pain, or overcome the challenge that your customer was experiencing. This means you need to get your customers to articulate to you how what you delivered really was a solution to their situation. You must encourage them to tell you in their own words how you solve their problem. You fixed their situation with your offering. Here are the kinds of questions you should ask your customers at this stage of your interview. What were you looking for in a solution? Why did you pick our company? What steps did our company take to help you find the solution you needed? What did the initial consultation look like? And how did it go? What did the implementation look like? And how satisfied were you with what we did. What after sale services did we deliver? And what was your level of satisfaction with each of those after-sale services? What problems did we help you overcome? What roadblocks did we help you avoid? How would you describe the engagement, how it went? Overall? How has our solution helped you since implementation or since your purchase? In what ways did we exceed your expectations? You get the idea. Your goal is to ask open-ended questions that get your customer talking about what you did, what the process looked like, what you delivered, what you would like to work with, whether you kept your promises, how your solution met their needs, and so on. Once you get to the end of your questions, you're ready to ask your customer a final set of questions about the tangible results they achieved using your solution. 9. Ask About the Results: Your primary goal in publishing a marketing case study is to prove to prospects that your product or service generates measurable results for your customers. Notice those two words. You generate results and you generate results that can be measured. You describe these results in the fourth section of your case study. After you have introduced your customer in the company section and after you have described their challenge in the situation section, and after you have described your product or service that you delivered in the solution section, you describe the results, you generate it in, you guessed it, the results section. The key thing to remember about this section of your case study is that you should follow logically from the previous three sections. In this situation section, you described your customer's problem in concrete, specific terms. In the solution section, you describe the products and services you delivered to fix your customer's problem. Now, here in the results section, you must show how your solution delivered, what the customer needed. Any challenge you stated in these situations section should have a corresponding result here in the results section. For example, if you stated that your customer had a problem with shrinking margins than your results section should show how you increase their margins. If you describe how your customer had a problem with missing deliveries, you should show how your solution helped them reverse this trend and start making more of their deliveries on time. In other words, anything you've reported in the results section should follow naturally and logically from the previous two sections. The results section is where you demonstrate that you fix your customer's problem, you met their challenge, you resolved their issue. The best way to do this is by describing measurable results. You take a key performance indicator or metric that your customer wanted to improve and you show how your company and your solution improve that metric. You take the measurable problem that your customer had and you show in concrete specific terms how your solution resolve that problem in measurable ways. Your aim here is to be both specific and measurable. Let me show you what I mean. You don't, for example, simply say that you helped your customer increase income. That's too vague. Instead, you say that you helped them increase revenue per customer. That's being specific. But you also say that you helped your customer increase revenue per customer by 6.3%. That's a measurable improvement. You don't simply say that you improved customer satisfaction, that's vague. You instead say that you improved your customers Net Promoter Score. That's specific. And not only that, you improved it by 11.7%, that's a measurable increase. You don't simply say that you've reduced employee absenteeism. That's way too vague. Instead, you say that you've reduced your customers employee absence rate and you improved it by 5.2%. You see the difference. You go from abstract to concrete. Measurable. You go from generalizations to specifics. Too hard numbers. The rule you are following here is a classic copywriting maxim, specifics, cell generalizations, don't. Every result you site should look like this. Whenever possible. It should be specific and measurable. If you want to persuade potential customers that your products and services generate results, be specific, be measurable. To discover how you helped your customer and your measurable ways, you need to talk to both your internal teams and your customer. Your internal teams will tell you how you delivered a project under budget or within a deadline or another metric that was important to your customer. And your customer will tell you the difference your solution has made since they started working with you. Now, every company is different, of course. And every sale you make, every engagement you have is going to be different depending on the unique challenges of each customer. To get the answers you need. For this section of your case study, ask your customer to describe how you improve the metrics that you mentioned in the situation section. Look back at the challenges that your customer needed to meet. Look at the KPIs, the key performance indicators or metrics or numbers that they needed to reach. And then ask your customer about how you help them reach those numbers. Take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle. On the left side list all the metrics that your company wanted to improve. On the right side list how you improve each one. Aim for a direct correlation. For each metric. Show how your specific solution helped her customer improve a specific metric. Think dollar figures, percentages, ratios, scores, rates, and other KPIs increases, decreases, gains, improvements. And whenever possible, use KPIs that your target customers understand and use in their business already. In other words, use the metrics that they are most likely. Use the metrics that are most likely to resonate with your potential customers. The final thing you want to do in the results section is discover how satisfied your customer is with your company and with what you delivered. This is your opportunity to ask the kinds of questions that typically generate the best testimonials, the best. Pull quotes, and soundbites. Ask your customer open-ended questions that get them talking about their level of satisfaction. Here are some questions to get the conversation started. If you had to describe how your purchase or how your engagement with our company went, What would you say? How would you describe it? What do you like most about our solution now that you're using it regularly? What's working for you? And why? What part of our product or service is most valuable to you? On a scale from one to ten. How satisfied are you with what you purchased from us? On a scale from one to ten? How satisfied are you with your experience working with our firm? On a scale from one to ten, how likely are you to recommend our firm or our solution? In what ways did we as a company, as a team, exceed your expectations? If you were talking with someone about your experience with your purchase, how would you describe it? If you had to describe life before our solution and life after our solution, what would you say? As you can see, your goal with all of these questions is to get your customer to open up and articulate in their own words how things are better now than they were before. You're aiming to get them to tell you why choosing your firm was a good idea. Why purchasing your solution a sound investment, how they are better off today than they were yesterday. Thanks to you, your firm and the solution that you delivered. Once you have finished with these questions, you are finished with your customer interview. You have all the information you need from your customer to start writing our case study. So that's what we'll look at next. 10. Turn Your Transcript Into an Outline: One of the things I like most about writing case studies, that you don't have to write. Case studies, exactly. Marketing case studies. One of the few types of sales and marketing content that almost write themselves. All that you really need to write. A great case study is a great interview with a great customer. You find one of your customers who has success with your product or service. You ask them a series of what you hope are intelligent questions about the experience that they had. And then you take their answers and you arrange them in a simple order of the company, this situation, the solution, the results, bingo, you have your case study. You don't have to conduct any online searches or read Mountains of documents. Simply interview your customer and then use their words as the bulk of your case study. This entire process involves a number of steps. First you record your interview, then you transcribe the interview recording, then you parse the transcripts, and finally, you use the transcript to craft your case study outline. So step one, you record your customer interview. If you're interviewing them face-to-face, use a digital recorder. If you're interviewing them over Zoom or Microsoft Teams or another video platform, record the interview using the recording function that's built into those tools. Once you have completed the interview, transcribe the recording, I use rev.com. I upload the digital file of the recording and rev.com sends me a Microsoft Word file containing a verbatim transcript of the interview. You're next step is to go through your transcript and to divide it into sections. If you use a service like rev.com, your transcript is going to look like this, just paragraph after paragraph of text. The transcript will not have any headings or any divisions. It will simply be divided into sections based on who was talking. Your first order of business is to go through your transcripts to give it some order. First, find the sections of the interview where you asked questions about the four sections of your case. Then during your customer interview, you began with asking questions about the customer's company. Then you moved on to discussing their situation. Then you discussed your solution and finally their results. So go through your transcript to find these four major sections. Create a heading for each section. Use the Heading one style in Microsoft Word so that these four sections are your top level in the hierarchy of your transcript. When you are done, your navigation pane on the left will show that your transcript is divided into four sections that will appear in your case study. Next, go back to the start of the transcript and search for the questions that you asked. Most transcription services like rev.com simply give you a verbatim accounting of who said what they don't divide your interview like the one you conducted into questions. They run everything together in paragraphs. Your second-order of business after you have divided your transcript into the four sections of your case study is to identify and then label each question that you asked. For example, as you read through your transcript, you will see where you ask your first question. Copy this question out a blank line before the question and paste and then change it to a level two heading. Leave the text that follows as it is. Then look for the second question you asked. Do the same with that question, copy it, turn it into a heading to heading. Work your way through your transcript until you reach the end. When you are finished, you will have a document that looks like this. Now in Microsoft Word outline view, you can see that your transcript is divided into four major sections. Each one corresponding with the four major sections of your case study. And within each section, you have the questions you asked and the answers their customer gave. You will see by now why I like writing case studies so much here right in front of you is the meat of your case study. Your case study is almost written by your challenge, of course, is that you have way too much material to include in one case study, most people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. If your interview lasted for one hour, you will have a transcript containing 9,600 words. But the average case study is fewer than a thousand words. This means you have a lot of pruning to do. The other challenge with your transcript is that while it contains what you want to write, it doesn't have those words are arranged the way you want them arranged necessarily. For example, you will likely need to take an answer that your customer gave in one part of your interview when they thought of it and include it somewhere else in your case study where it rightly belongs. Plus, you will discover when reviewing your transcript of the recording of your interview that your customer likely said, um, and and like can you know, plenty of times they also likely wandered down some irrelevant rabbit holes. So what all this means is that you must work with this transcript to glean the facts and statements and statistics that you want to use in your case study. You must go through each section, review your customers answers to each question, and decide if what they said is something you want to include in your case study. The best way to do this is to open a new document, call it Case Study Outline. Then copy the content you need from the transcript and paste it into your outline. Here are the two documents. On the left is your interview transcripts, and on the right is the document you just created, your case study outline. Give your outline the four headings you will feature in your case study, and then paste the relevant information from the interview. Beneath each section in the outline copied from the transcript on the left and paste into the outline on the right. Paste each piece of information onto its own line so that each thing you carry over from the transcript exists in the outline as its own paragraph. Next, go to each section in your outline. Start at the top with the first paragraph and decide where this fact or statistic or piece of information is going to appear in this section. Take bullet number six, for example, and move it up so it becomes bullet number one if needed. If an item near the bottom of your list belongs closer to the top, then move it. If a fact or statistic at the top of your outline belongs somewhere further down, then move it there. Rearrange your paragraphs so that they follow a logical order and tell your customer success story in a coherent way. As you can see by the time you reach this stage, you have a comprehensive outline. You have your case study divided into the four major sections. And within those sections, you have the raw material you need to craft your case study arranged in a logical order to tell a great customer success story. Now, you are ready to start writing, starting at the top with the company. 11. Write About the Company: You and I are going to write a case study together. Well, I'm going to write it and you're gonna be looking over my shoulder as I write, but we're in this together. First, let me set the stage. Let's pretend that you and I worked for an outsourced IT help desk provider called Tech answers. Businesses hire us to answer their IT support calls for them. In other words, when one of their employees has a computer that won't boot up, or they need to reset their password or they can't find a network printer. They pick up the phone and they dial the number for their companies, IT help desk, except my company answers there call from our call center hundreds of miles away. We Are there companies outsourced IT, help desk. We're writing a case study about one of our customers, a business called Ravi. They are a cosmetics company. I have interviewed the customer. I have recorded the interview, I have transcribe the interview and I have parsed the transcript and arrange the pertinent points into and outline. I'm now ready to start writing the case study, working from my outline. So we open a new document in Microsoft Word. We save it as a draft of our case study. We put a placeholder at the top of the page where the title we'll go once we write it, we leave another placeholder where the subhead will go. Once we write it, then we create our first section, the company. The thing to remember here is that what we say about their company depends on what we want to say about our company. What we communicate about them depends on what we want to communicate. But here's what I mean. We are writing this case study about reveal, partly because of who they are, but also because of who we are. We are hoping to acquire new customers that are like revealed. And to do that, our potential customers must be like our current customer reveal, and they must be looking for an outsourced help desk provider like us. So before I write about their company, I must understand what it is. I want to communicate indirectly about our company. So here's what we're all about as a company where US based or an IT help desk. We offer 247 outsourced. It helped us support. We operate in English and Spanish, and we help global brands wherever they are in the world. Our ideal customer is looking for these four things in an outsourced help desk vendor, which means our case study must be about a company that is like our ideal customer. Or to put it the other way, our ideal customer must see that our case study is about a company that is like them. Which brings us to the company section. Our case study here is where we introduced the customer that we're profiling. In our case study, we could tell our reader all sorts of things about reveal. And you and I will discover that our customers will want us to tell all sorts of things about them. But your job, my job is to put into our case study only what our potential customers need to know about our customer and nothing more. We want our case study to attract potential customers who are in the cosmetics industry and who are looking for an IT help desk provider that is based in the US that offers 24-seven support and that operates in English and Spanish. And it helps global brands wherever they are in the world. This means, when we write this section of our case study, we must include only those details about our case study customer that are relevant to our potential buyer. In other words, we must mention in our case study that our customer is in the cosmetics industry, that they are a global brand, that they operate across multiple time zones. That they deal mainly in English and Spanish and so on. This is how we establish relevance. This is how we demonstrate that our case study is relevant to our potential customers. You will remember that I said in previous lessons that the beauty of writing case studies is that they almost write themselves. Well, let me show you what I mean. Look at the outline we are working from. These are the facts that we gathered during our customer interview. We've already arranged them in order of importance. And we have also left out of the outline all of the things that the customer said about our company that are irrelevant. As far as this case study is concerned. We copy the bulleted list from the outline and paste it into the draft. We remove all of the bullets, go to the top of the list and start turning these facts into sentences. Week is a global cosmetics company that manufacturers and markets a range of cosmetics, skincare products, and fragrances in more than 100 countries. Were VK operates 247 across most time zones in North America, South America, europe, the Middle East, africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. The company was using a global third-party help desk provider, primarily in English and Spanish, period. That's it. This is how you write the company section. Decide what's most important for your potential customer to know about your customer. And indirectly what they should know about your company and then write that. And only that. By the way, if you want to be sure that you are describing your customer using the right language, checkout, how they typically describe themselves. One of the best places to find this information is in the media releases that the company issues. At the bottom of most news releases is a paragraph that describes the company. This paragraph uses a language that has been vetted by the company's public relations, marketing, and legal departments. So it's safe for you to use, as it is. Just remember that what you say about your customer in your case study must be relevant to your potential customers. So, feel free to borrow some of these phrases that the company uses when describing itself and then add the other details and facts that you need to include in this company section of your case study. Once you have written this section, move on to the next section, where we describe the situation. 12. Write About the Situation: Let's continue writing our case study about reveal the global cosmetics firm. We have just written the first section introducing our customer. Now we are ready to write the second section describing the situation. We are writing this section from the outline that we created. We created this outline from the transcripts of the recording of the interview we conducted with our customer. As you look at this outline, you see that it contains only those facts from the interview that are necessary to tell our customer success story. You'll remember that our target audience for this case study is companies like Ravi. We're targeting companies in the same industry that are facing the same challenge that we're faced, and that need the same solution that we found in our company. This is vital to remember as we write this section of our case study, we must write it with our potential client in mind. Everything we write must resonate with them as they read about our customer and our customers needs, they must be able to see themselves and their own need. To write this section, we go through the same exercise we went through when writing the company section. We take each bullet in our outline and translate it into a grammatical sentence. And then we ensure that all of our sentences follow in a logical format. In other words, we make sure they describe our customers situation logically. Here's what that looks like. Began experiencing problems with our outsource help desk vendor following an acquisition, service deteriorated, problems with billing mounted. Speed to answer grew to 25 minutes at times. That was so unbearably long that users began taking photos of their phone displays and sending the snapshots to the IT director to show how long they were forced to wait on hold. That was not a good look. Bro VQ decided not to renew their contract. Instead, they issued an RFP, interviewed a number of providers, and eventually partnered with tech answers. They chose us because our global presence, predictable monthly rate, fluency in English and Spanish and US based agents. Now, notice a few things about how we've written this section. First, it follows on naturally from the company section. The section that ends by saying the company was using a global third-party helped us provider primarily in English and Spanish. We continue this thought with the first section of the situations section by explaining that the company was having problems with this third-party help desk provider that we just mentioned. Next. Notice how we describe the challenge by supplying three examples. First, service deteriorated, second, problems with billing mounted, and third, speed to answer grew unbearably long. You'll see that the first two examples are generalizations. They're not concrete, measurable examples. This is because these examples are all that the customer supplied. The customer didn't supply anything measurable. Kpis, no metrics. So we had to work with what our customer supplied. But notice the third example of our customers challenge. Speed to answer grew to 25 minutes. At times, this was so unbearably long that users began taking photos of their phone displays and sending the snapshots to the IT director to show how long they were forced to wait on hold. Not a good look. This is a measurable, vivid example of a customer pain. You can easily visualize the frustration of the employees as they wait on hold for up to 25 minutes. Now this phrase is lifted verbatim from the customer interview. The customer actually said this word for word. It's a terrific example of the kind of gold that you get when your customers sit down and describe their pains and challenges. In their own words. You have the choice when reading your case study of stating your customer's pain like this, paraphrasing or quoting their customer. In this case study, we decided to quote our customer at the end in the results section. But feel free to quote your customer elsewhere in your case study if you like. For example, we could take this quote from our customer and render it like this. Speed to answer grew to 25 minutes at a time. That was so unbearably long that our users began taking photos of their phone displays and sending the snapshots to me to show how long they were forced to wait on hold, says Samantha wall, the IT director at Rubik. This was not a good look. She adds. Another lesson you learn from how we have written this section is that some customers won't give you hard numbers, but they will give you colorful examples. Were vague, for example, doesn't give us a metric showing how far service deteriorated. They don't give us a number or a percentage for how problems with billing mounted, but they do tell us how long their speed to answer was in minutes. And they do give us this vivid picture of what their challenge look like. And this brings up another vital point. Whenever you write this section of your case study, always tried to describe the consequences of your customers challenge. For every statistic or KPI or metric that you cite, translate that into the pain that your customer felt as a result. Don't just describe the situation, described the consequences, the cost, the delays, the losses that your customer faced as a result of their situation. In our case, the challenge was long delays in speed to answer, but the consequences of those delays was frustrated employees. Your goal is to uncover this pain in your customer interview and to describe it in this section of the case study. Notice that in the next sentence of the situations section, we describe what our customer did about their problem. Now, we're not introducing our solution yet. We're simply outlining the steps that are customer took to solve their challenge. And y roof week decided not to renew their contract. Instead, they issued an RFP, interviewed a number of providers, and eventually partnered with tech answers. They chose us because of our global presence, predictable monthly rate, fluency in English and Spanish, and US based agents. Notice that last sentence. It describes why our customer chose us. It uses the same four criteria that are potential customers use when selecting a vendor. Global presence, predictable monthly rate, fluency in English and Spanish and US based agents. This is how we demonstrate our relevance to potential customers. We describe our customers challenge and our customers buying journey in a way that resonates with our potential customers. We use the same language, we use the same terms, we use, the same industry metrics and buzzwords that we know our prospects understand and use every day. This demonstrates that we understand their industry and are familiar with their pain. The final thing you notice about this section of our case study is that it is tight, is just the 104 words. It includes only those facts that help us tell our customers success story and nothing else. It leaves out all other information regardless of how fascinating that might otherwise be. We keep this section as tight as possible. You get rewarded by respecting your readers time and by getting to your point as quickly as possible. Now, we are ready to write the next section of our case study. The solution. 13. Write About the Solution: By the time you get to writing the third section of your case study, the one about the solution that you provided, you will be on a roll. Writing a case study goes quickly and easily when you have a great outline to work from. So let's write the third section of our customer success story. As you can see from our outline, we have copied and pasted all of the information we need from our interview transcripts. These bullets are arranged in the order that makes the most sense to tell our customer story. So we start turning these bullets into sentences and then combine those sentences into a coherent logical paragraph. Reveals engage tech answers to provide tier one support to their users. We would also deliver some tier to support around user access granting IDs for certain applications that need approval, workflows, and a few other issues. We took the company through a comprehensive onboarding process that reviewed the companies off the shelf software as well as custom applications. We also reviewed their user request process in detail, particularly because the company must follow stringent Sarbanes Oxley financial record keeping and reporting controls. We examined every area of the company's business, from processes to workflows, from approvals to gatekeepers. Then at midnight we went live. The key thing to note about this paragraph is that it describes the implementation of the solution and not the solution itself. The solution that I purchased from us is outsourced. It help desk services, they purchase from us what they had already purchased the previous vendor. So there's no need for us to describe what they bought. What is important for us to describe in the solution section is how we set up our customer for success with our solution. So as you can see, we describe how thorough we were with our implementation. We took the company through a comprehensive onboarding process. We've reviewed their user request process in detail and we examined every area of the company's business. Notice how we hit on two hot-button topics, such as our customers, custom software applications, and their need to maintain regulatory compliance. In the cosmetics industry, most of the manufacturers have their own custom software that they have developed themselves. So in our case study, we mentioned that part of our solution involves a comprehensive review of their custom software applications. The cosmetics industry is also heavily regulated as far as safety is concerned, and as far as financial reporting is concerned. We demonstrate our familiarity with this fact by mentioning that our solution included examining the parts of our customers business affected by these industry Regulations. Again, that the risk of repeating myself, which I do a lot, we have included only those parts of our solution that are relevant to both our customer and to our potential customers. Remember, and I have mentioned this a few times already. Our audience for the case study is potential customers like the one we are writing about here. So this is why we only discuss the parts of our solution that match the kind of solution that our prospects are looking for. We describe our solution in terms of the products, services, implementation, and onboarding that we know our potential customers are looking for in a solution. Once we have finished this section, we are ready to write the fourth and final section of our case study, the results. This is the most important part of any customer success story, as you will see in the next lesson. 14. Write About the Results: A case study is a type of marketing content that tells the story of how a customer achieved success with your product or service. And it does that in a section of the case study called the results. The results section is the last part of your case study. Your reader gets to it after learning about the company, their situation, and your solution. The results section is where you prove to potential customers that your products and services generate results. To know what to write here, consult the outline that you created. You see from our outline that the customer described three results that her company achieved with our solution. Each of these results is its own bullet in the outline. The first is about improved customer satisfaction. The second is about faster speed to answer. And the third is about shortened handle times. You have three ways that you can present these results. You can write them out as we have done here as direct quotes from your customer. You can list them or mention them one after the other in your own words, or you can do a mix of both. We decided to frame these results as a quote taken directly from our customer. In other words, we decided to have our customer describing her own words, the results her company achieved. Here's how we combine the three quotes into two paragraphs. The average scores on our customer satisfaction surveys went up immediately, says Samantha wall, IT director at reveal. Another big improvement has been speed to answer, which is extraordinarily so much better. I think the longest whole time we've had is five-minutes so far, which is extraordinary compared with our prior provider. This was massive for us because speed to answer was something that I constantly got complaints about. Handle time has also decreased markedly, a 60% improvement over our previous vendor. The difference is night and day. I can tell you. I'd say we've had a very positive experience. They are interested, they value our business. They care about the quality they provide for our business of our size with the requirements that we have, tech answers is the right fit? Now you should quote your customers like this whenever they say what you want them to say. In an articulate way, not all customers speak this well or describe their results in such concise ways. Notice again that our customer has given us measurable results, just as we had hoped. Speed to answer has declined from 25 minutes to just five-minutes. That's a measurable specific result. Handle time has also decreased markedly, a 60% improvement. This is the kind of gold that you're after. Measurable results. Whenever possible, describe the results that your customer achieved in hard numbers such as percentages, dollars, ratios, and rates. Anytime you can cite an improvement and increase, a decrease or a positive outcome, put a number after it. Specific cell generalities don't. The more specific and concrete you are in describing the results, the more persuasive your case study will be. Now we decided to present these results as customer quotes with the salient points highlighted in bold. If you are concerned that these results might get lost in amongst all of this text, feel free to add them to the case study as a sidebar, like this. These results are easier to see at a glance when you present them like this. They just, they lacked the authenticity that you gained by having them as a quote in quotation marks. Finally, a few rules to bear in mind about your results section. First, any result you cite in this section must tie into a challenge that you mentioned earlier in your document. In other words, every result you say the customer achieved, it must be a result that you help them achieve to address a challenge they identified to you and that you mentioned earlier on in the case study. Every result you mentioned should mirror a customer challenge. If they had challenged x, then you delivered a solution that delivered the result. Why? If you mentioned a result in the results, it must match a challenge that you also mentioned in this situation section and correspond to a solution that you delivered in the solution section. Secondly, the result should flow naturally from your solution. It shouldn't be a stretch for any reader to believe that you did achieve the result that solve a customer's pain or challenge. And thirdly, and finally, the results you site should be concrete rather than abstract. They should be specific rather than vague, and they should be measurable rather than generic. For example, don't say you impacted anything. Impact can be either positive or negative, right? You can impact your customers revenue by decreasing it or by increasing it. So never say you impacted anything. Instead, use concrete language. Say that you increase something or decreased something or improve something. Be specific rather than vague. Don't say you increased your customers revenue by six figures. That could be a $100 thousand or it could be $999 thousand. That's a difference of almost a million. Finally, be measurable. Give results that show a measurable improvement. Don't say you increased your customer satisfaction score. Say that you increased it by 6.8%. That's a measurable result. Be concrete, be specific, and be measurable when describing your results and you will improve the success of your case study by, oh, I don't know, 50.7% 15. Write the Extras: Every marketing case study has some mandatory elements and some optional elements. The mandatory elements or the title and the four sections that describe the company, the situation, the solution, and the results. The optional elements include the call-to-action, company blurb, pull, quote, and sidebar. Since you and I have just finished writing the four sections, Let's look at the optional extras. First up is the call to action. I say this is optional because some folks in sales and marketing are adamant that their case studies appear objective as though they were written by a third party. To maintain this illusion. They insist that their case studies never sound salesy. So for this reason, they never include a call to action in their case studies. But you may have a different opinion. You may agree with me that every sales or marketing document we create should tell the reader what to do as the next step. Case studies, in my view, are no different. They need a call to action. So after you have written the first four sections, write a call to action that tells your prospect what to do next. You have a couple of options, of course, depending on where this case study appears in the buyer journey. If the case study appears at the start of the buyer journey, your call to action could be download our Buying Guide or read our white paper, or watch our explainer video. If the case study appears near the end of the buyer journey, your call to action could be a free trial today or book your demo now, or call me for a free quote. Then there's the company blurb. Your case study can have one or not. The company blurb is typically a single paragraph that describes who you are, what you do, and who you serve. It usually appears at the end of the case study under a subheading about us. When you write this blurb, make sure you describe your company, your offerings, and your marketplace differentiator in a way that appeals to the reader of your case study. If you write case studies for multiple industries, multiple markets. And if you offer multiple solutions, make sure your company blurb reflects the needs of the industry and potential customers for each Case Study, they are likely different. So your company blurb should also be different. Next up is the pull quote. A pull quote is a quotation lifted from the body of the case study and rendered as a design element. It looks like this. It appears on the page in a different font and is set off from the rest of the copy to draw the eye and make a statement. The best person to quote in your pull quote is the customer featured in the case study? And the best thing to quote them on is one or more of the results that they achieved with your solution. Now one thing to know About pull quotes is that you don't have to pull them from the body copy in your case study. Your pull quote can actually be a customer quote that doesn't appear anywhere else in the document. The fourth and final optional extra is the sidebar. A sidebar is a textbox or graphic that presents additional information to a piece of content. It looks like this. The sidebar says something incidental about a larger story. In your case study, the sidebar is where you can place supplementary information that doesn't belong in the body of the case study. For example, if the solution you delivered to your customer involved nine steps, you don't have to include these nine steps in the solution section that might be cumbersome. Doing so will slow down your narrative. So instead, you take all nine steps and you list them in a sidebar. This way you communicate the steps and your story in the body of the case study. Moving along at a decent pace. Sidebars are also useful for highlighting the results you achieved. You can draw attention to them by setting them off on their own as a design element on the page. You can also use a sidebar as a summary of your case study so that busy readers can read your case study by reading just four sentences in your sidebar. Now you can include some or all of these optional extras in your case studies. What you include depends on the amount of space you have in your case study once it has been designed and how much you feel you need to communicate. Once you have written these optional extras, you are ready to tackle the last writing task, and that is your case study title. The first thing your readers see is the last thing that you should write. Learn why. In the next lesson. 16. Write the Title: When it comes to writing marketing case studies, the first thing your reader see is the last thing that you should write. I'm talking about your case study title. After all, you don't know how to title your case study until you have first described the customer, their situation, your solution, and the results. Only after you have reached the end of writing your case study, are you prepared to write the title that goes at the start? Here's how you do it. Let's return to our case study. We have just written a customer success story about reveal the global cosmetics company. In it. We described how they were dissatisfied with their outsourced help desk provider because Service had deteriorated, billing problems, head mounted, and speed to answer was too long. Their solution was to switch to a new vendor, which was our company tech answers. We improved service. We simplified billing, we shortened speed to answer, and we reduced call handle time. Now we are ready to title our case study. Now we have two choices. We can write a headline or we can write a headline and a subhead. The format we're going to follow is pretty standard. Most case studies have a title that says how XYZ company achieved this measurable result by using our firm. Or sometimes companies put it the other way around how our firm helped XYZ company achieved this measurable results. Either way, the headline names both parties in the solution, the customer and the supplier and states have benefit or an accomplishment. In our case, our title could look something like this. How global cosmetics company reveal reduced hold times, shortened handled times, and boosted customer satisfaction by switching to tech answers. Notice that this headline names, the industry names are customer describes three positive results and names our company. The reverse way to write this would look something like this. How tech answers reduced whole times, shortened handled times, and boosted customer satisfaction for global cosmetics company, reveal, where you put your customer and your title is up to you. I prefer to make my customer, the hero of the case study. I like to write that they achieved success with our help. Rather than write that we achieved success for them. With titles, you have the option of using a heading and a subhead. You make a bold or catchy statement with the heading, then you follow it up with a subhead that supplies the details. For example, we can take our heading and render it as a subhead instead. Then above the subhead we write the main heading, a thing of beauty. So now the case study reads a thing of beauty. How global cosmetics company revealed reduced hold times, shortened handle times, and boosted customer satisfaction by switching to tech answers. When you write your case study title, here are a few things to keep in mind. First, identify the industry. The first thing you must establish with your title is relevance. Your reader must grasp immediately that your case study is relevant to them because IT profiles accompany in their industry. In our case, we identify the industry by saying global cosmetics company, reveal. Second, name, your customer. You are writing a case study about a company. Name, the company. Make them the star of your story. Now, if your customer is obscure, that is, your readers are unlikely to know your customer by name, then you can skip naming them and instead use a phrase to describe who they are and what they do. For example, if the readers of this case study are unlikely to have ever heard of vk, then we can leave out the company name and simply describe the company as a global cosmetics company. That's good enough. Third, name, the success in your title. State clearly and boldly, the success that your customer achieved. This success must be something that will resonate with your target reader. It must be a KPI or a metric, or an outcome that your potential customers also want to achieve. It should scream relevance. It should be the greatest benefit you delivered, the greatest success customer achieved. Fourth. And finally, name your company or your solution. As I said, you can put your company at the start of your title or at the end, but you should name your company or your solution somewhere. Now I say company or solution because what's important is who or what achieved. The success. In our case, we name our company tech answers because we are the service provider. The service we offer is a commodity, outsourced IT help desk services. So we don't name our offering. We named our company because our company is the solution. But your case study might be about a unique product or a unique service that you delivered. In this case, you should name the product or service and leave your company name out of the headline. For example, let's imagine that we helped our customers achieve their success with a software application of ours and not with our outsourced help desk services. Let's assume that this product is called direct answer. We would change our title so that it names are offering not our company. How global cosmetics company were reduced whole times, shortened, handled times, and boosted customer satisfaction with direct answer. Or we could write how global cosmetics company rubric used help desk software. Direct answer to reduce whole times, shorten handle times, and boost customer satisfaction. You will see by now that your case study title is essentially your case study in condensed form. It names your customer, names your solution, and describes the success they achieved. By describing the success, you typically allude to this challenge your customer faced. So your title contains all four parts of a good case study, the company, the situation, the solution, and the results. You write your case study titled this way, not just to act as a headline that for the case study, you write it this way to act as a headline elsewhere. You're going to be promoting this case study in multiple places on your website. It will appear in banner ads, in call-outs on web pages. Calls to action at the end of blog posts, in online ads, in social media posts, and sometimes in drop-down navigation. This is why you should write it as an elevator pitch, a condensed version of the entire case study. And this brings me to the final point. You should write a number of versions of your case study title so that you make the best use of each opportunity. This title works well as the headline of the case study document, but it is a little long to include in a link or to fit onto a banner, or to use in a tweet. So write a number of versions of the title so that you have one to fit each channel. Use. Here's what I mean. The full length version looks like this. A shorter version looks like this. And the shortest version of all looks like this. There. That's it. By the time you've finished writing your case study title, you have finished writing your case study. You are now ready to design it and publish it so that it starts working hard to generate leads, nurture leads, and win deals for your business. I wish you every success.