You need case studies to be able to create a connection with the reader, so they instantly empathise with your client.

Case studies as social proof

Tactfully created case studies can help with long term business results. Case studies are a form of social proof. I.e., they convince people that if a product or service worked for someone else, it would work equally well for them. 

Remember in the beginning of the recent pandemic, how video conferencing felt alien and we spent ages figuring out how to do screen share. As our colleagues accepted this, so did we. Most of us now prefer remote work, and video conferencing is the new normal. This is herd mentality. You accept changes and solutions to your problems more easily when they have been tried by others.

Testimonials are also a form of social proof, but a business that wants to drive more conversions needs to move beyond testimonials. Case studies are real life examples that prove that buying your product or service is worth it. As such, they provide a credibility that is unmatched. 

Creating case studies that drive conversations and conversions

A case study is essentially a detailed product review that uses one of your success stories to demonstrate the value of your business to future clients. For B2B businesses, case studies are one of the most effective value added tools to increase conversions. 

Follow the seven tips below to create case studies that can help boost your conversions and increase conversation around your brand:

1.   Determine your customers’ pain points

To connect with a reader on an emotional level, you need to create context. Your case study needs to be centred around solving a problem that has made life miserable for your prospective customers so that it can help in reducing customer churn. Only then will the reader identify with the case study and react accordingly.

Find the pain points of your prospects and weave your case study around that. Say, you have a business that provides a workforce optimisation solution that improves workflow processes. Your case studies should target people who are having a hard time with their contact centres, and running across issues like how to deal with bad reviews, angry callers, long wait times, long hold times, and dropped calls.

Survey customers and prospects to find out what troubles them the most and which problems are most common. Create a buyer persona for your business based on your research, and decide who your target customer is. Define key demographic traits such as age, gender, marital status, and location, and include psychographic traits: interests, values, and challenges.

2.   Choose a relatable customer

The customer you choose to feature in your case study should be one that your prospects can identify with. Choosing a well-established company will increase credibility. Make sure the customer you choose to endorse your brand is one that fits your buyer persona and matches your average customer. Potential clients need to be able to relate with this customer.

Choose a customer who has had a great experience with you. You may do surveys through email and ask precise questions like why they chose you over a competitor and what are some of the tangible benefits of working with you. Potential clients are looking for answers to these questions while reading your case study.

Once you decide on the client you will use for the case study, you need to add some comments from the customer to complement the case study data. Remember to add a headshot of the customer along with the quote, too, to humanise them. The quote should be about the major strengths of your business, because it will be in quotations and be one of the first things anyone reads.

If you are a SaaS company and want to present a case study to highlight SaaS conferences, for example, you would need to choose your quoted individual carefully. 

Being a B2B business, you would need a quote from the director or senior management of the company in question. This is because the decision making personnel at any other business you target to sell your solutions, will be the directors.

3. Tell a story

Your case study can be instrumental in building trust in your brand. The key is to sell it and make it believable. If you frame it as a story, not only will the reader remain engaged, they will visualize themselves in the same situation. 

The story needs to start from your customer suffering from a problem and explain how you stepped in with a solution and saved the day.

Your case study should not be a data dump with statistics and graphs only. It needs to be real and at the end of it, you need to come on top as an authority and major solution provider in your niche and how it improved customer experience. 

Use the hero’s journey format for storytelling to write your case study. Talk about the customer’s problem, how they tried to resolve it and failed, and then how once they found you, their problems were history. The reader should be able to empathize with the customer’s pain in the beginning of the story and celebrate the solution.

To stop people reading your case studies and moving on, they must invoke these kinds of emotions. That’s what makes them harder to forget. Keep the story engaging and craft it to be compelling and impactful, without any hype words or jargon.

4. Define your solutions

“Customers don’t care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business,” said Aaron Ross

This is a favourite amongst sales quotes. Your customer only cares about making their life easier. If you can convince them that your brand has made many a life easier with your products or services, consider that a major achievement for a case study.  

You get a chance to show off in this section of the case study. This is the section to go all out. Describe why you were chosen instead of a competitor and what your solution was to ease the customer’s pain points. 

Tell the reader how you analysed the client’s need and catered to it with your expertise. This section offers the opportunity to showcase some data that can really help with conversions.

If you have been tracking metrics like conversion rate, search engine traffic, page views, and increase ebay sales, show how you managed to improve them as a result of your solutions. Numbers and statistics offer credibility to the case study, especially in terms of tangible values of ROI and profits. Graphs and other visual aids can really help stress the advantages of being associated with you, and the positive long term change your client gained.

Use data to show how you helped your customer and which solutions you offered and implemented. Pitch your products confidently here. You need to make the reader appreciate the solution. Talk about hurdles during the implementation phase and how you overcame them.  

Let’s continue with our example of a cloud communications solutions provider. Let’s say they have successfully provided a customer with VoIP phones and decided to detail the experience in a case study. That case study would include what the customer’s complaint was, why VoIP phones were installed, how VoIP phones work, and how effectively it caters to the client’s initial problem, with a few statistics to support.

5. Decide your format

The first place your case study will be published will naturally be your website. Optimise your web design to convert better than competitors by including all web design best practices on the case study as well. 

The designated landing page design of your case study needs to be optimized for conversions. Text is dull to read, so ensure the use of images and graphics to entice the user to read forward.

Split test headlines and the Call to Action on the landing page to make sure that whoever lands on the page remains engaged for as long as possible. In the era of conversational commerce, where people only have a partial attention to spare, you need to create content that is visually appealing and text concise enough to pull in the reader and not disengage them.

Put your case study in prominent places on your website and put quotes from the case studies on product landing pages. For example, if you have a SaaS website, you’ll want to display positive feedback from customers who use your software.

Repurpose the case study in different formats, too, to ensure you reach every digital marketing channel. You could have an audio podcast, or a video for YouTube, perhaps an infographic or a PDF for emailing the case study. Which brings us to our next tip.

6. Advertise it on social media and via email

Your content strategy should be one that creates value on all fronts. Digital marketing encompasses the web, email, and social media. You cannot reach out to customers on one medium and ignore the rest. It is absolutely essential for B2B brands to leverage social media to connect with customers. 

Email marketing is still popular, too, and now is often coupled with quiz marketing to engage the customer further. If you find emailing your customer a case study to be a blatant, in your face, boast of sorts, you could have an innocuous link for the case study in your email’s signature. Sales case studies can be great to get people on to your mailing list and boost your email outreach campaign.

Facebook and other social media platforms have billions of active users. Advertising your case study on social media, whether paid or organically, can have a great impact on your conversions and your brand digital CX, not to mention the conversations that will be created on social media around your brand.

While posting on social media, use a captivating image, short compelling text using emotive language, and mention key improvement statistics. Not to mention relevant hashtags in case you are only opting for organic growth. 

Just as forecasting demand for your products can be difficult if your marketing budget is zero, forecasting increase in conversions through organic reach on social media is difficult, too, unless you spend some money. Investing in social listening or other analytics tools can be a sensible way to go.

7.   Implement SEO for prominent visibility of case studies

Content is king and your case studies can be among the most important content on your website. You need to sell them as such. Ensure a well-structured implementation of SEO, so you can use your case study as a key growth driver.

Case studies are a way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. In this age of digital marketing, the website that appears on the top of search results is the supreme authority on that keyword. 

Make sure your case studies are search engine optimised and include keywords relevant to your business and to the customer’s pain points from the research you did earlier.

If the customer searches for the solution to their problem, they should land on your page and that should be the mark of a successful SEO implementation.

If you’re unsure of how to go about this, explore the possibility of outsourcing services from a B2B SEO company to ensure that you’re optimising your pages to their fullest potential.

Create a buzz through high-converting case studies 

Case studies are a customer-centric content strategy that subtly conveys your expertise. They help weave a powerful narrative that emotionally connects with the reader, because the customer is at the centre of the story. A story in which you’re cast as the saviour. The whole point of the story is the problem and its solution. It is a smart marketing tactic like no other.

A case study gives potential customers the chance to know more about you and your products without feeling obliged to do so. If you managed to draft a success story with quantifiable and tangible wins, you do not need too much data to prove your mettle. An insightful story that describes the customer experience can move the reader, and help cement your reputation as a trustworthy brand.