Tips for your case study campaign
A really quick way to score enablement points with the sales team as a new product marketer is through case studies. If this is something you don’t have that much experience with, I’ve put together some tips for creating case study campaigns from start to finish.
Track the numbers early
Track the important numbers you need from your customers. You want to track how their numbers before your product, and how they’ve improved after your product. This may seem fairly obvious but when you’re just starting out at a company it’s something you need to remember. Be very clear on what numbers are important and what will move the needle in terms of convincing new customers to come on board.
Sometimes, you’ll discover these numbers aren’t being tracked yet and you’ll need to put measures in place to make sure they are. The earlier you do this, the better. Case studies are meant to have information on real results.
Work backwards with questions
This is another area where you need to be clear on what information you need. This will help you to create a compelling story. Most case studies are divided into 3 main parts:
The Problem: This is where you cover the problems they had before using your product. You can ask questions like, “What was your process like before Company X? Before Product X, how were you solving this problem?” The goal here is to show a dismal past before your product- dismal is a bit dramatic but you want to paint a good picture of the problem they needed your product to solve.
The Solution: Here, you’d want to focus on the type of solution they were looking for and what made your product the perfect fit to solve their problems. You want to match the solutions your product provides to each of the problems mentioned in the first part.
The Result(s): Here, be clear on the impact your product has made on your customer’s business. Highlight the important numbers. Tactfully include what their numbers were before your product and what they look like now. Only with your customer’s permission of course. Not everyone would want to share specific numbers so it’s okay to just ask for percentages instead. For instance, you want to be able to say “Product X helped Company X increase sales by X%”.
Schedule meetings or just “Plug in”
The best way to get information is through interviews- mostly on a call. Before I schedule meetings, I like to send in questions ahead of time so the customers know what we’ll be discussing and can get any data ready if they have to.
If you're new to your role, there’s a very big chance that the questions you have for your interviews have already been asked in some form or the other. You need to ask other client-facing departments like Customer Success and Product if they already have this information. This is because it can be annoying and even stressful for the client to have to be asked the same questions twice.
I experienced this in the first days at my role, I discovered the Product and Success teams had been having discovery calls and a lot of the questions I had had already been answered on these calls. This meant I could just “plug in” and use some of the recordings from these discovery calls for my case studies. With calls only to fill in gaps or get additional information if necessary.
Speak to the right people
The people you speak to for your interviews should be positioned in the roles where they have the most access to information and can speak from a business perspective on the impact your product has had. They should have access to numbers and have a good relationship with your company- I can’t stress how important this is.
If your product is a scheduling tool for marketers for instance, you want to speak to the Head of the Marketing department. If it’s a finance tool, you want to speak to the Head of finance or someone in the C-suite.
Create video testimonials
If you have the resources, video testimonials are another mode to consider. At my organisation, we did call interviews first and then did the video versions later on. This made things a bit easy because customers were able to draw talking points from what we had already discussed on the call interviews.
If you can, merge this process so you can just have the interviews in one go and in video to save your clients’ time, we only did it this way because the video interviews were a later decision.
You’ll need to do some pre-production here by including the questions and then sample answer prompts. This is to make sure your respondent stays on course during the interview and that you get the information you need.
Hit Publish
Now you’ve done the work, it’s time to hit publish. Post all your case studies to a section of your company’s website, if you don’t have a dedicated section already you’ll need to create that.
Headings: Case Study Headings should include compelling numbers or something important that you helped the company achieve, for instance:
Company profile: Begin each case study with a brief profile of the customer and include information such as the number of employees, their industry and website.
The Body: You can now go on to the body of the content. As discussed above, this will be divided into three parts The Problem, The Solution and The Result.
If you created videos as well, embed these to each case study post
Another great idea is to publish important highlights from the most compelling case studies on your home page.
Run your campaign
After you’ve hit publish, it’s a great idea to run a case study campaign where you shine the spotlight on the companies in your case studies.
Highlight the most compelling quotes from the case studies on your socials, with a CTA to read the full article on your website. If you also created videos, share the best short clips on your social channels.
Create a calendar for this and space it out. Aim to use different parts of the case studies over a long period of time.
Boost the best-performing posts as awareness ads if you can.
That’s it! If you have any more tips for creating great case studies and campaigns, you can drop a message here. I’d love to hear from you!