When it comes to marketing your business, there are a wide variety of business writing and content marketing strategies out there. Coming up with the right strategy will involve choosing the best business writing tools for your company. For example, you might use white papers, blog posts, and email marketing campaigns.
Another option you might not have considered is the business case study. Let’s take a quick look at some of the benefits of case studies so you can decide if they’re a good fit.
Here are three things business case studies can do to help your business.
Case Studies as Illustrations
Case studies help you and your business show what you can do rather than simply tell people what you claim you can do. They turn your successes into stories and illustrate your abilities to other prospects.
Case Studies as Testimonials
You probably know it’s a good idea to get quotes and testimonials from happy customers. Other customers may be more likely to trust their peers than to trust sales copy coming from a company trying to make money.
Case studies take testimonials a step farther. Rather than simply gathering praise, you share customer feedback alongside detailed descriptions of the work you’ve done.
Case Studies for Customer Relationships
When you write a business case study, you’ll likely interview customers and get not only their feedback, but also their permission to use them and their project in your case study. On top of appealing to new customers, that makes case studies a great networking tool with existing customers.
You keep yourself connected to them, and you highlight them through a case study profile that can bring them added attention. In other words, there are promotional benefits for the customer. And that’s not likely something other contractors have approached them about. It makes your company stand out and can potentially lead to repeat business.
Have you ever used business case studies? How did they help your business? If you haven’t written a case study yet, why might you consider it (or what’s holding you back)? Nothing holding you back? Then get in touch when you’re ready and let a professional business writer help you draft your next case study.
Jenn, is there a tech definition of case studies? I’m thinking some sort of guideline like we find for whitepapers maybe?
Technical case studies are just like other marketing case studies. You just present the problem the client or customer faced, your plan to improve things, and how you (or the technology in question) helped them out — basically how that plan played out. And it’s a good idea to add a customer quote to personalize things a bit. I set things up in a three-part outline — Challenge, Plan, Results / Evaluation — and then I conduct a customer interview to make sure I pull all of the background information I need (from my client and from their customer the case study is about).
Thanks… sounds like there are definite expectations for them.
I have another post on my schedule for later this week where I’ll talk more about the specific components of business case studies. So hopefully that will lay it out a bit better than this intro post. 🙂