Wondering how case studies can support your marketing goals?

Maybe you have a new case study, but aren’t sure how to make the most of it. Or maybe you have a great CASE, and you know the story needs to be captured, but aren’t sure where to go from there.

Here are a few handy tips to get you started, and you can find even more HERE.

Case studies belong on your website

Start with your homepage

Your homepage may be the only page your visitors ever see, so it’s prime real estate for capturing their attention and offering social proof. Case studies are powerful tools for building credibility, inspiring trust and confidence, and encouraging prospects to dig deeper into you website.

But don’t stop at your homepage!

As you build a library of case studies, designate a page on your site to house them, making it easy for people visiting your site to find all the inspiration they need to understand and connect with your products. And definitely pull out juicy bits of content from these studies to spice up your other web pages: a testimonial quote here, a fabulous infographic there, and you’ve grown the value of your case study across your whole site.

Social media + social proof: a winning combination.

Just like the other pages on your own site, your social media channels can benefit from links to your case studies or snippets from them.

Have a great customer or beneficiary quote? Tweet that out with a link to the study.

Does your case study have a fantastic image you can share on Facebook or LinkedIn with a thank you to the profiled client? Or with a sentence or two summing up the findings of the study?

Use case studies to support your other content and marketing campaigns.

The most effective content serves many purposes and case studies are certainly no exception. Each of your case studies can provide the backbone of blog posts, videos, and podcasts, even webinars, and they contain fabulous fodder for website and sales copy blurbs. And each of those pieces of content, in turn, can link back to your case study.

Pro Tip: Increase your prospects’ engagement with your site by including a call to action at the end of your blog post or video, where they can download the full study.

• Consider compiling several good case studies into an E-book or a training manual.
• Pull quotes and insights from a case study to highlight and support your any of your marketing messaging.
• Combine quotes and insights from several case studies to provide a well-rounded view of what your product or service has to offer – in real-world terms.
• An abridgement from a case study can do double duty as a testimonial.

Use case studies to, well, make your case in proposals, white papers, and other content.

We’ve talked about building trust by adding social proof. Case studies aren’t the only content that benefits from social proof, but they are a simple way to collect it.

Folding relevant case studies into white papers, premium content offers, and guides is a low-cost way to repurpose the high-quality social proof and impact evidence you’ve already produced, getting more mileage out of each content marketing dollar spent, and helping prospects see your solution fitting perfectly into their problem.

Case stories in a grant proposal make the same point as your data and statements, but may be more likely to capture your reviewers’ attention and build credibility.

Enrich sales meetings, presentations, podcasts, videos, and more.

Whether you’re getting ready for a short call to answer a prospective client’s questions or presenting a TED Talk on your revolutionary new practice and its world-shaking impact, case studies can be a good place to start building in connections and social proof.

Give your audience a real person to root for, and help them see themselves in what you do.

Add case studies to your other sales activities

Email marketing generates a fantastic return on investment; improve that even more by adding the power of case studies to your email campaigns. Or perhaps your field relies heavily on face-to-face sales? Include case studies in your brochures and sales packets. Empower your sales team with powerful stories of how your product or service demonstrably, adds value.

Customer concerns or objections to overcome? Offer a real-life example, in the form of a success story, of how you’ve already solved that problem for a similar customer.

And, of course, use case studies to train marketing, fundraising and sales staff. 

Trust is easier to build when your content – and your marketing overall – focuses on the value your product or service brings to customers, not the product itself, or even reams of data about it.

Case studies, customer stories, impact stories, help your staff live in the successful project, understand what built that success, and bring the theory and the data into focus for your prospective customer in a way that he or she can connect with.

 

Have questions about how to use case studies to attract and interest clients? Let’s talk!