Todd Giannattasio
Adding a case study at the end of our blogging frenzy helped our traffic spike over 1,000%
Knowing how to write a case study can drive tremendous results for your inbound marketing. Not only do we see our biggest traffic spikes when we publish new case studies, but leveraging case studies as a sales tool helps close deals much faster and easier.
Being able to prove your value with previous performances will help you raise your position as a thought leader in your industry as well as separate yourself from the competition when talking with prospects.
Elements That You Need To Include In Your Case Study
- Case Study Title
- Quotes About The Project
- Visuals Supporting Your Text & Data
Pages That Your Case Study Needs To Have
- High Level Overview
- About The Project/Client
- The Problems You Are Solving
- How You Solved Those Problems
- The Results Of Your Work
- A Call To Action For The Reader
How To Write A Title For Your Case Study
Just like anything you need a title for, you want your case study title to pique interest of whoever sees it and intrigue them enough to want to read it in full (or skim through it, 2015 web-reading style).
An easy way to write a solid title for your case study is to include the results that you achieved followed by the work that you did. For example:
“600% Increase In Leads From New Website Design”
While you can spend a ton of time trying to come up with a great headline for anything, I like to go with the KISS method and Keep It Stupid Simple. This formula is super simple and does the job.
If you want a little more on how to write headlines, check out Kevan Lee’s post, “30+ Ultimate Headline Formulas for Tweets, Posts, Articles, and Emails.”
Getting Quality Quotes For Your Case Study
Since you presumably did a great job for your client (or boss) on this project, which is why it’s worthy of a case study to begin with, it should be easy to get some quotes that are relevant and provide social proof to your readers.
Sean D’Souza gives us these 6 Questions to Ask for Powerful Testimonials:
- What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product?
- What did you find as a result of buying this product?
- What specific feature did you like most about this product?
- What would be three other benefits about this product?
- Would you recommend this product? If so, why?
- Is there anything you’d like to add?
We can use this same approach (rewording to make more sense for your company) to get quotes to insert in our case study.
Options To Add Visuals
Don’t get lazy with your case study graphics. It’s easy to create 3D charts in Excel to make them (literally) stand out more.
Including visuals with your case study, whether graphically or with photographs, will help improve the overall quality of your document for the reader. Plus you can leverage graphics to backup your data while providing some aesthetical relief from blocks of text.
3 options for adding visuals to your case study:
- A photo of your product or someone providing your service
- A chart or graph showing your performance, or even a screenshot of your analytics
- Add photos along with your quotes
Writing Your Case Study Overview
Your case study overview is like the executive summary of a business plan. It should introduce the problem, then hit all the key points very quickly for someone who is just looking for the highlights.
Writing under 100 words for your case study overview is fine, and even including a few bullet points works well to introduce the results that you’ve achieved.
What To Include In Your Overview
- Introduce the problem and why it’s a problem.
Example: ABC company had a website up for a few years, but never really got any benefits out of it, such as generating quality sales leads. They saw overall sales starting to decline as more potential customers were finding their competition online instead of them.
- Introduce your solution.
Example: Knowing they needed to do something different, ABC Company hired Tresnic Media to help plan and execute a new website strategy that would help get them back in front of their target market and growing sales again.
- Metrics of success.
Example: 600% increase in leads. 1,200% ROI
About The Project/Client
If you are working on with a client, this is easy. You can snag the description from your client’s LinkedIn page or website. If you’re writing a case study about an internal project, then put together a short paragraph describing the project.
Make sure you cover who the client is/what the project is, the problems you faced, and the goal of your work.
The Problems You Are Solving
Now it’s time to get into it! What problems are you helping to resolve? Write a short paragraph or two that describes what issues your client was having and why they are significant. Here is where you can begin implementing the classic copywriting formula of Agitate – Solve.
Bullet points to hit here are:
- What problem was your client having?
- Why are those problems significant?
- What consequences was your client facing if this problem wasn’t resolved?
How You Solved Those Problems
Here’s the second part of the formula where you solve that agitation.
Describe how you worked with your client to find, plan, and execute your solution.
Be concise. Try to keep this section to 2 or 3 short paragraphs.
Some suggestions to cover when talking about your solution:
- What did you find in your research that was relevant?
- How did this information play a role in your strategy?
- What was the strategy and how was it executed?
The Results Of Your Work
Time to show off!
In your conclusion, write about the performance of your strategy and how it made a positive difference for your client. Don’t worry about repeating the metrics you may have mentioned throughout writing the case study.
Add in some visuals to increase the impact of the text. Show a graph that conveys the tremendous success that you were able to deliver for your client (and that you can deliver for other potential clients reading your case study!).
*Make sure it’s not a flat looking graph, there are several easy ways to make compelling visuals with your data in Excel, don’t be lazy!
Call To Action
Like any piece of content that you publish, you want to end with a relevant Call To Action that will give your reader a next step to take.
You have just worked so hard on showing them why they should hire you and the success you can help them achieve, don’t leave them without a way to move to the next stage with you.
Ideally, you’ll have a relevant landing page that you can link to from the end of the case study that speaks directly about the specific service that you covered. That landing page should have a form and your contact information so that the visitor can quickly go from reader to sales ready lead!
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