Writing Great Case Studies or "Customer Evidence"

We know that claiming ourselves to be 'all that' is pretty meaningless. And someone else claiming it, or implying it by working successfully with us, has much more credibility.

An effective way to get this across is to tell stories about what we can do, from the customer's perspective. Copywriter Matthew Stibbe on his Bad Language blog shares The Rise and Fall of the Case Study.

In this post he describes the problems in developing case studies, the dullness that can ensue, and several neat ideas for improving on stale approaches (i.e. formulaic: problem, solution, benefits). Three of his many ideas are:

One case study, multiple presentations. The source interview and research don’t change, but perhaps I could write a traditional case study, a bullet point summary for the web, a killer quote for an email newsletter and a longer more journalistic story for PR purposes. The incremental cost of the extra writing is marginal compared the cost of going through the process to produce the basic case study.

More journalism, more story. Clients say that they want writing with fizz and ginger. They want something that reads like The Economist of the FT. But when I actually write something sparkling, they try to dull it down again; afraid that informality or originality might offend. It’s like turning My Fair Lady back into Pygmalion. The antidote is to have a little courage.

Remember the audience. I wrote some case studies for an ecommerce company. They were 1,000 words long but I was only allowed to mention the product in one paragraph. The rest of the piece had to be a proper story designed to appeal to the company’s target audience. In terms of PR coverage, these case studies were - by far - the most successful I have worked on. Why? Because journalists could see the point and people actually wanted to read them.

Matthew's first item is something we do often; pulling out nuggets here and there as supporting statements behind otherwise vague claims of the firm (e.g. timely, responsive).

He also talks about the fact that they are expensive--there is enormous effort, process, and skill behind good case studies. I have found the same to be true for those we've developed. In fact, many firms don't want to pay the prices we need to charge to make it worth our while to do this sort of work.

I'm reflecting now that in some instances, I probably haven't presented compellingly enough the value of that work. That really hit me when I read Matthew's point on measurability:

Build in measurability. Too often, people seem to think that the end of the process is getting the case study signed off and uploaded to a central customer evidence website. To me, it feels like that is only the beginning of the process. It must be possible to build in more measurability. For example, I can see exactly how many people come to my blog each day and what they look at. Perhaps the same can be done for case studies.

Like Matthew, I've focused on the project at times, and not on the residual value of the case study. We marketers should definitely be thinking about monitoring effectiveness of this (and other) means of communication.

A side note....the comment string on Matthew's post is very interesting. In particular, Jeff Younger writes that "case study" is altogether the wrong term--that a true case study is a history report that provides a proxy experience for the reader.

He states, "Because case studies are particular, any attempt to turn them into general marketing tools is an error." He and Matthew note that organizations like Microsoft have adopted the more appropriate term "customer evidence" for what most of us call "case study."

If you are a marketer and you're not yet reading Matthew's blog, you need to be! Also read Matthew's post: When Case Studies Go Wrong