Case studies are a special breed of marketing content that show how a customer put a company’s product to good use. Sometimes they’re called customer stories.
To a marketer, they serve a specific purpose: to move prospects “further down the funnel” that leads to buying their product. Thus, the narrative needs to achieve two things:
provide social proof: since a respectable company uses this vendor, the vendor appears more respectable
show evidence of fitness for purpose: the product has a track record of solving the problem the prospect is facing
Here are some tips for writing a great case study. To be clear on terminology used here: the client is the company that’s commissioned story, the customer is the company the story is about, and the prospect is the potential buyer of our client’s product. If you’re in-house, then the client is your company.
Process
Understand the business dynamics of case studies
For a marketer to solicit a customer to participate in a case study is a big ask:
It takes time for them to sit for an interview, review the draft, and seek legal approval.
Some companies are particularly touchy about the use of their name and brand in others’ marketing material.
Often the process grinds to a halt at review or legal stage, and you can only bug a customer to fulfill their commitment to doing you a favor so much.
Sometimes it’s baked into contracts that the customer agrees to support a case study, but even then, who’s going to go to court to enforce that?
Point is, the relationship between marketer and customer is complex. Appreciating these dynamics will help you gracefully navigate feedback and understand when to push for more information and when to make the most of what you have.
Pay close attention to the brief
The writer’s #1 job is to give the client what they’re asking for. Read the brief very carefully, and reread it a few times as you are writing the piece and before you hand it to the editor. (Didn’t get a good brief? Push for one, or be prepared for a lot more back and forth after you write it and inevitably get things wrong that could have been avoided. Sigh.)
You ought to follow the brief for every piece of work you do, of course, but it’s particularly important with case studies because marketers typically have a particular story they’re trying to convey within a broader context of messaging, competition, and so on. They also probably have first-hand knowledge: more often than not, they were personally involved in the interview with the customer, and may have worked with the customer in various capacities beyond the case study.
This isn’t to say you should avoid making points not explicit in the brief, but respect that they have a strong sense of the most salient and exciting points and how this particular story can be put in the best light.
Review precedents
If the client already has case studies, read them carefully and note their structure, length, tone, etc. Ask if they have any favorite case studies to emulate, or whether they’d like to evolve their approach. If they’re just getting started and have no particular opinions, find a few kinds of case studies from similar companies and ask what they like or don’t like about each. If you’re doing the work in-house, do this with your stakeholders to avoid a lot of runaround if what you write isn’t what they want.
Some clients like to include a kind of stat sheet on the customer that accompanies the post. If this is your first time working on a case study for a client, it’s smart to ask about their preferred formatting or suggest one if they seem open. If you’re in a position to influence the format of case studies, we suggest pushing to keep them shorter and more focused. The less you try to say, the more likely the reader will make it to and hopefully remember the important points.
Seek more info thoughtfully
Try to answer questions yourself: reread the brief, do some searches, play with the product, or if you’re at an agency you can ping a colleague who’s also worked on the account. Only then, if you can’t get what you need, then go to the client with specific requests. At Copytree we typically do this over Slack, but you can do it as a comment in the working document if you’re comfortable with the client seeing your work in progress—it can work well to put in a placeholder for stats, or make an assertion you’re not 100% sure of, and ask for details or verification. Just remember that your client has other demands on their time, and given the business dynamics (see above), it might be impractical to get more information out of the client.
Content
Establish why the customer matters
Unless it’s about a big name everyone recognizes, your first task is to get the reader bought in quickly on why the customer you’re profiling is relevant. Use objective measures such as employee count, revenue, or position on a list like the Fortune 500 if that’s impressive; if the customer is smaller or stealthier, look for credentials a reader might find relevant such as the work history of the exec suite or even their academic accomplishments.
Get quickly to the problem, and expediently to the solution
A prospect is reading this case study to understand how the product might help them. If you go into too much detail about the customer that’s the subject of the story, it becomes hard for them to picture themselves in the same situation. Similarly, while you have to set the stage by explaining the problem, don’t take too long to show how our client’s product addressed it. In fact, a good approach is to reveal the problem incrementally rather than entirely up front, so you can directly equate challenge and solution as you go along.
Latch on to the right specifics
Don’t avoid all details, though! They are the key to establishing credibility, and make for better storytelling. Whenever you get a good detail—software in the stack, places where a workflow gums up, the specific parts of the company having communication challenges, what have you—find a way to include it. When deciding whether to include a piece of detail, ask yourself (or the client) if it would help a prospect see themselves in the customer’s shoes, or if would make the story feel less relevant.
Don’t exaggerate the problem, don’t oversell the solution.
Avoid hype. When writing in the company’s voice, be even-keeled about the extent of the challenge and the impact of the product. The story will be much more credible if you don’t try too hard to set high stakes. After all, the target reader will have a similar challenge, so they’ll be able to judge if you’re blowing smoke.
Let customer’s voice express high stakes or immodest statements
There’s one big exception to avoiding hype: if the customer says it, you can use it! If they say a problem is the “worst ever,” or the solution is “beyond our wildest dreams,” that’s gold. Often even pull quote-worthy. (What’s a pull quote? It’s a quote that is “pulled” from the text and presented in a bigger, more attention-grabbing format. If they don’t already do this, see if the client would like to start.)
Style
It’s OK to gently tweak quotes
B2B writing isn’t journalism, so don’t stress if what the customer said in the interview doesn’t perfectly fit your flow. Change from third to first person, replace a pronoun with a proper noun, and so on. It’s ok to even merge a few sentences into one sentence or rephase a bit more dramatically for clarity. This isn’t a license to make stuff up—you’ve got to preserve the original meaning and tone. A good rule of thumb is, if you are extremely confident the customer were to read your subtle rearrangement of their words and agree with it, it’s fine. (Don’t put your client in the awkward position of a customer protesting they didn’t say what’s written!)
Don’t overwrite, use source materials when possible
Your job as the writer is to pull the pieces together to write a tight, compelling story. If you’re blessed with a customer interview full of quotes and a thorough brief from our client, your work might be pretty easy. Avoid the temptation to insert your craft to feel like you’re adding value; you add more by correctly judging what’s good enough to copy and paste.
Balance quotes and narrative
When you’re working with a lot of primary source material from the customer (an interview, presentation notes, etc.), you don’t have to use quotes to convey everything they’re saying. In fact, too much verbatim can get old. It’s a fine idea to take some concepts from quotes and build them into the narrative, especially the ones that need a little more massaging than the type of gentle tweaks we mention above.
Usually works best to end with a quote
To conclude this piece, here’s how to conclude your piece. It’s hard to tightly wrap up just about any piece of writing, but there’s a good trick with case studies: use a quote. Let the customer’s voice remind people of the problem that was solved, express a positive emotion, or share high esteem for the quality of the people or product at the company. No need to be original about this: as Pablo Picasso allegedly said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”