[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Case studies are such a valuable resource for businesses.
When a prospects read a case study it helps build trust and showcases how you can impact your clients.
But the most important step in creating a case study for your business is choosing someone to interview.
The best way to make sure your case studies are more likely to connect with your prospects is to find great existing clients to interview.
Choosing a business should involve more forethought than throwing a dart at a board.
So here are the best tips and strategies when trying to choose the best clients to interview for a case study about your business.
Pick a business with a story tied to your business
A common mistake comes from choosing clients who haven’t felt a personal impact from your business working with them.
For your case study to have the greatest effect on someone reading it, there needs to have been some stakes involved in how their business changed.
This could simply be “we couldn’t get our finances in order, and had difficulty paying our staff.” You have to show where they were before your product or solution was introduced to them, then carry through and show the positive results after.
Work with your sales team and support and find the best clients to interview. They will know who loves your business, what their situation was before, and how much your business impacted them for the better.
Choose a single angle on how you helped them
It’s critical when telling the story around the case study not to confuse the reader. It’s critical to choose one angle that will highlight your company the best. Even if your business solved several problems for business, pick the strongest one and make the case study about that. Possible angles you might pick include:
- Cost savings
- Getting more time back
- Increasing efficiency
Thinking about how you helped a business in one way will help you narrow the scope on finding a great customer to interview. You can look at a business and see how much their growth and development was affected by your product or service.
Picking companies with no positive benefits other than how nice you are
This is more of a “things to avoid tip”, but they need to have something nice to say about your business other than how nice it is.
As strange as it sounds, you don’t want to choose a business whose only positive benefit is how nice you are to work with.
You want your existing client base to think you’re great to work with, and it’s a positive aspect to feature in your case study, but it can’t be the main feature.
Excellent customer service is essential but at the end of the day, it doesn’t separate your business from your competition. Don’t sell yourself short and be sure to touch on how your business offers something that another business does not. You need to be able to tell the story of how the case study interviewee now has something, because of you, they didn’t previously possess.
You can use your great customer service as a side supporting, a swing to win someone in your favor which is already interested in you, sell the benefit to your prospects, something that they can see a positive change in their lives.
Pick a client who had tangible deliverables
People are visual and need to see an actual result from interacting with your product or service.
Make sure you spell out some quantifiable results your business did for the case study business.
Examples of this might look something like this:
- Our company decreased hard costs by $300 per week
- Our business saved 10 hours a month
- We eliminated 60 hours per year by getting rid of the manual data entry from our workday
Providing details like this helps potential clients visualize measurable results for their own business to replicate.
On another note, turn those metrics into a graph or pie chart.
Let your readers physically see a before and after. Here are some examples of charts/graphs to use.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”5577″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It can be difficult thinking when trying to select a business, but you’ll be happy in the long run if you take the time to find some data on how you helped them. Prospects will have a better sense of how you can assist them if they see what you did for someone else.
Not sure how to develop a compelling case study?
If you want to see how your peers have solved their marketing and website problems, take a look at our portfolio, and see what others have said about the result.
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