People check out your website but don’t sign up or make a purchase as often as you’d hoped?
You’re a B2B company that wants to take their marketing game to the next level?
You’ve received amazing feedback from clients but don’t know how to properly leverage it?
In this post you’ll find out how to write a success story or alternatively called, case study, that will help you attract more customers. Once you know what goes in there and how everything looks like, writing a success story becomes a simple and straightforward process.
“Will this product or service get me the results I have in mind?” This is a question you’ve probably asked yourself plenty of times before making a purchase, and so have your potential customers. When making an important buying decision, decision makers in companies are used to diligently tap into any sort of proof of success. This proof can come in the form of references, reviews, ratings, and the most trusted one: case studies.
For obvious reasons, businesses want to know how those that came and spent their money before them performed. They want to feel a boost of confidence before reaching out for the purchase button. Wouldn’t you?
In marketing today, customer success stories, and its equivalent, case studies, enter the category of social proof, along with testimonials, references, reviews, and ratings. But there is an important difference between case studies and all the other forms of social proof:
Case studies can become the strongest pieces of your brand’s persuasion portfolio due to their more comprehensive display of a customer experience. They offer a more elaborate and thus more convincing form due to its more detailed and hands-on approach.
B2B buyers trust your customers more than you. Most B2B buyers first research their options for solutions and products online before even contacting a provider.
Among the many content marketing strategies being used nowadays, one type of content continues to be trusted by buyers, especially B2B ones: success stories. There is no doubt that there is a great convincing power in good success stories, and you should leverage that.
Success stories provide brand credibility and are a strong asset in your marketing strategy. Instead of just talking about the benefits of your products, customer success stories show evidence of how your products and services have helped real clients with real problems.
Case studies showcase not just your brand but the customers as well. One of the marketing mistakes that businesses make when crafting a case study is talking too much about themselves. But it should come as part of a case study definition that if you really want to resonate with your consumers, you should focus more on them, not your business.
To put it simply, success stories work because others can easily relate to them and want to achieve the same results as the success story examples.
When looking at the Demand Gen Report’s 2017 Content Preferences Survey, we find out that B2B buyers use case studies more than any other content to inform and rationalize their purchasing decisions. So, no matter the course you decide to take when writing your case study, one thing is certain: you must write one. And here’s how to start:
While you might have quite a few companies reaching back to you and telling you how happy they are with their purchase, not all of them are willing to cooperate on a case study. Don’t take it personally. There might be many reasons why one can’t work with you on this: lack of time or manpower, feeling like there isn’t much for them in it and so on. That’s why it can be a good idea to try to offer them a small incentive – like a small upgrade or a free consultation. But be careful: You don’t want to turn it into a paid success story.
To get to that awesome case study, you first need to gather the right info from your hero client. The best way to do so is through a well-crafted questionnaire that covers both their inspiring experience and more precisely, how your offerings helped them.
When it comes to the manner of collecting the data, the ideal way would be a video call where you go through the questionnaire and try to get answers to all the questions. The call should be recorded, so you can always get back to it to further understand your task at hand.
When it comes to the tone of the success story it’s best to try to match the featured company’s style with a friendly, conversational, and easy-to-read one. And no matter what, remember to keep it positive and inspirational.
The perspective you should keep throughout your piece should be a 3rd person one, a journalistic perspective, with no salesy talk at all. Remember that you’re telling a story first before anything else.
The layout of the entire success story should be built based on your brand and visual identity while at the same time focus on the client’s company design. Make sure to include their logo and visual cues that connect the story with their image. The visuals must follow and complement the story well.
GETitOUT was able to showcase this interesting Success Story example thanks to our client and close collaborator, Doc2.
Visit them on the website doc2.co to see more of their success stories that will be published soon.
Most marketing things you write are far more open-ended than customer success stories. A lot of times the formats of your materials vary but keep some common staples or standards. It’s not the case with customer success stories. Readers will have some fairly specific expectations, so success stories are generally following a clear and specific formula.
It is a good idea to write your headline last, after your story comes together. You’re likely to easily recognize your most impactful benefit, and that’s what you need here. We recommend you include:
Here are some case study examples of headlines:
How [Company] Used [Solution] to Build an Award-Winning App in Record Time
[Company] Saves [Amount of money] a Year After Switching to [Product or Service]
When devising the highlights for your case study, assume a large portion of your readers will be skimmers. So, you must offer them here a brief, one-glance type of synopsis of your entire story. Short and on point bits of info along with important facts can be used to write your highlights.
When you go about how to write case study documents, you first examine the company you’re writing for. If it’s a popular company, you may jump into your challenge/solution sections a bit faster. With most other customers though, you should assume readers would benefit from some basic background information, which may include: Company name, Headquarters, Locations, Industry, Size (sales, employees, market leadership, etc.)
Ideally, you also include some information about the featured spokesperson such as their name, title, credits, and so on – which will boost the credibility of your case study.
In any case, make your profile as brief as possible. Even if your customer is as big as Facebook or Starbucks, this is not the most exciting part of the story. The goal of the profile is to make the customer feel relevant to the reader based on something: size, market, product category, and others.
Here’s where the really interesting part begins, and we could safely say that most of the case study advantages will be leveraged starting from this point as well. Here’s where you offer your readers a display of a transitional phenomenon – a process of transformation that begins with the challenge which tells where your client was before using your offerings, and ends with quantifiable results.
You could say that the journalistic portion of your case study begins here. You need to speak about the obstacle the protagonist faces. For B2B, such challenges are bound to be about: saving time, saving money, making money and derivatives of them such as reducing risk, expanding, hiring, simplifying a process, and so on.
This list, of course, can be longer and more specific than we provided above, but most benefits are bound to fall into one of these categories.
Sometimes there’s not much in the way of eye candy in a customer success story example, and that could be ok. But the simplicity and inspirational power of the challenge/solution/results formula should be your focus when devising your case study format.
The middle act of your success story and the transformation process of the customer is how they came to discover, buy, and use your product. This information could be less interesting to the reader, so you’ll need to be smart about it.
It’s likely to be uninteresting to hear about things like internal politics, budget struggles, and so on. But it might be interesting for readers to learn about:
A product or service they were replacing or purchased and found disappointing
The process of implementing your product
What made them realize they needed your solution
If we’re to stick with basic story construction, we’re in the third act now, the after stage of your customer’s transformation. The resolution is here – the happy ending with its happy characters.
Dig into benefits here and be wary of getting too deep in with features. If you do get into features, keep them simple and attach them to benefits. Here you should get specific whenever possible, by stating numbers and quantifiable results, as well as try to capture your readers’ emotions and make them resonate with the story.
The reader should identify and empathize with the customer and not your company. That’s why you should talk about people and not organizations. Your brand is not the hero of your case study; your customer is.
You must resist the temptation to make your story sound like a data sheet or press release about your offerings. Write about why and how the customer uses your product or service. Aim to have readers see themselves in your story and wanting to embark on the same journey.
Case studies are somewhat short and while they are a relatively black and white journalistic exercise, the good ones feature some color, both figuratively and literally. Where space allows, colorize yours. Gather short authentic customer quotes.
Grab and use images whenever possible: the product in use, screenshots, people.
Present data that can be made into mini-infographics.
Include the customer’s logo.
Many success story examples include a great quote, authentic image, and logo somewhere at the top, which makes for a more compelling intro. You need to give life to your story from the very beginning, so your readers will get hooked.
You can expand the value of the long-form customer stories you create by repurposing them into shorter pieces which can become suitable for a variety of marketing channels. Create short versions of your customer success stories so you can reuse them in other places and reach a wider audience. Extremely brief versions of your case study can be applied well at scenarios such as:
Finally, it’s smart to use your company’s social media channels to promote your success stories. Find engaging snippets and pieces of visual content that will quickly catch your audience’s attention and share them. For social media outlets, brief excerpts, such as quotes and relevant graphics can become compelling short stories on their own.
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