Telling your own story isn’t always easy. That’s especially true in business, where the next project constantly takes priority. It’s often difficult to make space for writing a case study.
Your successes deserve better.
Case studies can be the most valuable assets in your content library. They document not only what you did, but how you did it, and for whom. In sales, if a case study speaks to a prospect’s pain points, the sale is easier to close. The goal is to build a collection of case studies that captures the full diversity of your company’s capabilities and clients.
What is a case study?
A case study is simply a well-worded story about business. The word “story” is popular in marketing but doesn’t always nail what is being done. Not so here: Case studies are stories in every sense—with beginnings, middles, ends, and even characters.
There’s no limit to what your stories may be about. Although work for a customer is the most common topic, a case study can also cover an internal initiative, an acquisition, or any other substantial win that’s worth celebrating.
What does a case study include?
The basic case study format answers four basic questions:
- Who was the customer?
- What was the customer’s challenge?
- How did the company solve the challenge?
- What was the outcome?
This simple framework can be used to create case studies that are as short as a paragraph for social media or as long as a multiple-page article. The optimal length of a case study depends on several factors, including industry norms, audience expectations, and the company’s underlying marketing strategies.
The basic framework is also flexible. In a professional service industry a case study may include a summary of individual contributors’ backgrounds and skills. A company may want its case studies to revolve around certain themes, like core values.
Having a well-defined style ensures consistency among your case studies. This is especially important in an industry like construction, where case studies are core marketing assets. A style sheet dictates exactly how a case study should look and what it should say. A collection of case studies is more impressive if they share a similar look and feel.
Before publishing a case study, always consider whether it raises compliance issues. Contractual obligations may require the customer’s consent before publishing anything that includes the customer’s name or details about the project. Even without a legal obligation, we always recommend our clients seek the customer’s approval before publishing a case study that may impact the customer’s business.
How are case studies used?
Case studies get to the heart of what authentic marketing is about: clearly conveying your value proposition.
Their universal appeal makes them especially influential. Anyone interested in learning more about your organization—current customers, prospects, potential partners, contractors, and job seekers—can use a case study as a window into how your team works.
Use a multichannel approach to achieve the most value from your case studies. Here are the most common examples:
- Post to your website. A blog dedicated to case studies offers a durable, long-term showcase of your best work. Along with bolstering your site’s SEO performance, it ensures your best stories are always available.
- Share and share again on social media. A condensed case study makes excellent social media content. Because social media has a short shelf life, it’s safe to tell the same story a few times—few of your followers will see the repeats.
- Use the power of email. Incorporate case studies into your customer newsletter or direct them to a highly targeted audience for a cold outreach.
- Put together a brag book. Once you’ve finished a few case studies, consider assembling them into a digital or print publication that can drive sales conversations forward.
Making creative use of your case studies gives them life. Feel free to experiment. The more eyes on your work, the stronger your brand becomes.
Can AI help create a case study?
Because case studies follow a well-defined format, AI can be especially helpful in their production process. AI tools tend to be mediocre writers, but they are excellent data analysts and brainstorming partners. Given the right set of parameters, they substantially accelerate the writing process.
Large language models like ChatGPT provide the best results when they are fed high-quality data. For case studies, that means two things:
- Details about the expected final product, such as the case study’s basic structure, its target word count, and specific rules for elements like the title and closing call to action.
- Specifics about the project that the AI can use to answer the “what, who, and how?” questions.
For the first point, consider preparing a style sheet with all your case study rules formatted for an AI to quickly process. Simply use standard heading tags to indicate the logical order of rules. If you’re not able to preload the style sheet into a custom AI bot, you’ll still be able to upload your standard document as part of your initial prompt. This step establishes the guardrails that improve the quality of the AI’s output.
There are numerous strategies for giving the AI details about the project itself. Here are a few:
- Record a conversation. Hold a short call with your customer and chat about the project. With a few straightforward interview-style questions, you can gather the raw material for the AI to chew on. Simply upload the transcript as part of the prompting process.
- Supply documentation. If data about the project are contained in documents, like a response to an RFP, consider giving them to the AI. To preserve confidentiality, this is best done on a platform that protects user information from incorporation into its algorithm.
- Manually supply desired details. Anything you know you want included in the case study should be supplied to the AI directly, with a clear indication that it needs to be incorporated into the final product.
Red Mallard finds that a piecemeal approach works best with AI-assisted copywriting. Consider working on one topic at a time to keep the AI focused.
Once you have the raw AI output, it’s time to edit and refine. The AI has probably made mistakes or ignored vital details that matter to your business and your prospects. The AI may also misstate technical information, especially numbers. Creating content with AI is as much about editing as about writing!
Expertly written case studies start here.
At Red Mallard we’re big fans of case studies. They’re fun to create and are among the most impactful forms of content.
If you’ve been in business for a while, but you haven’t created any case studies, you may be sitting on a pot of gold. Let Red Mallard assist you to tap into your story’s marketing potential. Connect with us today to start.
