Case studies are a great way to highlight how much your customers like your business or product. The goal of these articles is to give the reader an understanding of how you solved the problem and made a positive change. These case studies are great for social media or just a useful sales tool to show similar customers how you were able to make a positive change. As consumers, we are often curious to know how a service/product can help or be useful. This is where you should indirectly brag about your company.
How to get participation:
This should usually be done via email or phone and it is always helpful to have the client provide some of their own photos. Many clients are slow or apprehensive about committing to these interviews. Generally, if you offer them something like a Starbucks, Amazon, or Visa gift card, you'll find that they're much more interested in helping you produce a great case study.
Writing your case study:
You want to organize your case study in a narrative way. In other words, you want to tell the customer’s story. People tend to identify with stories more than anything else, especially when the situation described is very similar to their own. You should have three sections:
Before we find your service/product:
-Company information
-Issues before using your product/service
-Pain points
After we start using your product/service:
-What changes were made
-How easy it was to make these changes
-What benefits have they noticed
Future outlook:
-What do you hope to see in the future thanks to your service/product
-How this will allow you to save time/money/headaches in the future
-Ask for a brief one-line testimonial – “If it weren’t for this product I wouldn’t know what I would be doing next year.”
What to ask?
Questions should always be open-ended and you should encourage the customer to provide as much detail as possible. Remember that you can extract testimonials from these case studies; So if you phrase your questions correctly, you'll see some golden nuggets that you can pull out to use in your article. Below is our case study questions cheat sheet, which should help you ask important questions to get great answers for your case study essay.
About the work:
Company Name?
Where are they located?
How long have they been on the market?
What they do?
What does this company specialize in?
Who are your customers?
How many people work there?
Can you think of any other interesting information that people might want to know?
Life before service/product:
What caught your attention about _____ company?
How did you start doing business with _______ company?
What were your projects like before you used _____ company?
Why did you choose ____ company?
Was there a defining moment or a moment that you remember that made you choose us?
What was the biggest difference between us and our competitors?
What aspects of our service did you like most?
Why is now the time to use our services?
What were the main considerations you took into account before choosing us?
Life after service/product:
How did things improve after you used the service?
What parts of the project turned out better than expected?
Would you use _____ company again? Why or why not?
How have things improved for your business (or life) since our work was completed?
Are you able to do something now that you couldn't before?
If you could say one good thing about our company, what would it be?
Is there anything we could do better in the future?
What was your favorite part of this whole project?
What would it take for you to recommend us to your friends/family/colleagues?
Quantitative data:
Improvement Can you quantify any of the changes that were made?
Are you saving or making more money with our service?
What was the total cost, time and scale of the project?
How many people were needed to complete this project?
How many jobs were created as a result of this project?
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