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Two Ugly Ingredients for Stronger Case Studies (and How to Use Them)
Can a case study to be *too* positive? A strange question, maybe, but one that’s kept me up at night. If there’s one thing people LOVE bashing about case studies, it’s their credibility—and in many cases (no pun intended), I don’t blame them. The average case study out in the wild tends to be light on details, heavy on hyperbole, and tough to trust. They’re criticized for being cherry-picked examples in baskets of otherwise rotten fruit; impossibly great outcomes made...
Is It Time to Rethink the Agency Case Study?
Creating case studies for agencies comes with its own special set of challenges. First, agency customers are a particularly skeptical bunch because they’ve either been burned by an agency in the past or heard horror stories. Maybe they didn’t get the results they wanted. Or the work was poorly performed. Or communication was terrible. Whatever the problem was, they’re not likely to be won over by cheery case studies that consist of a laundry list of tasks performed and summary...
A Surprising Way to Repurpose Your Customer Interview
You could be sitting on a goldmine and not even know it… Especially if you already have a handful of case studies under your belt. You may think you’ve squeezed every ounce of marketing juice out of those studies, but there’s a byproduct of the creation process that you probably haven’t tapped. I’m talking about the audio files of your customer interviews. These files are chock full of persuasive content and quotes that are just begging to be used—and you...
What Nobody Tells You About Creating Customer Success Stories (But Should)
“Creating customer success stories—how hard can it be?” If there’s a painful lesson I’ve been forced to learn (repeatedly) in life, it’s that any time you ask “How hard can it be?” — you’re about to find out. This is why I can’t help but smile every time I see marketers underestimating the challenges, workload, and unexpected games of whack-a-mole that come with putting together customer success stories. After all, it’s just “Challenge, Solution, Results” right? How hard can it...
How to Write a Killer Case Study Intro
The blinking cursor of death… You’ve read the client brief, recorded the interview, and found the perfect case study template. Now you’re sitting in front of your computer with a strong cup of coffee (your most important writing tool), and you’re ready to crank out a killer case study. But where do you begin? Oftentimes, the hardest part of writing a case study (other than putting together the headline, which we’ll cover in another post) is just getting started. How...
Client won’t approve your case study? Don’t give up – try this!
You’ve written a case study, but your client won’t approve it. What now? It happens more often than it should: a client agrees to do a case study but then backs out after you’ve gone to all the trouble to write it up. Yes, it’s discouraging – but it doesn’t have to mean scrapping the case study entirely. In this post, I’ll share the step-by-step process Case Study Buddy follows to try to turn around this setback – and one last-ditch option...
7 Great Sales & Marketing Insights You Can Get From One Customer Interview
Ask the right questions and a customer interview will become a goldmine of actionable intel. One of the most common pieces of feedback we get at Case Study Buddy after sending clients a recording of our interview with their customer is, “I can’t believe how much you got out of them!” Few clients anticipate how much we can actually help them learn on a call, but the great thing about customer interviews is that you can learn so much about a customer in such a...
The 3 BIGGEST Mistakes to Avoid When Interviewing a Client
A client interview is a terrible opportunity to waste. One client interview can be a content goldmine, generating Enough information for a detailed case study Multiple quotes to use as testimonials & social proof Insights that can shape your messaging in a way that improves conversions Critical feedback to help improve your business & shape your offering But conduct an interview the wrong way, and you’ll get a lot of… One-word answers Over-the-top accolades Cringe-worthy silence Here’s three mistakes to watch out...
When is the Best Time to Ask a Client for a Case Study?
Back in junior high school, I was the kid with the worst possible timing. See, there were girls I dreamed of hesitantly putting my arm around while watching the latest PG 13 movie and sipping back an ice cold Tahiti Treat (boy, I miss those), but I never got the timing right. I either blurted my feelings out too soon (“Nice to meet you. Wanna be my girlfriend?!”) or way too late (“I heard you liked me last year and even though you’re in love with...