How We Helped Lever Create 22 Case Study Assets in 12 Months
How does a small team in a cutthroat industry with established competitors scale case study creation?
For Lever, it was all about finding the right partner.
Lever Achieved
Lever is a leading Talent Acquisition Suite that makes it easy for talent teams to reach their hiring goals and connect companies with top talent.
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Challenge
Scaling case study creation as a small marketing team
Recruitment and talent acquisition are cutthroat industries with many established players. Lever’s sales team uses customer success stories to provide social proof of Lever’s ability to scale and compete with even their biggest competitors.
But capturing customer success stories and transforming them into compelling assets was a major challenge for Lever’s small marketing team. With so many moving pieces to manage and execute, the time-consuming process took Lever’s marketing team away from other critical work.
That’s why Lever looked for a partner to help them produce case studies at scale.
“We were producing case studies in-house—but my team has limited resources. We wanted to scale up our efforts,” says Jill Fox, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Lever.
However, Lever wanted to do more than just turn customer stories into blog posts that would fade into obscurity in a month. They wanted a partner that could help with innovation and strategy to develop a wide variety of evergreen media assets they could use across their sales funnel. And they wanted each story to generate ongoing ROI for years to come.
“Internally, we’ve had a lot of conversations about leveraging a wide variety of media and using customer success stories in different ways. So we were looking at different vendors in terms of ones that could do video testimonials as well as written case studies,” Jill says.
With that goal in mind, Lever chose Case Study Buddy as their case study partner. At Case Study Buddy, we excel at capturing detailed stories in a single interview and then turning that interview into an entire campaign’s worth of content.
“The reason that Case Study Buddy stood out was they have a whole team to take us through the process step-by-step and be there with us as partners through the journey,” Jill says.
Jill Fox (Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Lever)
Solution
One proven partner: multiple assets from every interview
We started by collaborating with Lever on a custom scoping document where we dug into Lever’s growth goals. We then aligned those goals with potential interview candidates and surfaced nuanced aspects of each relationship that would make compelling and effective stories for specific target audiences.
“In some instances, we wanted to highlight how the customer uses our data analytics solution. In other cases, we wanted to highlight the different integrations they use. Case Study Buddy works with us to make sure that each story is unique to the customer,” Jill explains.
Armed with this list, Jill began introducing customers to her dedicated project manager and Case Study Buddy’s in-house interviewing team. She was cautious at first—but the first customer interview met and exceeded all of her expectations.
“My ultimate feeling with Case Study Buddy is comfort. They always keep me in the loop as they communicate with our customers. I love the level of transparency. I am never in the dark when working with Case Study Buddy,” Jill says.
Building a library of customer stories they can leverage throughout their funnel
Before long, we had captured over a dozen interviews on Lever’s behalf—and each one contained a treasure trove of riveting metrics and anecdotes.
For example, we learned:
- Coupa used Lever’s flagship product, LeverTRM, to scale internal headcount by 40% year-over-year.
- Loopio used LeverTRM to protect candidate confidentiality while hiring two C-suite executives.
- Cogent Biosciences switched from a competitor’s product to LeverTRM, which enabled them to review new applicants 92% faster.
Every story was unique, and each served a specific purpose—addressing client-specific pain points, highlighting key features, and celebrating big wins.
Just as importantly, we took steps to make sure Lever’s customers were just as excited about these stories as Lever themselves. And in all of our interactions, we treated Lever’s customers with extreme care, including making sure both Lever and their customers approved case studies before publication.
“Nothing is ever published without our customers being happy with the way they’re represented. They sign off on all written, video, and audio content,” Jill says.
Turning each interview into multiple targeted assets for different marketing channels
With the stories captured in 30–60 minute interviews, the next step was to turn that raw footage into usable assets.
“From one interview, we can have a written case study, a video testimonial, and multiple audiograms. It’s very helpful to have multiple assets come out of one interview,” Jill says.
Written case studies
Lever prioritized building out their written case study portfolio. To support that goal, Case Study Buddy distilled each interview into either Snapshot or Narrative assets.
Each asset showcased a unique situation: a customer frustrated with a competitor’s platform, or how they use LeverTRM to grow their team as they scale, or the integrations they use daily.
Audiograms
Next, Lever wanted to focus on live customer soundbites. For this goal, our A/V team built audiograms from choice quotes in the interviews that we had already conducted.
We selected each audiogram to advance a specific Lever goal, such as promoting their platform’s powerful built-in analytics or advocating for its customizability.
Remote video testimonial
We recorded our interview with Coupa as a remote video testimonial. We captured some amazing, candid moments, including a direct quote from Lever’s customer about how they “couldn’t imagine life without LeverTRM.”
We then used the same interview to create three audiograms, and a written case study that tied the whole experience together.
That process would later be repeated for Mastery Charter Schools as well.
Jill Fox (Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Lever)
Results
22 new case study assets delivered in one year
In our first 12 months working together, Case Study Buddy produced over 22 different case study assets for Lever.
“Working with Case Study Buddy enabled us to produce 14 written case studies, multiple audiograms, and a video in the past year. I do not believe that we would have been able to capture these stories as effectively without Case Study Buddy,” Jill says.
Jill also says that Case Study Buddy’s process has proven immensely beneficial—saving time and energy on critical assets—which enables her team to focus elsewhere.
“The partnership has alleviated a lot of time from the marketing team because we can trust that Case Study Buddy will deliver a powerful experience,” Jill says.
Lever now has a library of evidence that their go-to-market team can use to upsell customers and win new business.
We will also help Lever repurpose upcoming interviews into written case studies, audiograms, and video testimonials. Lever plans to use each asset in a variety of ways:
- Post them to their Lever.co Customer Stories page
- Promote them on social media
- Send a copy to the featured customer so that they can also share the assets with their followers
“In working with Case Study Buddy, I have learned to appreciate how powerful case studies can be. They help us showcase the journeys our customers have gone through in detail and see the outcome of leveraging LeverTRM,” Jill says.
Since partnering with Case Study Buddy, views and downloads of the written case studies on Lever’s website increased by 45% year-over-year. But the true value of each customer success story goes even further.
Jill explains, “An existing customer looking to migrate to the latest version of our platform reached out, hoping to see a case study that demonstrated our confidential hiring.”
Jill Fox (Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Lever)