Top 5 tips for creating case studies that pack a punch

Are you tired of a portfolio of lackluster case studies that do little or nothing to grab your audience’s attention? If so, there’s no better time to learn how to craft a case study that packs a punch than now. Crafting a stand-out case study goes beyond simply outlining the problem and solution. A well-crafted case study should showcase your organization’s expertise, build credibility with potential customers, and ultimately lead to increased sales. It would be best if you told a story that resonates with your prospective customers. You should also highlight the impact your solution, in which case can be your product or service, has had on a real-world problem.

In this detailed blog, we’ll discuss valuable tips and techniques for crafting a case study that captures attention and converts your leads to loyal customers. Let’s help you take your marketing efforts to the next level. So, get ready, and let’s dive in!

Make Your Case Study Appealing And Pleasing To The Readers’ Eyes

Regardless of how detailed and exciting a case study might be if it’s disorganized and all junked up, no one would give it the attention it would have attracted if it was simple to read. For case studies to produce the anticipated results, they must be scannable and seamless to read. Focus on using formatting elements that can make it more appealing. Use elements like headers, italicized or bold text, and bulleted lists.

Aside from bringing significant SEO values to the case study page, the formatting elements help your audience, especially those who intend to skim through, discover the treasure in the content, and perfectly understand the value you want to deliver. In addition, you should consider including multimedia elements in your written content. Videos, images, and Pdfs can go a long way in making your content engaging. Pictures of the customer, dashboards results, and video interviews can make the case study more compelling.

Consider Including Real Figures

Haven’t you encountered any case study where a marketer stated they doubled traffic for their customer? It left you guessing if it was additional 200, 500, or 1000 visits they were referring to, right? To craft compelling case studies, include direct and clear numbers; don’t leave your audience guessing. Instead of stating that you doubled your customer’s traffic, tell the accurate and specific figures. Your results are what the readers care about. The clearer you reveal it, the higher your chances of converting your audience. Share precisely how much the boosted revenue, traffic, or goals matters to your clients. It helps to make the case study believable and breeds trust for your brand.

If you can, share real proofs on graphs, analytical data, or charts. It would help if you, however, considered that not every person understands analytical technology as you do. Therefore, focus on highlighting vital data. This allows your readers to see how you triggered the client’s growth, from the starting point to the ending point on the chart or graph. This picture proof also helps your readers to envision exactly how your services can trigger their growth, making the case study more powerful.

Share Specific Strategies

It’s alright if you state that you doubled some websites’ traffic or sales, but tell us exactly how you did it. Here is where you subtly market your services by telling us the ones you used and how they led your clients to the anticipated results. Instead of saying, “our marketing strategies resulted in these impacts,” you should rather say, “a six-week campaign on social media utilizing YouTube and Facebook and a seven-week campaign on link building resulted in increased ranking and boosted traffic from 3500 to 18,000 per month”. It would help if you didn’t worry about giving out your secret – your goal is to set up your brand as a premier leader in the industry, which requires that you show you know your onions.

Be Honest

It would be best to be brutally honest with your audience about your fears and doubts about your previous experiences. Be honest about every piece of information you present. Honesty in the context of case studies refers to presenting your facts truthfully and accurately without omitting or exaggerating important details. This is essential because a case study usually informs business decisions; thus, misleading or inaccurate data can cause negative consequences. For instance, a case study that includes exaggerated and false information about a service or product’s success may lead to hopes being dashed or unrealistic expectations for the same service or product. It could result in wasted efforts on projects that are bound to fail.

More so, being honest in your case studies helps you to build trust and credibility with your readers. If your readers later discover that the information you present in your case study is inaccurate, it can damage your brand’s reputation and harm your business. You should give your facts the precise way they are, even if they don’t paint the most flattering or glorifying image of your product or service. When you do this, your case studies become trustworthy, informative, and valuable resources for the audience.

Make It Shareable

You should include a social media sharing button in your case studies so readers can easily forward it to their social media pages. It can help your case study become more visible and reach a larger audience, generating more interest and engagement from your target audience. Make it easy for them to download it as a PDF or other file format they can share via email or any digital channel. In addition, create a shareable summary highlighting the major takeaways and critical points. This summary can then be shared with a link to the full case study for the audience who wants to learn more.

Case studies are an incredibly valuable component to add to eLearning, when they’re well-written, but how do you go about writing one that’s going to be both engaging and effective?

You want the message to be powerful, and you want it to be something that resonates with employees in a way that’s going to have a long-term impact on their behavior and decision-making skills.

So here are the top five tips for creating an outstanding case study to include in your corporate eLearning.

1. Follow a logical flow of information that simultaneously tells a story. As we’ve recently discussed, case studies are a great opportunity to help employees develop soft skills, and show them techniques to approach particular situations within the workplace. With a case study, begin by organizing your thoughts to flow from providing the background needed to assess the problem, and then continue on as you tell a logical, sequential story. The story should really center on laying out a problem, and then solving that problem.
2. Create your case study with relevancy as your top priority. One of the primary ways you engage an adult learner is by creating a sense of relevancy, and that should be apparent in your case study. Before you begin writing or developing any type of case study, identify how it will be relevant to your employees in a specific, day-to-day way.
3. Think outside the box when it comes to the perspective from which the case study is written. Since case studies are great for introducing and developing your employees’ soft skills, use the perspective of the material to create a sense of empathy or understanding on the part of your employee. For example, you may initially approach writing a corporate case study from the point of view of an employee, but instead, to create an emotional connection that can lead to behavioral changes, consider writing it from the perspective of a client. This will help guide the decision-making process of your employees in a way that’s based on the needs of the client. This can be particularly helpful not only in leadership development training, but also eLearning targeted to customer service training.
4. Simple is always best. This tends to be the biggest downfall when writing corporate training case studies—the tendency to want to go overboard with the details. Yes, you want to provide relevant details to create a context for the problem and solution aspect of a case study, but you don’t want to add too many details because it can become confusing and your goals can be lost as employees feel like you’ve gone off on an unrelated tangent. As with most eLearning-based writing, keeping it concise keeps your learner engaged and makes more of an impact.
5. Don’t make the right answer obvious when you’re writing a case study. The goal is to encourage critical thinking and the development of soft and problem-solving skills, so if you spell out the solution right away in a case study, you’re not going to have as much effectiveness or meaningful skill development as is possible. Great case studies don’t necessarily mean your employees make the same decision as the person in the story—instead, case studies really help employees learn how to assess and analyze, and develop their own toolbox of problem-solving skills that can be applied across a variety of situations. Just because your employee doesn’t come to the same conclusion as the individual in the case study doesn’t mean it hasn’t been effective.

For many organizations developing case studies for their corporate eLearning and training, it may be helpful to outsource the written content, although every organization differs and some do have the capabilities to produce it in-house. Regardless of the path you take, when you determine a case study is appropriate for your specific eLearning, you have a tremendous opportunity to add value to your training materials and delve into the decision-making processes of your employees.

Final Thoughts

Creating a case study that skyrockets your marketing results takes time, effort, and careful attention and consideration. By adopting the tips and techniques highlighted above, your case studies will capture your prospective customer’s attention and inspire their action. Implement these tips and watch your brand become the envy of others in its existing market.