If you’ve read our previous blog post about whether or not you should add case studies to your website (spoiler alert – we’re big advocates), then we hope you’re on board with the idea now too.
This follow-up post is a deeper dive into the types of case studies that you might like to consider.
Before we launch into the different styles that you may decide to incorporate, it should go without saying, but always check to see if the client or customer is happy to be involved. If a case study is written well, and well-optimised it may attract the attention of a journalist or thought leader, who may share it on social media and before you know it, the case study has been amplified around an industry. In most scenarios, this would be great news but not if you’re on the receiving end of a call from an unsuspecting client.
It’s obviously just polite to check in anyway and it also shows that you’re proud of your product or service and want to shout about it.
What about client privacy?
Knowing how much to reveal about a client, whether they are a business or an individual, will vary. A business client may on the one hand want the publicity, especially if they have invested in something that will ultimately improve the way they do things. However, another business client may want confidentiality as they may be reluctant to share their news with competitors.
Secondly, there is also personal privacy to consider. Naming and locating an individual can sometimes be unhelpful if they are in the public eye, or in doing so you compromise their security or that of their home or family.
What you reveal and what you don’t will be dependent on the industry but regardless of this, it must be real and must include sufficient information to come across to others as such. If it is fabricated, it is simply a hypothetical ‘example’ and not a case study. However, it’s fine to omit full names or surnames to protect people: Mrs H from Basildon, HR Director at XYZ, Stan from ABC Builders are all adequate references.
It can also be helpful to ask a case study to complete a consent form which details the ways in which they are happy for their content to be used and the manner in which they would like to be referred to.
Case study
A traditional case study will explain who supplied what to whom, why, when, features, benefits and what issues were overcome.
It will be written from the supplier’s perspective although care should be given not to overuse superlatives when describing the supplier’s ‘amazing’ and ‘industry-leading’ work. Generally speaking, case studies are edited highlights of a supplier’s work rather than written up after each and every project.
Application stories
An application story is often the term used in B2B PR for certain types of case studies – particularly those in the building trades. It is usually used when a product is applied to a certain situation. This might be a boiler company being chosen to supply a heating system to a community centre or a flooring company supplying a bespoke design to a dance studio.
These are usually written from the business’s point of view in the same way that a case study would be. Whether a case study is an application story or just a normal B2B case study matters not but it’s good to highlight how the supply of the product or service has made a tangible difference to the client.
Testimonial
A testimonial differs from a case study in that it is written from the customer’s angle. As well as explaining the who, what, why, where and when, it means someone is waxing lyrical about the supplier rather than the supplier themselves. This may include insights into why they were selected, how easy they were to deal with, how competent they were and how the outcome met their expectations.
The obvious benefit is the third-party endorsement but case studies can also cement a longer-term relationship between the two parties as well, which could potentially drive future business.
Testimonials tend to be written in the first person (I, me) but it’s not uncommon for the supplier to interview the client, do the write-up themselves and then get sign-off before putting the content live.
Quotes
Client quotes are a succinct form of a case study that can be easily added to a website. They are a short-form case study if you like, and enable a supplier to add credibility without too much effort. In this short form, it is usually the norm for the client to write their own quote and email it to the supplier for use but it’s not uncommon for the supplier to draft the quote either – as long as they ask the client for permission to use it.
While this post mainly concentrates on adding case studies to a website in the written form, they can take many forms. For example, a longer video case study for YouTube, shorter for TikTok, images and videos for Instagram and Facebook.
Case studies are also used in the media, which we’ll be covering in the next post.
SEO considerations
Case studies allow a business to optimise for some longer-tail keywords and thus generate more traffic. Bear in mind that no-one will be searching for ‘Mrs Smith’s new kitchen in Hull’, but should Mrs Smith have chosen a ‘midnight blue kitchen with granite worktops’, there might just be some search volume around the latter.
Google likes to see fresh content being regularly added to a website so creating new case studies also ticks this box.
Case studies are often the last thing on any business owner’s mind but they are worth their weight in gold and definitely something that should be pursued for a number of different but equally valid reasons.
