Everyone loves a good story, especially when there’s a happy ending.
Which is exactly what a good case study is. The story of our protagonist, the client, who encountered the evil problem, and with the help of the hero, your company, overcame every obstacle to become victorious & successful and everyone lived happily ever after.
A case study is a powerful business building tool because it engages your audience and gives them a complete picture of your business.
Nuts and Bolts of Case Studies
A great case study will:
- Introduce the client– your visitors want to know who you’ve helped in the past. What industry are they in. Little details paint a great picture. Choosing the right clients (aka your ideal clients) will help you generate future business.
- Describe a challenge they are facing with emotional detail– You want your visitors to know in detail the struggles you have helped your clients overcome. Problems are often common so what you help one client with will often be a similar challenge other are facing. And as with all copywriting, there are several emotional appeals that will move your prospective clients to action. Emotions like fear of loss can be powerful motivators in your descriptions.
- Talk about the specific strategies used to solve that challenge– You don’t have to give away your “secret sauce,” but the more you can describe how your solutions impacted your clients, the more credibility you accumulate.
- And conclude with the tangible results of the project– Are there tangible results from your services? Increase in sales, analytics data, if you have any figures on how you have helped you clients, the more concrete and tangible results you can show, the better.
Besides those details, you are trying to answer these questions:
– Is this person credible?
– Have they gotten results?
– Is their product or service what I am looking for?
– How does it all work?
The ulitmate goal of the case study is for your prospects to choose you to do business with. But along the way you are giving them everything they need to know about your company, your ideal client, the problem scenarios they face, and your process for working.
Some websites don’t have all the pages that we have been working on in this Website Content Series. The only pages they highlight are Case Studies. But if you have put the effort into creating the pages we have talked about, the powerful content on your other pages is now paying off dividends throughout your website.
A Sample Case Study from My Website:
Maunalani Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is one of the top Nursing Centers in Hawaii and has been ranked by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a 5-Star skilled nursing facility based on ratings in health inspections, nurse staffing, and measures in medical quality of care.
But you would not know it by their online presence. In their sixty-four years of existance at that time, they had never had a website of their own. Their only online search result was a directory website filled with advertisements. Anyone actually making it to that website would believe Maunalani was a cheap, substandard operation….
Read the full Case Study here…
This Week’s Weekend Website Project
Think back on working with one of your ideal clients. Make some notes about that project and write out a Case Study.
What has been your experience with Case Studies?
Have they converted your prospects to clients? Let me know if the comments.
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