Case studies are the most requested and least read piece of marketing material most businesses own. The standard format is a page of context, a paragraph of what was done, and a percentage nobody can verify, and prospects have learned to skim past all of it.
Case study writing improves considerably once you accept what the reader is doing. They are checking whether you have solved a problem that resembles theirs, and everything else is in the way.
Lead with the situation, not the client
A prospect recognises themselves in a problem rather than in a company profile. Opening with the client’s founding date and sector means the reader has to work out whether this is relevant to them, and most will not bother.
Open with the situation instead. A business losing enquiries because nobody answered the phone after five is instantly recognisable to anyone with the same problem, whatever industry they are in.
Say what you actually did
Most case studies are vague about the work, either to protect methodology or because whoever wrote it was not close to the project. That vagueness is exactly what makes them unpersuasive, because the reader is trying to judge competence.
- The specific decisions taken, including ones that turned out to be wrong.
- What you tried first that did not work, which is more credible than a clean narrative.
- How long it took, honestly, including the slow parts.
- What the client had to do, since a prospect is assessing their own effort as well as yours.
The third item does more for trust than any result. A case study that admits the first two months produced nothing reads as an account of real work rather than a sales document.
The case studies that generate enquiries are the ones that describe a false start. It is the detail that convinces a reader they are looking at something that actually happened.
Elena Rossi, Senior Content Lead, Media @ Marsons
When you cannot publish numbers
Plenty of clients will not allow revenue or performance figures to be published, and inventing or estimating them is not an option. That constraint is workable rather than fatal.
Describe the change qualitatively and precisely: what the client could do afterwards that they could not before, what stopped happening, what they now spend their time on. A specific operational change is more persuasive to a careful reader than an unverifiable percentage anyway.
Never invent or estimate a result
A figure that cannot be substantiated is a liability, and the people most likely to ask about it are the ones closest to buying. If a number cannot be published or evidenced, leave it out entirely rather than softening it into something vague enough to seem safe.
Getting the client to agree
The approval problem is usually solved by asking at the right moment and asking for less. Immediately after a good result is the point of maximum goodwill, and it is when people say yes.
Offer options: full name and figures, name without figures, or an anonymised version describing the sector and size. Most clients who refuse the first will accept the third, and an anonymised case study with real detail is far better than nothing.
Keep it short and scannable
Two hundred words with headings beats a thousand words of narrative. Readers scan for the situation, the approach and the outcome, and a wall of prose hides all three.
Include a photograph of the actual work or the actual people where you can. A case study illustrated with stock imagery undercuts the specificity everything else in it was trying to establish.
Put them where the decision happens
Case studies buried in their own section get read by almost nobody. The relevant one belongs on the service page it relates to, next to the explanation of the work, where the doubt it answers is actually forming.
A short summary on the service page linking to the full version works well. That way the proof reaches the people reading about the service rather than only the ones who went looking for evidence. The digital marketing hub covers how the pages fit together.
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