Often as part of our PR activities, our clients employ our help in developing case studies of successful product implementations with their products. We’ve worked closely with Toyota Motorsport and Continuum Dynamics, Inc. on behalf of Tecplot, Inc., and several prominent universities on behalf of Serials Solutions, among others.
Over that time, we’ve worked our way through processes that have worked well, and those that didn’t. Therefore, we thought we would share with you a few tips that have helped us succeed in developing strong case studies that highlight the great work of our clients.
- Set-up Customer Interviews – Whether it’s by phone or by e-mail, conducting an interview with your client’s customers will help you get your head around their unique implementation and challenges, and offers an easy way to ask questions. Before you end the interview, make sure to reiterate the key points back to the customer and ask them if there is anything important that you haven’t already asked about. For phone interviews, we also recommend recording the calls in order to easily refer back to the discussion, and pull out sound bites for the creation of the case study.
- Create a Case Study Format – Before you launch into the customer interview, take a few minutes to visualize the final case study. How will you break up the sections? Do you want to focus on the challenge, the solution or the metrics? This will be very useful as you move on to step three and develop your questionnaire.
- Develop a Questionnaire – By developing a questionnaire prior to your customer interviews, you’ll ensure that you have thought through the appropriate angles and all the information you need to gather ahead of time. Ultimately, you’ll want to limit the amount of time spent going back and forth to the customer to address “forgotten” questions after the fact.
- Outline the Case Study – After you have interviewed the customer, it is helpful to go back to your case study format and outline the information you just gathered. Do you have everything you need to begin writing? It’s a good idea to have a clear direction in your head, before you put your creative pen to paper to ensure you are utilizing your client’s time in an efficient manner. In several cases, we have even delivered the outline to our client prior to writing, in order to guarantee we are taking the appropriate direction.
- Get Creative – Often the words “case study” can seem a bit business-like. While case studies are often a sales and marketing tool that help companies demonstrate their value, don’t forget that the people reading them enjoy creativity. While you are writing, be sure to include all the elements of a good story: plot, scene, characters, climax and conclusion.
While not every company chooses to develop case studies, companies that do can ensure a smooth development process if they are willing to outline the necessary steps ahead of time. Just as in every public relations or marketing strategy, the preparation can be just as important as the final product.
Have you successfully used case studies in your organization? We would love to hear your tips or best practices around the creation of these useful documents. Just leave us a comment below.
Additionally, if you need help with strategies around leveraging case studies to generate coverage in vertical publications, check out our post on the topic.