Case studies are a great way to communicate in long form some of the successes your business has achieved. They can also outline successes enjoyed by your clients or customers. They’re a powerful tool for building trust and fortifying your brand’s reputation over a broad audience.
In past posts, I’ve referenced them and demonstrated their importance. Today, it’s all about implementation and integration into your content strategy. Here are five ways you can start using case studies to build and fortify crucial relationships and get the attention of influencers and thought leaders in your industry or niche.
1. Write Blog Posts About Your Case Studies
One of the easiest ways to introduce and create curiosity and excitement for a case study is by using the power of your blog to promote it. This works out well for your case study copywriter or copywriting team since the case study itself can be used as the primary source material for the post.
Oh, you are outsourcing at least some of your blog writing this way, right? If not, we need to talk about that in a few minutes…
Let’s just assume for a minute that you are collaborating with a freelancer or copywriting company for blog content. The first thing you want to be sure to do is to be very clear about the parts of the case study you want to spotlight in your post. There should be a simple, clear, problem/solution progression that starts with jabbing all the major pain points, then finishes off with a clear call to action to read and respond to the full study.
2. Create Short Videos Around Your Case Studies
A visual interpretation of the study is also a way to get people’s attention quickly. It also creates a sense of urgency to act. A short video (60 seconds or fewer) that outlines the major pain points and teases with the solution is the best approach in this instance. You don’t need to resolve the problem, just write a clear CTA into the script to read the study and provide an easy way to click through.
Videos work well on social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Linking to them in email blasts is also an effective way to generate a few more click-throughs. Share the content on social media with a call to action to read the study. By the way, this also works well for blog content. I’ll take it one step further still: Split test promoting video and blog content on social media and see which results in more overall clicks or conversions (whatever the goal of your case study may be).
3. Include Case Studies on Your Landing and Sales Pages
Speaking of conversions, case studies are often the thing that helps move people along on the buyer’s journey. They can be a huge motivator for the fence-sitters and skeptics, and they provide the social proofs that people look for when deciding to buy from, contract with, or invest in your business.
The case study can be featured in its entirety or just referenced and linked. The former is a good idea for content like long-form sales letters (LFSLs), while the latter works better on landing pages and emails.
4. Promote Your Case Studies on Social Media
I alluded to this above, so I’ll just add a few simple points here. Building excitement over a case study is a challenge, but social media provides the right environment for doing just that. Start by creating posts with compelling visuals. Don’t use stock images if they can possibly be avoided. Instead, provide a custom graphic of some kind that spotlights your brand and come up with one tight, pointed phrase that can get people to stop scrolling and pay attention.
Engage with your audience in real time. This alone will generate far more of a buzz than a post alone. Let’s take it even a step further: Start posting about your case study beforehand. Don’t just tell people, “Hey we’ve got this cool case study dropping at 5:00,” because, let’s be real – no one is going to care. Instead, lead with a few posts about some of the pain points associated with the study and get your followers’ minds fixed on those problems and their possible solutions. If you are targeting and attracting the right audience, the people who see those posts are likely to see enough points of relatability in them to want to learn more.
5. Link to Case Studies in Your Emails
In all honesty, this is probably the most effective content tool you have for promoting case studies. People who opt in to email lists typically enjoy written content. Otherwise, why would they even bother signing up for emails from you?
You can take advantage of this by offering them something more substantive to read. If they’re already interested in your brand, they’re probably also interested in getting an inside look into some of your company’s accomplishments. They might also want some tangible proof that you can deliver on what you promise.
Overall, case studies lend themselves well to most parts of your content strategy. Look for unique ways to use them to your advantage and capture the attention of audience members who are likely to respond favorably to them. If you’ve gotten this far and still can’t figure out how to make it work, contact us.
BeezContent works with a number of talented staff and freelance writers to produce quality content that gets results. Not sure how to integrate case studies into your content? Need a good one written right away? That’s something we should talk about today…
