Case studies provide credible stories about your product or service. With a simple process, you can create powerful case studies that you can then use on your website and other marketing materials.

With some key questions and a simple outline, you get powerful case studies that help your business.

It Begins with an Interview

To create a solid case study, it starts with you interviewing your client. You just need a few questions and a bit of curiosity to really know what your customer is thinking. This will give you some great content that you can use for an impressive case study.

Schedule a Time

Pick one of your best clients and schedule a time with them. Let them know that you want to interview them to understand how you are doing. You probably only need 20-40 minutes of their time.

Start Asking Questions

These are the foundational questions to get your customer to start talking.

If you were talking to one of your peers in your industry, how would you describe our company to them?
When you think about our company, what are the two most important things that come to mind?
What are the best things you like about working with our company?

Follow Up Questions

In order to get the full story, you are going to need to get more information by asking drill down questions:

Tell me more about…
Why is it important that…?
How is your company more effective when…?
How has that impacted you personally?
Why is this important to you?
What makes you say that?
What impact does that have on your company?
How did that make you feel?
What do you think about…?

Quantify

Don’t forget to quantify the impact wherever possible, for example:

How much revenue do you think you generated because of… (let them know that they don’t have to be exact – just a ballpark would be great.)
How much money do you think you saved because…

The Format for a Case Study

The hard part of creating a case study is getting the content you want to use in it. Now that you have all the content, you just need to put it together. Here’s a simple case study format you can use:

Background

Provide a brief description of your customer
What was happening that they needed to look for a solution like yours?

The Search

How did they go about looking for a vendor?
Why did they choose you?

Approach

How did your company solve their problem(s)?

Result

What were the results?

What Else Can You Do With This?

Once you have interviewed your client, in addition to creating an awesome case study, there’s a number of other things that you can do with the content you’ve gathered.

You have a lot of content you can use for your website and other marketing materials, including:

Quotes
Testimonials
Email Marketing

Reviews

Online review sites like Google My Business, Facebook Business and Yelp can be a great place to have customers do reviews. They can help you get more clients. It can be difficult to get people to give reviews. However, if you provide them with the copy for the review, it makes it easy for them.

Note:

There’s a great book called The Revenue Growth Habit that has a lot of information on interviewing customers. We used it for inspiring some of this blog.

Powerful Case Studies, Created Simply