Best 7 Steps To Write An Effective Case Study
What is the purpose of a B2B case study? Simply put, a B2B case study helps users understand how as a business, you can solve their pain points as you have done for other clients.
As part of your content marketing activities, B2B case studies are content that must feature on your website to give your audience a credible understanding of your problem-solving capabilities. The audience that actually goes on to read your case studies is already in the middle or bottom of your sales funnel, just a tad bit away from making a decision to purchase.
Your website content determines and drives the decision-making process of an audience and what better way to do this than by giving them a deep glimpse of your work? While online reviews or testimonials are one way of doing it, B2B case studies take your content marketing success levels to a higher tier.
7 Steps To Write A B2B Case Study And Share Your Story With The World:
1. Introduction
In order to give a brief about who you helped find a solution for a problem, a B2B case study must ideally have an introduction about the client you partnered with. List out the 5Ws (who, what, when, why, where) and 1H (how) of their brand and a gist of what you accomplished for them to drive the results they were looking for. Including the client’s years of business, brand value and industry gives a clear idea of how interesting your case study will turn out in the next few paragraphs.
2. Challenges
Your customer has approached you because they have pain points, they are unable to solve on their own. This is where you will have to list down all the challenges they faced in the initial days of your interaction. Introduce the challenge by talking about what impact this problem had on their business.
- The problem statement gives the reader an idea about what the business tried to accomplish but failed to for taking wrong or misguided decisions.
- How long did the problem exist before you entered the scene?
- Talk about the end user while you mention the challenges because this is where your reader will see himself/herself as the protagonist of your story.
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3. Wants
You would want to highlight the end goal of your customer.
- What is it that the client wanted to achieve by opting for your solution?
- Why is it that they wanted a solution to accomplish their end goal in the first place?
These are the questions you would need to answer while you get down to writing what your client wanted.
4. Needs
Didn’t we just cover that, you wonder? Wants and needs are often misunderstood to be the same but keep in mind that they are different and accordingly draft your customer’s wants for your case study. Needs are what help you achieve the wants. List down the points that qualify as needs that your client had in mind to fulfil their wants.
5. Your Audit
One of the most important points of your B2B case study is the audit. This is where you tap and identify the problem your client is facing because they are unable to achieve their wants. You conduct the audit to understand why are they facing the challenges you mentioned above.
List out the audits in various areas of their functionalities and operations to give your reader a brief on what you spotted before proposing solutions.
6. Solution
This is the part that is going to be the centre of your readers’ focus. They have already opened this case study keeping in mind that their problems may be similar and are looking for a solution. How you have solved the problem for another client is important for them to understand. This is where you show all your technical expertise in helping them overcome their challenges. What did you do, why did you do it, where did you do it, when did you do it and how did you do it? They want it all. Give it to them through your case study. Draw comparisons and take the liberty to play around with the flow.
7. Impact
Your solutions need backing and that’s what impact does. Impacts can be highlighted with numbers or results that your solutions have driven. How did that impact come about? Your B2B case study needs to have a good reference of results that you were a major contributor for to show your reader that you are the right choice to help them undertake the task of helping them solve their challenges.
Conclusion
Ideally, your impact in the case study does the job but it may abruptly end for some if it doesn’t have a conclusion. This could be a repeat of what you spoke about in the introduction about solving your customer’s problems and driving a particular result.
Now that a conclusion is stressed upon, this blog has one as well. It is recommended that you stick to a word limit of 1000 for a B2B case study. Case study write-ups, when stretched, become too heavy for readers to fathom and absorb information. Keep it simple and easy to understand and you will do your business a big favour!
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