You've Created A Great Case Study, Now What?

By Wendy Jacobson, Owner of Incredible Content

Chief Editor’s Note. For B2B marketers, the case study is one of the most misunderstood and underused assets in the content marketer’s toolbox. This is the third in a series of articles from Wendy Jacobson, a content marketing master, intended to help B2B organizations and their marketing teams create case studies that better engage prospects.

Congratulations! You worked hard on creating your case study which demonstrates how you helped a happy customer overcome a challenge. You’re particularly thrilled because it tells a nice story that taps into the emotions of the reader, and you are looking forward to your customers and prospects seeing it. But how do you make that happen?

As with any type of content, creating it is simply the first step. Just as important is the next step: distribution, and not simply posting it to your website and moving on, but really thinking about and planning how to reuse and repurpose a single piece of content.

Squeeze as much juice as you can

You spent a lot of time pulling together the items needed for your case study, including:

• Talking to the customer to get their input
• Wring the case study, framing it as a story
• Coming up with an enticing headline and call to action
• Putting it all together

While the temptation may be to simply post it to your website and call it a day, resist that urge and realize there are plenty of other ways to use it. Let’s discuss some:

1. Sales Tool –

Case studies provide social proof, which is very powerful. Your prospects want to know how you can help them, and if possible, they’d like to hear it from someone they relate to, such as a like-minded customer. Case studies do that. Sure, your salespeople can tell their prospects how awesome you are, but it’s way more credible if your happy customer – who may be your prospect’s competition – does if for them.

Create a nice PDF of your case study that your salespeople can either send their prospects electronically, or print out and leave behind after a meeting

2.  Email Newsletter –

Send that case study to everyone on your email list as part of your email newsletter. When you do, you can do one of two things:

• Include the entire case study in the body of your email
• Give a quick intro + summary of the case study with a link to your site for your audience to see it in its entirety

There is no right or wrong method; it all depends on your preference, just as long as you send it.

3. Create a Lead Magnet –

Your case study can help you collect email addresses of people who want to hear from you by using it as a lead magnet.

To do this, you need to create a compelling landing page that tells the audience in general terms what the case study is about, why they want access to it, and how it will help them. NOTE: You want to make it enticing enough that they’ll exchange their email for it, but you don’t want to give too much away. Some ways to do this include:

• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): Find out how a NAME OF INDUSTRY company solved COMMON CHALLENGE in TIME FRAME and how you can, too (Find out how a top healthcare company reduced its collections period from 90 days to 30 days and how you can, too)
• Exclusivity: Our new case study and special offer is available for TIME FRAME (If you request our case study within the next 7 days, you’ll receive a free consultation)
• Curiosity: Ever wonder how COMPANY solves PROBLEM?

Those are a few ideas but if you notice they all have one thing in common: they create some sort of urgency or desire to want to learn more, which will compel your reader to click on the link and download the case study.

4. Social Media Fodder –

Create social media posts from the content of your case study. You can provide a brief snapshot of what the case study is about or the challenge your customer faced and include a link to it, or use call-outs from the case study as the verbiage for your posts.

As there is no right or wrong way to do this, you can experiment with different ways in how you share your case study.

5. Create a Blog Post –

Another way you can repurpose your case study is to turn it into a blog post. Here, you are adding some commentary and perhaps changing up the format a bit so that is reads differently than the case study, but it’s a relatively easy and efficient way to take your content and create something else with it.

Just as there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one way to reuse and repurpose a case study. Experiment with the options above that resonate with you and get as much mileage as you can from your case study.

Her company name, Incredible Content speaks specifically to how she views content: as a vehicle for businesses to build and maintain their credibility. Over the years, Wendy has helped businesses in the healthcare, wellness, food and technology industries foster their credibility via content such as articles, emails, web content and case studies.

Wendy has always loved to write and has a BA in History and English from The George Washington University. She lives in Minneapolis and when not working, she enjoys spending time with her husband, two teenage kids and dog. She also likes to jump rope, bike, hike or do just about anything outside.

Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn, visit her website, incrediblecontent.net and subscribe to her newsletter that shares 3 quick and easy tips to level-up your content each Tuesday.