You’ve done a great job satisfying your customer’s needs and helping them accomplish their own business goals. Surely, you don’t want all that hard work to go unnoticed. But, what’s the best way to show to the world how valuable your services are? A case study.
Learn how to showcase your company’s success using compelling case studies. Plus, we’ve included 40+ examples to give you some awesome case study template ideas.
Did you know that Neil Patel increased lead capture by 500% using LeadQuizzes
What is a Case Study?
In the context of marketing, Top Rank Blog defines a case study as “an analysis of a project, campaign or company that identifies a situation, recommended solutions, implementation actions and identification of those factors that contributed to failure or success.”
According to Content Marketing Institute, case studies are the 5th most popular marketing technique, right after social media, e-newsletters, blogs, and website articles. In fact, 63% of marketers think that a case study is an effective marketing strategy.
Case studies are real-life examples that show the value of your product or service. They are also used to further promote your services and get you even more customers. What we like the most about case studies is that they are very effective when it comes to turning your ideal potential customers into actual customers.
Why are Case Studies so Effective?
Case studies are especially effective for converting customers sitting on the fence. You wouldn’t believe it how often the answer to the question “Why did you choose to work with us?” is “I was impressed by your case studies” or “I saw you helped someone in my industry so I figure you can help us too”. But what makes case studies so effective?
Case studies don’t tell, they show. For example, telling you that you can generate lots of leads using LeadQuizzes is fine. You may believe it, but you don’t have to. But, showing you how GothRider, an e-commerce company similar to yours, profitably generated 75,813 leads using LeadQuizzes leaves a much stronger and more credible impression. Doesn’t it?
Before we provide you with some actual case study template ideas, let us briefly guide you through the preparation stage of writing a case study.
Behind the Scenes: The Preparation Stage
Preparing a quality case study eventually comes down to obtaining all the necessary information from your company and your client or customer (along with the permission to publish it) and then showcasing it in a format that appeals to your customers.
Identify the Target Audience – Appeal to Your Ideal Customer
A compelling case study must appeal to your ideal customer. In order to learn what appeals to your customers and how to tailor your content to their needs, you’ll have to do some in-depth research and create a buyer persona. What’s a buyer persona?
In a nutshell, a buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer. It represents your target customers’ behavior and preferences when interacting with your online business. Creating your own buyer persona is crucial. In fact, NetProspex case study shows that using buyer personas can lead to a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.
Moreover, Bourbon and Boots generated 35,752 leads and doubled their sales in only 3 weeks. Their secret? They based their online quizzes on buyer personas, instead of creating sales-focused quizzes.
Once you know who your ideal customer is, you have to show them that you’re comfortable in their industry, know its specific needs and, most importantly, know how to deliver results in the selected industry. Creating a great case study is the way to do it (while our case study template ideas make it a lot easier).
Identify the Subject of Your Case Study
Simply told, you have to decide who or what is your case study going to be about. Ideally, it will be some of the clients or customers who have seen a dramatic result after using your product or services.
When opting for a case study subject, you should have the desired outcome of your case study in mind. In most cases, you do not write a case study just to showcase your success – you do it to get even more clients.
We’ve already shown you how to choose your target audience above. It’s time to apply that knowledge. For example, if your buyer persona is somebody from the automotive industry, make a case study about car parts manufacturers. If it’s somebody in the education sector, create case studies about university students. If it’s… well, you get the gist.
Get Your Subject on Board
Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes
You could simply send out an email asking for permission. If you plan on doing several case studies, it might be a good idea to have a pre-written template that you can later adjust. This will save you some time in the process. Here is a CoSchedule’s template you could use as a starting point (later on in the text we’re going to give you some actual case study template ideas as well):
Hi [Name of person],
Our team is conducting a case study, and we would love to tell the story of [company]. Would you be interested in working with us to create a case study around the use of our product?
Here’s a description of our process and what we would need from you:
What we’d like from you:
High-resolution company logo (basically as big as possible)
High-resolution images of your team, company office, etc – stories with photos of your team will drive more traffic (people like seeing that there are humans behind a story)
Stats: before [Company] / after [Company]
What does the process look like?
1 [phone/video call/coffee] interview with [person].Our team will then take your interview and build a story out of it.
2-3 email conversations may be necessary to gather extra information.
Once the final draft is complete – we’ll send it over to your team for review.
We’ll then finalize the story, create a landing page, and build a campaign around it.
Once live we’ll share the final story with you (for your marketing efforts)
Average Turnaround Time: 1 month (subject to change based on response times and edits).
What’s in it for you?
Perk One
Perk Two
Perk Three
Perk Four
Perk Five
Best regards,
[SIGNATURE]
Conduct Interviews
Once you get the necessary permissions, it’s time to draft your interview questions. It’s critical that you obtain all the necessary information in order to write a great study, so here are some of the things you could ask your subject:
- Getting to know your subject (basic questions about their company and their experience with your product/service)
- The problems or challenges they were experiencing (before they turned to your company for a solution)
- Why did they choose your company to help them solve those problems?
- How does your solution solve their problems (if it does)?
- How did they implement it?
- What were the results of the implementation? Has there been any progress?
These are some of the things you’d generally want to know when writing a case study, but you could break them into even more detail, to make sure you get all the relevant information.
Writing a Case Study (Template)
The Structure of a Case Study
Headline
Every piece of content (case study not being an exception) starts with a quality headline. Some studies show that 8 out of 10 people will read the headline but only 2 out of 10 will read the entire thing. What should a good case study headline be like? Ideally, it should…
- Name the subject of the case study
- Explain what was done
- Present the result
Executive Summary
This is usually a paragraph-long section that explains the background story of your subject (client or customer). It should be short and concise and could include some statistics that showcase the success of your subject.
About
An introduction to your client or company. Basically, it’s the data you can pull from their website or LinkedIn profile.
Challenges/Problems
This is the ‘before’ section of your case study. Here, you should elaborate on your client/customer’s situation prior to turning to your company for assistance. You should also briefly outline the results they expected to achieve by using your services.
Credit: Hubspot
How You Helped (Solution)
This section gives you an opportunity to describe how your product or service helped solve their problems or address the challenges they faced.
Progress/Results
What effect did your product or service have on their business? Here, you should emphasize the change in their business since they started using your services. This is the ‘after’ section of your case study. Make sure to support the results with some actual numbers and visuals.
Extra Tip #1 – Numbers, Numbers, Numbers
Sometimes numbers speak louder than words.
Claiming in your study that you’ve tripled your customer’s traffic doesn’t have to be an impressive achievement at all. For example, if the traffic was 100 visits and now is 300. But, if their visits had gone from 170,000 to 570,000, now that’s something.
So, instead of just saying you’ve tripled their traffic, it’s much more effective to use real numbers to support that (accompanied by graphs or any other proof that you might have).
Extra Tip #2 – Wrap it in an Easy to Read Format
Keep in mind that most people just hate looking at huge chunks of text. So, make sure to apply all those formatting elements that you use with other types of content, such as articles and blog posts. This includes but is not limited to headers, images, and bulleted lists. But, why not take it a step further?
While some customers still enjoy reading, many others would probably prefer a graphical, audio, or video presentation of your case study. So, try turning your old-fashioned text-based case study into an infographic, a podcast (we at LeadQuizzes are especially fond of podcasts), or a YouTube video. Make it as visual as possible by including graphs, logos, and photos. Take a look at this infographic case study from KISSmetrics, for example:
Source: KISSmetrics
Promoting Your Case Study
After you’ve completed your case study (and your client’s thrilled with it), it’s time for all that hard work to pay off. It’ll all be in vain if you don’t get it out for the world to feast their eyes on your success. Some of the ways to promote your case study include:
- Have a dedicated case studies page on your website
- Including the case study in your email campaigns
- Starting a social media campaign
The great thing about case studies is that they can be easily pinned to any piece of content and there are at least 15 ways of using case studies in your marketing strategy. As promised at the beginning, you’ll find 40 case study template ideas down below, including case studies involving some of the greatest companies in the world. We hope these will help you find inspiration for your own case study.
40 Awesome Case Study Template Ideas
- Instagram – “Most Instagrammed Locations” Case Study Template
- Dell – Dell Nurture: Utilizing automation to create personalized customer experiences
- Adobe – RBS, earning customer trust
- Adobe – Adobe raises brand awareness with LinkedIn Sponsored Content
- LinkedIn – Service Brands increasing brand awareness with LinkedIn company pages
- Google Analytics Premium – Optimizely sees results with funnel-stage remarketing
- American National – American National Case Study Template
- Patagonia – Patagonia Case Study Template
- Fit Father Project – How this health and weight loss business generated over 15,000 leads and created a profitable and scalable sales funnel using LeadQuizzes
- Real Madrid FC – Connecting with 500 million passionate fans worldwide
- Neil Patel – How they increased their website lead capture by 500% using LeadQuizzes
- CS2 Compliance – How CS2 Is Succeeding With Curata Template
- UStream – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Case Study Template
- Budweiser – Budweiser Influencer Marketing Case Study Template
- Roberts and Durkee – Case Study: How One Company’s Thought-Leadership Content Is Driving New Business, Exposure
- Bourbon and Boots – How this e-commerce business generated 35,752 leads and doubled their sales in 3 weeks
- Marvel Origins – “Marvel Origins” Campaign Case Study Template
- Groupon – For effective video ads, look beyond demographics to behavior and context
- Jon Benson – How this business profitably generated 110,192 leads selling weight-loss supplements using LeadQuizzes
- Lime-a-Rita – 3 tips for making effective, hyper-relevant video ads at scale
- Annmarie Gianni Skin Care – How Annmarie used LeadQuizzes to generate $200,000 in new sales and increase their leads by 20,258 people in only 2 months
- L’Oreal – Case Analysis: L’Oreal Paris
- Dr. Tami Meraglia – How Dr. Tami Meraglia used LeadQuizzes to build her email list by 34,657 people in 6 months and reduced her cost per lead to $0.19
- Neutrogena – Mobile case study: Neutrogena sun activated advertising
- Ryver – B2B Marketing: How team communication product Ryver started a Twitter war with Slack fans to drive a 20% increase in users
- Malwarebytes – Imperial College gives malware a failing grade
- Continental Office – B2B Marketing: Continental Office’s customer-first brand and website redesign increased traffic 103%
- Weebly – How Weebly Saved “a Million” Hours on Content Production and Achieved a 3X ROI
- BrightEdge – Stanley Doubles Traffic and Revenue with Effective Site Migration using BrightEdge
- Fender Musical Instruments – Fender Musical Instruments | American Standard Case Study Template
- Fuji Xerox – Fuji Xerox Australia Business Equipment Case Study Template
- Intel – How Intel Used SimpleReach’s Innovative Distribution Platform to Drive More Content Marketing Efficiencies
- Bitly – How One E-commerce Brand Solved The OmniChannel Challenge With Bit.ly Campaigns
- Cavallo Horse and Rider – How they used LeadQuizzes to build their email list by 20,333 in 4 months at a cost per lead of only $0.22
- Levi’s – Reclaiming the identity of a brand: A Levi’s case study
- Fab – Fab Uses A/B Test to Improve Customer Shopping Experience
Did you know that Neil Patel increased lead capture by 500% using LeadQuizzes