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Unlocking the Power of Case Studies in B2B Marketing with Joel Klettke
217 Plays10 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans talks to Joel Klettke about the significance and strategic use of case studies in B2B marketing.
Key topics include the inception of Joel's company, Case Study Buddy, and its unique approach to crafting case studies.
We delve into the challenges and potential of case studies, emphasizing storytelling, strategy, and the integration of various marketing elements.
We also talk about tactics for leveraging case studies in marketing campaigns and sales, the importance of customer stories, and methods for extracting value from case studies.
Joel shares insights on customer intelligence gathering, the identification of ideal case study candidates, and measuring the ROI of case studies.
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Transcript
Introduction to Case Studies in Marketing
00:00:09
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Case studies are valuable assets within the marketing and sales toolkit. They showcase a product or services results and build trust with potential customers. But truth be told, case studies often don't get the attention or love that they deserve. They're seen as second-class citizens. To shed light on the power of case studies and how to leverage them, I'm excited about my conversation with Joel Kletke.
00:00:38
Speaker
Joel founded Case Study Buddy, a company that specializes in helping mid-sized enterprise B2B companies create case studies and video testimonials.
00:00:47
Speaker
With an eye for storytelling and a deep understanding of the B2B marketing landscape, Joel has embraced case studies and transformed them into compelling narratives that drive sales and engagement. He's a thought leader in the field, known for his insights into how businesses can strategically use these stories to enhance their brand credibility, engage their target audiences and drive ROI.
The Founding of Case Study Buddy
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dig in.
00:01:13
Speaker
One thing I will add about Joel is that he is a fellow Canadian, something I didn't realize until we connected. It's always good to be talking to someone north of the border. We've got that hardened ability to weather the snow and stay friendly even in the midst of all that. So it's good. Why don't we start by.
00:01:32
Speaker
talking about Case Study Buddy and what inspired you to start it. I'd like to get some insight in how Case Study Buddy's approach to creating case studies differ from traditional methods.
00:01:46
Speaker
My background, I started my digital career in SEO. I was working at an agency left there to go into freelance content writing. From there, I transitioned into conversion copywriting and it was on the back of a copywriting project. I had just finished a project for WP Engine and someone on their board said, hey, there's this little company I advise.
00:02:04
Speaker
they need a case study, is that something you do? Those moments where it's for you, I do that for sure. I figure it out. Absolutely. I'll take a crack at it. I'll give it a foolproof price point and give it a go. And in the course of doing that project, my eyes were opened really both to the potential and to the challenges of these assets.
The Unique Approach of Case Study Buddy
00:02:22
Speaker
The first thing I realized was, hey, there are a lot of moving parts to this. You have to be good at
00:02:27
Speaker
interviewing, coordinating, project management, storytelling, strategy. It all comes together in these assets, at least if you want to do them. And that's quite a bit to manage and think about. The other thing that occurred to me was just the real need and power of these things. For this small company, starting to get some stories under its belt in terms of how it served its ideal clients, how it differentiated to the market, their sales team was salivating with the potential of being able to deploy this and have something tangible
00:02:55
Speaker
to point to, and the more that I looked around the B2B landscape, the more I realized like every company of every size benefits from having these, but prompted me to ask, why don't I see more of them? And I started to get answers as I did it because they're hard to do, because there's all these moving parts, because you're reliant on a third party to do them. So in doing that project, it made me wonder, surely someone's cracked the code on this. Someone must have put together a company that just does this and focuses in on this and really takes care of this process from end to end.
00:03:25
Speaker
So I turned to Google and it was a wasteland. There was the odd agency that had this as an adjacent service to what they did, the odd freelancer who again made it one of the many formats that they did. There was one person, Casey Hibbert, who had really planted the flag and she'd said, this is my focus, but one person can't serve a whole market.
The Role of Collaboration in Case Studies
00:03:44
Speaker
That's where the idea came from is what if I built a team? What if I operationalize this? What if I could have specialists in these different disciplines and really do this well? And so that ties into second part of your question, which is what differs, right? How do we approach it a little bit differently? I think the first thing is we at this point, we've gone beyond just product ties, storytelling.
00:04:04
Speaker
To really try to help teams get their internal ducks in a row when it comes to getting these done. Case studies are a team sport. You need the support of sales and CSMs who usually have the context and the relationship. You need the support of leadership to give the resources and time to do it. You need the support of marketing to have a vision for where in the landscape of sales, enablement, and marketing this is going to fit.
00:04:25
Speaker
and they all need to get along and talk to each other, which they normally don't. So we start with the internal relationships, the SOP, but then in terms of the actual delivery, it's that really turnkey aspect. This is all we focus on. We can do it with a level of strategy and velocity that most internal teams just don't have the novelty of time or the ability to prioritize. We can look at who is this targeted towards? Where does this fit in the ecosystem? What is the messaging of this? What is the action we want people to take? And then beyond that,
00:04:53
Speaker
because we know where it's going to live in the marketing ecosystem of things, we can then repurpose that into multiple pieces of collateral all at once, rather than dripping it out and doing, oh, we did an interview here and a survey there, and now we have to approach them again for a video. Now we're thinking about tying this into a campaign, we can come at it holistically. And I think that's really the big difference that
00:05:11
Speaker
sets us apart and allows us to be really effective for clients. I have a business coach who advocates that the riches are in the niches and that the more that you specialize, the better you'll do. And it seems somewhat counterintuitive because some people may think that focusing on a niche means you're backing yourself into a corner and that your
00:05:31
Speaker
cutting off a huge part of the market that you could potentially
Challenges in Crafting Effective Case Studies
00:05:34
Speaker
service. I think that's why a lot of marketers and marketing agencies are all things to all people, but clearly you've identified case studies as a market that you can serve. The one thing that I see when I look at case studies is of the companies that have them,
00:05:53
Speaker
Most of the case studies are pretty crappy they follow that format problem solution results it's very template there's no story telling their boring and often their ineffective sales and marketing assets.
00:06:09
Speaker
The question would be, why do companies treat case studies with such I don't know if the word is disdain, but they don't give them the love that they deserve. They spend so much time crafting guides and ebooks, but when it comes to case studies, it's almost like they're going through the motions. Why is that?
00:06:26
Speaker
There are many reasons for that. The first is accountability. No one really steps up to own this function because it crosses so many teams, sales, marketing, customer success. There's really no ownership typically of the strategy. There's no thought put towards
00:06:43
Speaker
how you're going to use these or even realization that these can be strategic assets. I think for a lot of marketers, they've been taught that template, problem, solution, results, and that's all this is. I think also people tend to mail it in because they're hard. So they don't want to have to ask the customer because they're worried the customer will say no. So they try to just manufacture it internally. That's not a customer story. That's a you story and you're missing some
00:07:08
Speaker
pretty critical narrative components in that their entire perspective and experience is absence.
Enhancing Case Study Storytelling
00:07:14
Speaker
Now you've got a very cold clinical set of bullet points of here's what we did that, okay, the metrics might be impressive, but there's nothing compelling about that story. I think a lack of ownership, I think a lack of initiative to involve the customer. I think people backbench them because they're hard. I also think just a lack of imagination. For years we've had people
00:07:33
Speaker
Excited about and identifying because they are easier because they're maybe easier to play around with we could do ultimate guides they had their heyday for a while we can do infographics we could do this really nice storytelling and brand journalism and again this case study asset just gets relegated to when you have time for it.
00:07:51
Speaker
mad rush to try and create it, no processes, no systems around it, so you get what you get and you don't get upset. And I think to break that starts by realizing there are so many different types of customer stories you can tell. There are disambiguator stories where you're talking about how your product or service can serve a really unique new market. For example, there's a company that makes sexy topic
00:08:14
Speaker
industrial air filtration. Prior to the pandemic, they had been doing cleaning particles out of factories and manufacturing environments. COVID hits. They realized we've got a medical grade solution for gyms and air filtration. They start telling stories with different language, with a different emphasis geared towards gyms, and they start cleaning up. You can have these disambiguate stories. You can have these stories about implementation where it's just
00:08:39
Speaker
for so many software products or big initiatives the implementation is the biggest hurdle you can focus just on that going well you can tell playbook style stories where it's here is the recipe and exactly how you can go replicate this outcome with our support there are aspirational stories where it's less about
00:08:57
Speaker
what and more about who. So HubSpot does an amazing job of these with their startup stories where it's about an inspirational founder that people want to be like. And oh, by the way, if you want to be like them, HubSpot played a role in making that happen. I think it's a lack of imagination, ownership, and honestly, just bandwidth to make these
Maximizing ROI from Case Studies
00:09:14
Speaker
what they could be. They're not on marketing's radar and they should be.
00:09:17
Speaker
I'm glad you mentioned HubSpot because if I'm referring people to a company that does case studies well, it is HubSpot. Anybody who's interested in looking at a company that does case studies the proper way, definitely check out HubSpot. One thing you mentioned earlier that I wanted to pick up on was the idea of
00:09:38
Speaker
extracting as much value from a case study as possible. When I help companies with podcasts, one of the things I tell them is that it's not just an interview, it's fodder for blog posts and eGuides and tutorials and thought leadership pieces for LinkedIn and Twitter updates. There's so much good stuff in talking to customers.
00:09:58
Speaker
How much marketing and sales assets or collateral can you extract from a case study interview? Do you do that yourself? Do you work with marketing teams to say, listen, they told us some amazing stuff. It would make for a great series of tutorial videos or thought leadership videos. Talk to me about that process.
00:10:15
Speaker
There's a lot that we plan for. One of those internal pieces of alignment is determining where do we want to use these and what campaigns do we want to support? And that should necessarily inform not only the story we tell, but how we tell it. We use a pretty simple framework internally that's like brain dead simple, nibble, bite, snack, meal. How do we take this core asset
00:10:37
Speaker
and break it down into collateral that meets the informational appetites and needs of people at different stages of the buyer's journey. And so we will plan from the outset, this is the audience that we're trying to speak to with this. And these are the channels we're trying to reach them on. And because of that,
00:10:53
Speaker
Here's what we need. We needed one cheap version of this for sales to do cold outreach with. We need some pull quotes turned into social collateral to support some of the social campaigns we're going to do and the customer of the month campaigns. We need some high level slide decks so that we can empower the sales team to speak through this or even incorporate into a.
00:11:09
Speaker
live event presentation. We need this deep dive video piece. We're going to let that live as more of a webinar type of asset. So we're going to structure the story a little differently to capture that, and that's going to live in one section as well. We want to go in with intention. We don't want to leave that to chance because if you don't ask a certain question, if you don't account for a particular use case when you're capturing it, it's very hard to manufacture that later.
00:11:34
Speaker
and then beyond that opportunities as you mentioned start to present themselves when you start to see some of the activity that the company is now partaking in or what i'm really passionate about is as you accumulate more stories now you're in the territory where you can do things like a highlight reel take the best little sound bites from multiple
00:11:51
Speaker
different interviews about different subjects. Maybe it's all them speaking to one pain. Maybe it's all them speaking to one outcome. Maybe it's all them speaking to one particular feature, what you do, put that together. Now you have proof in numbers, something we also like, and it's very powerful for sales. We call it a nuclear deck. It's a shock and awe asset where you take little bits of multiple stories and visually present them as a deck of one sheets, a deck of
00:12:14
Speaker
Pull quotes, you pull that all together, organize it meaningfully for your space, whether that's by industry or opportunity, what have you. And again, it's a way of showing there is a lot of proof here. There is a lot of substantiating evidence that you can get what you need from us. What's the role of customer intelligence? When I interview a company's customers, when they reluctantly allow me to interview customers, one of the things they're looking for is for a customer to say,
00:12:40
Speaker
all the good things about a company's product or service it's amazing because we all think our customers are super happy but what inevitably happens is a customer will talk about the things that they don't like or the competitive alternatives that they're seeing or the improvements that they'd like to envision
00:12:57
Speaker
This information is often very surprising to my clients. How do you organize that information and how do you make sure that information is propagated within the organization? So you're not just creating case studies, you're doing customer intelligence that can help sales, marketing and product get better and do things differently.
00:13:17
Speaker
this draws very much on my background in the conversion copywriting site because we lived and breathed that voice of customer. We needed that insight and how did we get it? Customer interviews. We recognize, hey, when we're doing a case study, we have this unique moment in time where we can capture this information. We need to be
00:13:34
Speaker
intentional need to be diligent you can't just pepper someone with forty different questions in the span of forty minutes you'll never get what you need but part of that comes down to identifying not only the immediate goals for the peace in the storytelling but because you have this moment seizing it how do we ask some questions that also surface those insights what could be better what could come next what could
00:13:54
Speaker
this look like? Why did you choose this company over that? What were your buying criteria? Those are natural dovetails into the types of stories that we tell. And then in terms of sharing that, I think you'll have run into this too. What we really encourage clients to do is to build this centralized repository of knowledge that is accessible, that is searchable, that is something that everybody can contribute to and evaluate in this living and
Selecting and Engaging Case Study Candidates
00:14:18
Speaker
breathing. I think one of the big exciting developments now is
00:14:21
Speaker
With AI, we're starting to see the ability to have this raw input, whether that lives in transcripts from sales calls. And now you can search them very rapidly and categorize below themes very quickly. Those are the types of things becoming more and more possible. So again, that's part of that internal alignment.
00:14:37
Speaker
And that starts well beyond you ever getting on a call as you're developing the strategy, as you're putting together the SOP, talking about your content gaps and your knowledge gaps. What things would sales like to learn? What things would marketing like to understand? What things about the landscape of our competition would we like to know? And building that into your question set, centralizing that after the fact, and then leveraging tools, be it, you know, whatever it might be to make that searchable, indexable, and valuable to the various teams that will ultimately use it and need it.
00:15:07
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about case study 101. In concept, talking to customers and identifying great case study candidates is very attractive, very seductive, because who doesn't want a customer saying nice things about your product or service? In practice,
00:15:23
Speaker
There's a lot of internal angst or reluctance about reaching out to customers to do a case study. One take is that you don't want to poke the beast. They're happy. They're doing their thing. They're using their product. You don't want to remind them that there's reasons for them to ask questions or complain about the products. There's a little bit of reluctance there. Sometimes companies are just afraid or they just don't know how to do it.
00:15:45
Speaker
The question is, how do you identify the best, and I put best in quotation marks, the best case study candidates? Because I imagine that it's not a one size fits all proposition. You want to highlight different use cases in different ways that companies are using a product. What's the process
00:16:06
Speaker
in terms of identifying potential case study candidates and then effectively reaching out to the ones that you think will participate in the process. It starts by identifying your goals, what types of stories are you looking to tell, and then creating a short list of clients who fit that criteria. Now speaking about criteria as well, something that's mission critical to establish is what does a win actually look because there can be disagreements between
00:16:30
Speaker
Sales and marketing marketing will go to sales say we'd really like to interview this customer sales will say come back in six months the account will be better in six months i'm going to renewal now come back like having some shared criteria for what constitutes a win what does a win actually look like that can vary from company but that could be.
00:16:46
Speaker
a minimum threshold for key KPIs. That could be a minimum relational milestone, be it amount of time with you or the fact that they've just upgraded service, so that's an indicator that they're happy. But look at your communications, look at the natural progression of your relationships, establish some hard coded criteria
00:17:04
Speaker
that is shared, that is centralized for this is what a win actually looks like. From there, build your shortlist who is happy and who is recent, because you don't want to go back in the time machine too far. If they had their win three years ago, we're in B2B. The odds of that person even still being at the company are extraordinarily low. The odds of them remembering that experience are also extraordinarily low.
00:17:25
Speaker
So one of the things that we encourage clients to do is to map out their cadence of communications and have some accountabilities to those who have those conversations for asking some indicator questions that will give you a little insight into, okay, is this a company that might be ready to do a story or might be willing to contribute? There's some other areas that are low hanging fruit, especially if you're just getting started. If you have a G2 Kaptera Trust Radius profile, look at people who've already proactively given you reviews.
00:17:52
Speaker
They've put up their hand in some small way to say, I'm willing to do this. Another way to, let's say you're like, we have no insight into our customer base at all. We haven't been diligent with this in the slightest. Run a customer feedback survey is one of the simplest and most effective things we've ever done for a client. They're reticent to do it. And then they loved it. Now it's a quarterly thing for them is we ran a customer feedback survey. We use it to identify the types of wins and things that existed in their database. We had one question that just said, would you be willing to share your experience
00:18:21
Speaker
with others, just a yes, no box. Would you be open to being featured in a success or in sharing experience with others? And we got many qualified customers putting up their hands and coming to them in that case saying, yes, we would be willing to share. So start with criteria.
00:18:37
Speaker
build your shortlist, look at the low hanging fruit, and then the trepidation around making the ask, I understand, but so much of that fear of making the ask or fear of poking the bear comes because companies just don't feel like they know how.
Handling Metrics in Case Studies
00:18:50
Speaker
A very simple rubric for doing this, be personal, be specific, be short. Why them? Why now? What's involved? What's next? If you can answer those questions in six sentences,
00:19:03
Speaker
You're already miles ahead of the average person making a mile long ask and tripping over the shoelaces in the process. I love the rubric, love the idea of strategically identifying the right target audiences, depending on the use case. The other wild card within the case study landscape is quantifying success.
00:19:23
Speaker
a lot of companies when they use a product, they may not want to talk about how successful they've been. We don't want to talk about how much sales have climbed or how much conversion rates have improved or how much retention has been reduced. It's like their state secrets. How do companies
00:19:42
Speaker
create impactful case studies when a customer won't quantify their results. You're talking about anecdotal evidence, about a high level, or they did things better or faster. It sounds nice, but doesn't have as much meat on the bone as numbers. What do you do in those cases? And how do you encourage or motivate companies to share the results? That it is a win, that it does reflect well on their performance and as the company as well.
00:20:12
Speaker
Let's start there and then move to what you do when they won't. To get companies motivated to share results, I think a few key things. Number one, realize that most of your clients won't know their numbers at the drop of a hat. And sometimes them saying no is them saying, I don't know. So instead of surprising them on a call or in an interview saying, what are your numbers? Would you share this?
00:20:31
Speaker
giving them a little bit of homework ahead of time. People want to come prepared for an interview. They want to be able to look knowledgeable and to speak to their success. One of the simple things that you can do is if you have data on your end, share it and say, these are the specific KPIs metrics we'd love to speak to. What do you think? Are you open to sharing them so that they have something
00:20:51
Speaker
specific to say yes or objective because from there you can build a different case for other things that I'll get to in a moment. So give them a little homework, give them the data that you have and present it in advance of the call again so that they can prepare. Let's say they say, oh, those are too sensitive. We don't want to talk about those things. Your first course of action is to look for proxies. So to say, okay, if you don't want to share the exact number, could we turn this into a range? Could we turn this into a percentage rather than a raw dollar figure?
00:21:17
Speaker
Could we turn this into an equivalent? This is why you see in some case studies or customer stories, for example, statements like with the money they've saved from X solution, they've been able to now do separate other thing. We're not defining the exact amount of money involved, but we're showing that, hey, there has been a savings over here that has now been applied somewhere else. Now let's say that they are reticent to share any metric at all. What do you do? How do you make this meaningful? I think the first thing to realize is
00:21:45
Speaker
Not every win, not every piece of buying criteria, not every concern a potential lead has to do with metrics. Yes, there are some explicit things. If you're hiring an SEO company, you want to know how they can help you rank and traffic increases. Those things are compelling to you.
00:22:00
Speaker
But you're also very concerned with how do they communicate? Are they ethical? How do they treat their customers? How do they iterate and solve a problem? How do they form a strategy? None of those are KPI driven stories. When metrics are not available, we look for as what are these
00:22:17
Speaker
qualitative decision-making factors that we can now speak to. So we can't show the exact metric, but how can we translate or ask questions that point to these qualitative realizations?
Integrating Case Studies into Sales
00:22:28
Speaker
The other thing is tangible examples. Even when we have a KPI, we never stop there. Go beyond the metric and into the impact. There's one thing to say, our frontline staff are now 50% more efficient.
00:22:38
Speaker
Okay, fine. When you go, our frontline staff are now 50% more efficient. For example, Caroline, our friend and office staff no longer spends eight hours a week chasing executives to give them their paychecks. It happens automatically. That visual for someone on the frontline of chasing executives around, going door to door,
00:22:55
Speaker
We may not have a metric like the hours, we may not have a metric like efficiency, but when we can paint a picture of in real life, here's what's possible now, here's what the experience looks like, that can also be compelling. Yes, it might feel a little bit squishier, but squishy can be compelling because it's relatable. If I'm someone who feels that pain or wants that picture for myself,
00:23:17
Speaker
not having the metric may be okay in that instance. So lots of ways to come at it, but examples especially make a big difference. A post case study question, usually marketing is the one that leads the case study charge. And they're very excited about the case study. And in many cases, it doesn't go anywhere. It sits on the website waiting for someone, anyone to read it.
00:23:40
Speaker
How can marketing get sales teams to leverage case studies so they can close deals more effectively? They can reduce sales cycles because obviously you've got this great asset that shows prospects that there is a roadmap to success. And here's an example. So what are some of the things that
00:24:02
Speaker
marketing can do to work with sales i guess i may go back to your original partnership concept one of the most important things is involved them from the outset give them a voice in not only the types of stories you go and capture but the end formats what often happens is marketing is so concerned with their own needs the content they want to produce the metrics there held accountable for
00:24:23
Speaker
that in the process, they just ignore that my deep dive piece might be completely worthless in a sales environment. They might need functionally a different format. They might need a one sheet. They might need a pocket story. They might need a 15, 30 second sound bite versus the deep dive piece. So the first thing is involve them from the outset, give them a voice in shaping the strategy, determining the priorities and determining the output. So many problems get solved.
00:24:49
Speaker
by being proactive. The second thing is make it absurdly simple for them to access, find, and then use what they need. There's all kinds of different tools for this now, but one of the critical things that you should be doing with every story
00:25:05
Speaker
Even if it's just in an Excel doc somewhere is categorizing what is the solution discussed? What are the pain points addressed? What is the hero quote without having to click through to the story? What's the hero quote or hero metric from this story? What vertical does this serve? Having an index or a database that again is searchable or I can just filter by I want something in this space. If I'm heading into a sales call,
00:25:30
Speaker
I don't have half hour to track you down, ask, do we have something like this? What format is it in? Read through it, pull out the index, the information that I need, put it in a format that they can actually use. Bring them in from the beginning. And then once you've got this thing, make it accessible, searchable, categorized so that they can go and deploy it.
Measuring Case Study Success
00:25:50
Speaker
Then the final thing is celebrate it.
00:25:53
Speaker
When sales does use these hold them to account when you've created them say, how are these performing for you? What questions are you getting about the story? Is what we created for you doing its job? How does our sales cycle look now that you have this? Are these sales cycles faster?
00:26:10
Speaker
pulling weight for you, have more conversations, hold them to account, and then when there is a win, celebrate, make them look good in front of leadership, make them look good in front of their peers, and they'll be motivated to continue using these assets rather than forget that they exist. Again, as you mentioned, too often, it's like we create these, we shove them on someplace, we expect the sales just remembers they exist and are there. Think about the amount of churn, the amount of things that come people's way, it's never gonna happen. You have to make this branded simple and celebrate when the thing you want done actually happens.
00:26:40
Speaker
So here's the $64,000 question for someone like you that creates case studies. How do you prove the ROI of the case studies that you create? How do companies determine whether they're getting bank for the buck? They commission you, you do customer research and the interviews and you craft compelling narratives and it looks great. Everyone's really happy. But at the end of the day, how do I know that the money that I've paid Joel is actually driven the results that I wanted?
00:27:10
Speaker
It is an amazing question and it's something that you really have to work with the internal teams because there's that whole saying, if you measure a fish's ability by its ability to climb a tree, that's definitely not the quote. But if you look at a fish's ability to climb a tree, like this thing's useless. If you look at a case study's ability to drive one-to-one conversions, you may leave disappointed, especially if you haven't set it up to do that. So how do we measure the impact? It starts by looking at the channels we're going to deploy on. So here are some very practical ideas. Anyone listening,
00:27:39
Speaker
can use to measure the impact. If you're using these things in cold outreach, what do positive response rates look like relative to before and after? What do open rates look like? What do ultimate conversions look like? Assisted conversions, that's one channel. When you're using them in ads. So for example, when you're using them in an awareness campaign, again, how many people are clicking through, how many people are reading the content and then assisted conversions.
00:28:05
Speaker
down the line when you're using them in remarketing this is one of the rare instances where a one to one conversion rate actually does make sense one of those hidden gem opportunities for customer stories is using them in remarketing we had a client cart hook that adopted the strategy of stopping using or testing against landing pages sales pages instead they started driving people to a relevant story
00:28:27
Speaker
after they'd already put up their hand in some capacity, the story started winning. They started seeing a better conversion rate from bringing people back into a story. So there you might be able to measure the one-to-one conversion rate. Other instances, again, talking to sales and saying, okay, moving forward, we want to try to establish some benchmarks with you in terms of time to close or in terms of positive
Case Study Success Stories
00:28:49
Speaker
response rates.
00:28:49
Speaker
and try to hold them to account to measure how quickly are things closing. Even something that feels very soft and anecdotal, but actually does matter is their confidence in closing. Before, when you get this type of opportunity, how confident are you that you'll close it? Now that you have a story for this particular use case, how confident are you going to close it? Measure that over time. That can be meaningful to leadership. If you're using stories on site to have the opportunity to convert, but the big thing is looking at how many conversion paths
00:29:17
Speaker
are these stories part of. If you're using a platform like HubSpot CRM, you can see who has engaged and what that looks like. There really is no one hero metric. It's really going to depend where and how you're deploying these, whether in ads or so on. One other one, practical.
00:29:33
Speaker
use case that people can measure. Take if you're in software or if you're a services company that has tiers of service, look at your nurture campaigns and how many upsells are you driving? How many new conversations are you spawning? So there's this whole cloud of different metrics that I think you have to look at for your use cases and in aggregate.
00:29:52
Speaker
to bear out the value of what you're doing. Because if you only look at that one-to-one conversions piece, that's not what these are typically built for. They're one touch point of 20 plus that someone will typically encounter along that path. So hopefully that gives some ideas and some hard numbers you can look at to support the efficacy of your case study program.
00:30:11
Speaker
It does talk a lot to the value of the marketing mix. I think over the last five to 10 years, we've leaned into data so hard that we believe that there's a direct correlation between X and Y. If I publish this blog post, it'll generate this many leads. We're learning as marketers and hopefully as CEOs that this isn't the case. There are multiple touch points. Some of them we can
00:30:35
Speaker
measure and some of them not so much. Case studies and content for that matter fall into that camp. Here's the most difficult question I'm going to ask you today and I'm hoping you can answer it, but what's the best case study that you've ever created and what made it so successful?
Conclusion: The Strategic Value of Case Studies
00:30:52
Speaker
There's what we call a switcher story. We did a HubSpot story that was focused on people moving from Salesforce to HubSpot focused on the University of San Diego, I believe. And it was one of a handful of stories like seven or eight.
00:31:05
Speaker
that were measured for their impact in assisting conversions. The reason that I really like this story, and I'm so proud of it, is we've really captured in that story the pain felt before, the evaluation process, the reasons to switch, and then ultimately the process of switching and the satisfaction after the fact. And that story influenced, again, I'm not saying one-to-one,
00:31:27
Speaker
but contributed to or influenced over $2 million in new ARR as part of paths. So that's one that I'm very proud of. I think another that I'm very proud of, I'll cheat a little bit, is it's actually a series of videos, but we have a client who's in a very technical space. The healthcare supply chain, they run an annual event with their customers there. They give out awards and that sort of thing. They wanted to have a live testimonial booth on site and they wanted to capture as much content from that as possible.
00:31:54
Speaker
We helped them plan that. We helped them see the opportunity. We helped them get participation and we ran that booth and we walked away with over 23 interviews, all that are repurposed now into multiple different assets. We gave them an entire year's worth of content.
00:32:11
Speaker
from one single event, the ultimate bang for buck, I think we've ever achieved for a client. And to do that in a technical space, to get that level of participation, to get the depth of storytelling, even in an area that is so technical or so outside of the understanding of the typical person, I was enormously proud of our team on that one. So I'll cheat and give you two, but that housewester and then that healthcare supply chain video series, I'm tremendously proud of the impact they were able to have there.
00:32:37
Speaker
Those are great examples. Thank you for sharing. What you've managed to achieve over the last 37 minutes is to put some sizzle on a topic that doesn't get a lot of attention, not a lot of love, not particularly as he's seen as a sexy beast. Thank you for that. Where can people learn more about you and case study buddy?
00:32:56
Speaker
You can learn more about Case Study Buddy at casestudybuddy.com. We have a newsletter you can sign up for. We also have a blog that's just packed full of DIY type advice. So even if we're not a solution for you and you just want to do your own storytelling better, there will be a ton to take away there. For me personally, I'm most active on LinkedIn. I don't always respond quickly, but I do always respond. Happy to jam on ideas or share inspiration, pull an example.
00:33:18
Speaker
And I'm also on Twitter or I guess they're calling it X these days. Both of those places are great places to connect and I'm trying to get out to more in-person events, be it in Canada or otherwise too. Do check out the newsletter because anytime I'm speaking, we'll announce it. And I love to just shake hands, have a meal and get into the guts of things.
00:33:36
Speaker
Sounds great. Thanks Joel. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe by Apple Podcast, Spotify or your favorite podcast app and share via social media. If you're a B2B or a SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. I work as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor. My services include a 90-day marketing sprint that combines strategy and tactical execution to move the needle quickly.
00:34:02
Speaker
And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. It features tools, templates, and worksheets to jumpstart your marketing. Perfect for entrepreneurs and, of course, you can find it on Amazon. You can reach out to me at marketments.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.