The Content Buffet - By John White » case studies

Case Studies and Your Prospect’s Head – 3 Takes

John White — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:54:03 +0000

Marketing managers use case studies to explain how their products are used. What kind of ideas do your case studies plant in your prospect’s mind?

How does your organization use case studies? Do you realize how potent a tool they can be in your Content Buffet?

[Quick factoid in case you want to be convinced: Eccolo Media's 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey finds that 68 percent of respondents rated case studies as "very” to “extremely influential” in 2011, as compared to 39 percent of respondents in the 2010 survey (page 8).]

Why do case studies work?

They work because people don’t want to feel alone in taking a chance on your product. Whether you’re selling mixing bowls, gas turbines or a college education, nobody wants to be the first to try your product.

So keep that in mind when your marketing communications writer is creating your case studies. Instead of describing how cool your product is, tell a story in which your prospects can see themselves so that they don’t feel they’re taking a big risk by sending you their check.

Of course, you can’t calm everybody’s nerves with one case study, so organizations with a content marketing strategy create a series of them and give them titles that make it easy for people to find one in which they can see themselves.

What’s in your prospect’s head?

Depending on how your marketing communications writer executes your content marketing strategy, your case studies will trigger one of these thoughts in the brain of your prospect:

“These guys have some big customers.” Sometimes you want a case study that drops names. Who can resist that temptation? If you landed the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and made them happy, trumpet that from the rooftops and put that idea into your prospect’s head. Most of the time, though, the namedropping is pretty transparent and it’s wrapped around a frankly rather dull Problem-Solution-Result structure. It’s not pretty, but if you have to get the piece approved by a phalanx of your client’s reviewers, you may need clinical, succinct copy.
“This is the same problem I have, and these guys understand it.” If you want to plug the reader right into your socket, show that your customer actually had multiple problems – they always have, somewhere – and that you didn’t stop asking questions when you reached the first one. Explain how you fixed them, in as much detail as you can get away with.
“If these guys can frim the jim-jams for them, maybe they can frap the krick for us.” For this, you need to drive imagination with a case study that tells a real story, especially a story about an unexpected use of your product. You have to show your readers what your customer accomplished with your product, then put them in the frame of mind to think one step removed. That accelerator was designed for a robot? What if we used it in a history-making tchotchke?

What kind of ideas do your case studies plant in your prospect’s mind? Does it align with your content marketing strategy?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: gurdonark

The White Paper Outline – Discover, Consider, Decide

John White — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:22:21 +0000

Breaking your white paper into these three parts can help you build a campaign around it. Start with your white paper outline.

It was supposed to be a simple, short paper:

We’re looking for 4-6 pages of copy. It’s for a lead generation campaign. It’s about our new line of wireless schmedlapps.

That’s all they knew. I knew a little about schmedlapps myself, so they were comfortable with me. We signed the agreement and scheduled the interview.

The schmedlapp subject matter expert is a senior marketing manager. He briefed us because he knew how he wanted the campaign to go, and because he had enough exposure to customers to understand the audience for the paper. It was a jolly, upbeat interview, resulting in a decent helping of grist for the writing mill.

So I started the white paper outline

as I always do: I reviewed my notes, listened to the recording (you do record your interviews, don’t you?) and began moving bits around into a decent flow. Then, suddenly, I got a wild idea from an Alinean webinar I attended featuring Tom Pisello & Jim Novy.

The webinar was titled “Mapping Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyer’s Journey” and it emphasized three steps on that journey:

Discovery
Consideration
Decision

Ker-ching!

I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with – so I started rearranging the white paper outline into exactly those sections.

Discover – Why are Schmedlapps Becoming So Important?
Consider – Are Schmedlapps Right for My Organization?
Decide – How Do I Make the Case for Schmedlapps in my Department?

Readers crave structure in white papers, and this seemed perfect. Betting on the come, I wound out the 4-6 pages of copy to an outline worth 9-11 pages and submitted it.

Double ker-ching – The client’s reaction

We held a conference call to review the outline – they had given me lamentably few actionable changes in writing – and most of the marketing manager’s comments were run of the mill until he said:

I think we should take this structure and break it out into three separate white papers.

To repeat, I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with, and could result in additional business – so I let the manager continue down that road. He had sold himself on the idea of developing three separate white papers and telling the schmedlapp story over a three-month campaign.

Works for me. And, I didn’t have to convince anybody of anything.

So, we’re full speed ahead in building the discover-consider-decide series of papers. The client understands that this represents a change of scope, which affects the original estimate. It’s a better-rounded series of papers for the client, and new work for me.

Caveat writor

While I think this is a good structure for the schmedlapps story and campaign, I don’t want to encourage marketing communications writers to impose it on every white paper you ever write. There are times where it won’t apply, and even when it does apply, you should not use it for every paper.

Why not?

Because your writing will become formulaic and staid, and your white papers will start to look like those ghastly boring case studies that everybody posts on their website, with the invariable Challenge-Solution-Result flow.

If the only tool you have is Discover-Consider-Decide, you’ll start bending every client’s story to fit.

Keep this in mind as one way to tell the story, but not the only way.

photo credit: joguldi

What Should and Shouldn’t Go into Your White Paper

John White — Thu, 26 May 2011 10:59:49 +0000

What are you going to put into that white paper you’re planning? Don’t fill it with garbage or you’ll annoy your readers and lose their trust.

It’s easy to confuse “we need to write a white paper” with “we need to tell more people about us.”

Wise marketing managers are able to discriminate between these needs and keep the chest-pounding out of the white paper. Cooler heads keep in mind that people don’t buy features; they buy benefits.

Eventually, wise marketers can convince those who want to fill white papers with the company’s fabulous technical advances that that kind of material belongs in a brochure or advertisement. That works for a given audience in a given context, but expectations are higher for something you want to call a white paper, so you need to be more subtle.

Still, that only tells you what shouldn’t go into your white paper. What should go into it?

What should and shouldn’t go into a white paper

First, consider a few simple guidelines:

It should be easy for me to learn something useful from your white paper.
I should be able to see my problem, or my customers’ problem, properly described in your white paper.
The structure of your white paper should be obvious to me, so that I can skip any uninteresting part and resume at the next meaty bit.
I should feel that I’m drawing my own conclusions from your white paper, instead of drinking your Kool-Aid.
When I finish the white paper, I should feel that I could probably trust – or at least not distrust – your organization to help me with my problem.

In general, then, here are some should’s and shouldn’ts about what goes into a white paper:

White papers should contain:

industry data from reputable sources
quantifiable trends
a credible explanation of a real-world problem
broad strokes about your category of technology or approach to the problem (but don’t describe it as your technology)
sensible arguments in favor of this technology, weighted heavily toward solving the real-world problem explained earlier

White papers should not contain:

your opinions about where the industry is headed (call that an industry overview instead)
details about which competing products have which features across your category (call that a buyer’s guide instead)
a list of feature-benefit pairs, even if they are customer-oriented (call that a brochure instead)
details of a customer engagement or use case (call that a case study instead)
customer quotations about your company or technology (call that a testimonial instead)

“Am I ready to write now?”

Well, not really. You also need to know what motivates the ideal reader of your white paper. I’ve posted on that in the past and shall surely do so again in the future. The more information about your audience that you can give to your marketing communications writer, the better the resulting white paper.

Keep in mind this post from Jonathan Farrington on negotiating with the four personality types. Marketing managers need to understand these types – drivers, expressives, amiables and analyticals – as much as salespeople do, and publish content that floats everybody’s boat.

It may take more than a single white paper to do that.

photo credit: swanksalot

Turning Webinars into Searchable Text

John White — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:53:34 +0000

Webinars take time and money. Here’s how to get the most of each out of yours, and get search engine clout in the bargain.

Webinars, videos, customer interviews, conference proceedings, panel discussions…marketing managers expend a lot of sweat in setting these events up, and they deserve to reap sweat equity from all that effort.

How can you make these vehicles work harder for you? How can get more mileage out of them? Most important, how can you get real SEO juice out of them?

One of our technology clients has events of this type first transcribed, then has the transcripts edited and converted into full-blown case studies. The resulting text is SEO-rich in customer names, industry terminology, product names and references to their wins in the market.

The procedure we follow on these webinar-to-case-study conversions is simple, and I outline it here:

Product managers, field engineers, marketing managers and just about all employees in the field are empowered to record at these events. They use digital audio recorders, Flips and professional video equipment to capture the event, which they then digitize and make available as an audio or video file.
Marketing then quickly reviews the footage and vets it for worthiness as a case study. (Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you get to the fairy princess.)
Every month or so, they point us to the online repository of the audio and video files, some of which they place at dropbox.com and others of which they point us to at video sharing sites on the Web. We coordinate priorities and schedule using a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.
We then have the audio and video transcribed, which, practically speaking, takes about 1.5 days per hour of footage, including first-pass editing and review in an MS Word document.
We then send the transcript back to Marketing for review and approval by the customer who gave the presentation.
Once the customer has approved, we edit and massage the transcript from its rough, oral form into a more polished, written form, which takes another day and a half or so per hour of footage. We introduce subheadings to correspond to slide changes in the presentations and questions in the panel discussions. We also add customer logos, pull-out quotations and other tidbits of metadata that go into the finished product.
The client then reviews the case study and pours it into an Apple Pages template. In lives as a PDF on the Website, gets crawled by the search engine bots and viewed by customers and prospects.

The result is easier to follow than the rough transcript, and it tells the client’s story more effectively. It is not always perfect prose, but we make sure that it is good English, free of the uh’s and um’s of extemporaneous speech. It is finished enough to be valuable marketing content, yet spontaneous enough to fit our client’s marketing style and strategy very well.

And, of course, the search engines love it.

How do you recycle your webinars?

photo credit: cogdogblog

Breathing life into a bag of bullets

Customer Interviewing – Some Basics

John White — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:46:15 +0000

Interviewing customers for case studies and success stories is the marketing writer’s stock in trade. Some ideas on getting the most out of it.

The case study or customer success story is to your Website what a recommendation is to your LinkedIn profile: an excellent addition to your trophy case.

But it’s a long road from the point at which you, the marketing manager, say “Hey, let’s write up the Schmedlapps account!” to that trophy case, and the first step is the interview.

Criteria for interviewee

First, not everybody wants to reveal that they’re using your product. “We’d love to do a case study with you, Gus,” you’ll hear, “but you guys are our secret weapon. We don’t want our competitors to know how we’re doing so well.”

And many large customers make it difficult to do a proper business-to-business case study, especially for small companies. You’ll have a marketing communications writer author the piece, then you’ll send it over for review, and it will get raked over the coals by your customer’s Legal department. Drag.

For this reason, you should make an ongoing campaign of case studies, so that you have a pipeline of interviews, drafts, approvals and trophies always in motion.

Set up time with Sales and go through the customer database for ripe candidates. Select interviewees using criteria like:

is a current customer
has had a good experience with the product
can talk about technical and business benefits
can talk authoritatively
can talk (this is often overlooked, making for short, fruitless interviews)
is a manager or above

Setting up the customer interview

As interviewer, you’ll only be able to control 50 or at most 51% of the interview; the rest is in the hands of the customer. Prepare well, but also consider that you cannot predict everything.

Have Sales initiate the request. They know the personalities involved and can steer you to the person most likely to give a glowing review of your product. They want to help. Of course, if you go over their head and initiate contact without their knowledge, they’ll consider it a slight.
Once Sales has gotten the customer’s approval for the case study, suggest four different one-hour windows and ask the interviewee to select the most convenient one. Plan on a 45-minute question-and-answer session.
Set up the conference bridge or online meeting and send the details to the interviewee.
Prepare a list of questions and send them to your interviewee ahead of time. He will not likely read them, but you’ve done your part. Ask the questions you need to ask, along with at least 3 great case study questions.

Mechanics of the customer interview

A sufficiently motivated interviewee with a decent story to tell will do most of the work for you. In fact, you may even get in her way with your annoying questions, but as long as you’re getting useful details that your readers will want to learn, you’re still fulfilling your mission. The marketing writer can do the rest.

During the interview:

Mention that the interviewee will see and have the opportunity to approve a draft of the case study. Many people ask about this, so take care of it up front.
Describe the audience and your goals for the piece. This gives the interviewee context and may determine the general direction of your conversation.
Reward good storytelling and juicy details: “This is just what we’re looking for. It’s gratifying to hear such a good story about our product.”
On the other hand, some people aren’t comfortable in an interview. If the interviewee is not inclined to talk much, be frank: “I was hoping to get more details on how your company uses our product. Can you think of somebody else I should talk to instead?”
Try to get a statement of quantifiable benefits. Customers – especially large ones – are usually reluctant to issue them, but it’s worth a shot for the impact they have on the case study. If you can’t get a good, solid statistic, try something like, “Would it be accurate to say that our product shortened your testing cycle from weeks to days?” If the answer is “yes,” turn it into a quote.
Also, be sure to get a clear explanation of how the interviewee did things before using the product and how she does them now that she’s using the product. The before-and-after sequence makes it easier for your readers to follow the story.

Conducting a good interview isn’t the same as writing a robust case study, but it will put you and your marketing writer squarely on the road to it.

photo credit: St0rmz

Want Great Case Study Interviews? Ask These 3 Great Questions

John White — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:01:59 +0000

The interview’s the thing, wherein you’ll catch the conscience of the…customer. Three easily overlooked questions for your case study interviews.

Want a great case study? Make sure your marketing communications writer asks great questions.

There’s a bit more to it than that, of course. You need to be sure that you’ve chosen an interviewee who is relatively talkative and who likes your product. It’s no fun being on the phone with a customer who either doesn’t talk much or who spends the time hammering you for improvements and product details.

But assuming you’ve got a live one, what questions should you have your writer ask?

The usual suspects

Be sure these – or similar – questions are on your crib sheet. (I recommend sending them to the interviewee ahead of time, but I don’t recommend assuming that s/he will have read them. They rarely do.)

How did you find out about our product?
Tell me about your process of choosing our product.
What are the three biggest problems it helps you solve? (Hope for two, anyway.)
How did you solve those problems before?
How much time/money/blood/sweat/tears are you saving with our product? (Customers rarely go on record with this kind of quantifiable testimonial, but try anyway. Ask twice.)

Those are the war horses, and any professional writer can put together a nice, utilitarian, formulaic case study with the answers. If your marketing writer isn’t coming back with the answers to them, think about looking for a new one.

Don’t forget, though, that people want to read a story.

3 great questions

Is anybody using your product in ways that you hadn’t predicted?

Uncommon, unanticipated uses of your product – even uses for which your product wasn’t really intended – show readers that you’re selling more than a one-trick pony.

One of my clients sells an IT service management product whose buyers are constantly amazed at how co-workers in other departments want to use it as well. HR, testing and product management groups see how versatile Service-now.com is and immediately begin to hatch plots of getting their own licenses and apps.

I used to work for a company with a data compression software product that saved space on your hard drive (back when that was a problem). Because the data are compressed, they’re effectively encrypted as well, and one large customer bought the product, disabled the compression, and used it to transport confidential data.

Have you done anything famous with our product?

Your reader may not know anything about your customer’s company, but if your product was used in a famous context, it’s a big talking point.

“I used your software to design an accelerometer,” said a customer of one of my clients during an interview, “and a Chinese partner built it into a goodie bag item given to all attendees at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” Cha-ching – instant recognition.

Do you have any stories or anecdotes? Did anything interesting happen while you were installing our product? Any war stories?

This is a real grab-bag, and if the interviewee happens to be a bit of a raconteur, s/he will run with it. These anecdotes make for good reading.

Put yourself in the place of your reader: Your job is to plow through the marketing content from several competing suppliers and narrow the field. Whether you’re shopping for knife blades, blade servers or blades of grass, wouldn’t it be more pleasant to read a decent story or two along the way? What are you more likely to say at lunch with your colleagues: “I read a great brochure today,” or “I came across a good story in a case study”?

And don’t forget…

A couple more things on case studies:

Remember to confirm the interviewee’s job title. The piece looks silly without it, so you may as well get it early on.

I find that 45 minutes is the ideal length for an interview. A half-hour is too short and an hour is too long.

What do you have your marketing communications writers look for in a case study interview?

photo credit: Xurble

Business to Business Case Studies – Which Format?

John White — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:06:44 +0000

Use case studies to show prospects that they’re not the only ones who have the problem. And do it with a good story instead of a datasheet.

Marketing managers use B2B case studies so that prospects will think,

Hmm. If this product can do that for them, maybe we can get it to solve our problem, too.

So their real value lies in how quickly and clearly your marketing writer can describe three main things:

the problem
the solution
the resulting benefits

But most business-to-business case studies adhere too closely to that format. The prospect gets a quick, scannable read, and there’s a lot to be said for that in an era of short attention marketing.

But people want to read a story.

Standard format: Problem, solution, results, 800-number

This example from Juniper Networks is the archetypal technology B2B case study. And it’s a lot like this other example from Juniper Networks, so they obviously rely on a format to help them generate case studies quickly. It’s well structured, mentions the product name, includes a hyperbolic quotation, and describes the customer’s business. It probably took the marketing communications writer weeks to get it through the gantlet of approvals. Any salesperson would be tickled to show it to prospects.

But as Jamie Wallace and Stephanie Tilton emphasize, your case studies deserve to tell your story, and these examples don’t tell much of a story.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your B2B case studies all looking similar, as long as they don’t all sound similar. And format has a lot to do with that.

Why does a case study need a story?

Put yourself in the place of the people who read your case studies. They:

have a problem to solve
can’t take forever to solve it
want to read something short before they (have to) dive into your white paper
want to read more about your customers’ business and problems than about your products and services
want to know how your customers solved their problems
are looking for good reasons to select you over your competitors

Here’s Debbie Weil counseling caution when your PR agency writes your case studies. Why? Because they tend to hand readers rose-colored glasses. A real story has some tension and conflict, and those are not usually at the top of the list of things PR agencies will suggest to you.

I’m not kidding you – it’s difficult to find a case study that favors a story over problem-solution-benefit, which means it’s difficult to write one. I think I’ve written a few, but now I’m not so sure.

What do you look for when you’re reading a case study? When you’re writing one?

photo credit: hectore

Breaking a Case Study into Two Pieces

John White — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:21:43 +0000

Separating a case study project into the outline and the body can help you manage the risk that your customer may not approve it.

How many times have you wanted to write up a textbook-perfect case study in your organization? Doesn’t it seem like just the kind of piece to populate your content marketing campaign, score points with the Sales team and show your customers how much you value their business?

But how many of those times have you hit a “Yes, but…” as you rolled your case study idea down the road?

A lot of case studies (or “customer success stories” or “application stories”) become shipwrecked on the reef of customer approval. Customers have three common objections to being identified in a case study:

“You’re one of our secret weapons, and we don’t want our competitors to find out that we work with you.”
“We don’t want to reveal that we have problems in the first place, let alone that we needed an outsider to solve them.”
“There’s nothing in it for us.”

Still, these case studies are powerful arrows in your quiver, so you don’t want to give up on them entirely.

Your marketing communications writer may tell the story in a way that makes you and your customer appear to walk on water, but if it doesn’t go over well with the customer’s review team – usually for legal reasons – you’ll spend money to have a piece written that never sees the light of day.

Breaking the case study in two

“This is a really good story for us and for our customer,” a marketing manager with one of my clients told me. “From the outset, we set the expectation with the customer that, if the data looked good, we would cooperate on a case study. But if they decide that the data don’t look as good as we think they do, they may pull the plug on the piece and decline to let us publish it.”

With that in mind, she asked whether I wanted to write it up.

“Unfortunately, we can’t set this up as an hourly project,” she added. “You’ll have to bill it as a project, but I don’t want to have to pay you for the entire thing if you end up not doing all the work.”

I thought about it for a bit.

“Let’s break the project into two pieces,” I suggested. “Normally, I’d estimate the interviews, outline and drafts as one piece, but let’s set up the outline as the first deliverable. Once we have your customer’s changes, I’ll finish the draft and that will be the second deliverable.”

She liked the idea, because it relieved her of some of the risk. I liked the idea, because it showed her I could think flexibly about the project. I set the interviews and outline as 1/3 of the total estimate, and the draft as 2/3 of the total.

Lesson learned

In fact, I should have anticipated that the interviews and outline would be the lion’s share of the work.

Usually, the outline merely serves to show the direction the piece will take, but in this case it did much more of the heavy lifting. It had to pass muster with the marketing manager, her legal team, her customer’s product manager and her customer’s legal team; in other words, it’s taking a long time to get approval on a little bit of work. I’m glad to run this gantlet early so that I don’t have to run it later, but I’d have done better front-loading the estimate as 2/3 interviews and outline, and 1/3 draft.

photo credit: Gargaj / Conspiracy

7 Marketing Questions and Formats for Answering Them

John White — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 05:32:25 +0000

If the role of marketing is to start a conversation, then the role of the marketing manager is to come up with new answers to a handful of questions from prospects.

Consider everything you have your marketing communications writers do for you in light of a few life-or-death questions that your prospects pose:

1. “Who are you and what the heck do you do?” This is pretty elementary. What piece of marketing do you have in place to present yourself to prospects? Is it easy to digest? Are you convinced that people understand who you are and what you do when you explain it?

Melinda Brennan wrote about business mistakes around targeting a niche. If your niche is annihilating termites, it’s pretty easy to tell people who the heck you are. But if you also kill rats and remove beehives, you need to figure out how you’re going to introduce yourself when you wear multiple hats.

Have a look at how JDSU does it.

Format of choice: Website

2. “Why should we buy from you?” This is a trick question. The prospect is really asking, “What’s in it for me to buy from you?” Security? An end-to-end, well thought-out system? Warm fuzzies?

Answer this question with a question: “What has your hair on fire, Ms. Prospect? What nagging problems are you dealing with?”

You’ll do two things by asking a question here: prove that you are willing to listen and help both you and the prospect qualify each other. These are perfect business goals for a marketing manager.

Format of choice: Prospect questionnaire

3. “What makes you different from everybody else?” To answer this, you reflexively contrast yourself with your competitors, but that’s not as important as aligning yourself with your prospects and figuring out what they want that is different from what is already out there.

Inebriated by the potential of wireless and brisk consumer uptake, carriers out-cooled one another for years – more devices, more services, lower rates, better plans – until they got hip to the fact that subscribers (that’s us) really just wanted their calls not to drop. That realization has brought AT&T and Verizon to their current mine’s-bigger-than-yours campaigns, with billboards claiming coverage for “97% of Americans” versus hundreds of technicians walking behind the guy with glasses.

Formats of choice: Surveys, primary research

4. “How will that help me with my business problems?” I constantly paraphrase David Meerman Scott on the issue of figuring out which problems you solve for your customers. They don’t care that your technology is a neat hack, or that you can manage agile development among 100 software developers in your sleep. In fact, they probably can’t even hear your explanation because they’re distracted by problems they’re trying to solve.

If you can show them how it solves their business problem, it will be easier for them to envision paying you.

Format of choice: Business-benefit white papers

5. “Interesting. How does your product/service work?” Do you have materials that explain how your product or service works under the hood? Sooner or later, somebody technical needs to see and be convinced of the merits of your approach.

If you’re selling a car that improves mileage by disabling one spark plug above 65mph, plan on telling prospects how you do it. If you help filthy rich people stay filthy rich, get ready to explain how you do it.

Mind you, not everybody asks this question. It’s the hallmark of the analytical buyer personality type, which is about 25% of the population. Can you afford to not have a story for 25% of your prospects? I thought not.

Format of choice: Technical white papers

6. “Interesting. How much does your product/service cost?” You knew they were going to ask this sooner or later. Note that it doesn’t prove that they want to buy; some people ask just to have the information, or to disqualify themselves.

You’re better off making absolutely certain that you understand all of their needs before you name a price.

Format of choice: More questions

7. “How do I know I can trust you?” There’s an easy answer to this, which finally landed in a memorable movie this year: Inception.

Cobb: How do I know I can trust you?

Saito: You don’t.

And that’s about what it boils down to. Prospects don’t really know whether they can trust you, but until they have at least some glimmer of confidence that you’ll do what you say you’ll do, they won’t buy from you.

Formats of choice: case studies, customer success stories, blog, real-time media

What are the questions you face, and the formats you use to answer them?

photo credit: Hamed Saber

3 Tips for Anonymous Case Studies

John White — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:48:51 +0000

Case studies and customer success stories are the dessert of The Content Buffet because of the credibility they lend you. But when you can’t drop names, try these tips.

“It’s a solid case study,” said Dan. “Too bad we can’t use it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I sent it to the customer last week, but they said we can’t publish it due to pending litigation.”

That seemed silly to me, but I’m not the lawyer. I guess that a deep freeze on publishing anything is a company’s way of circling the wagons when the arrows begin flying.

Dan had paid a lot in time, money and face to get the case study written, and it grieved both of us marketers not to be able to use it.

“Can we run it and not mention the customer’s name or any particulars?” I asked.

“Maybe. Wouldn’t it lose a lot of its value, though?”

“It would lose some value,” I answered, “but it would be better than not using it at all.”

Anonymous case studies

True enough, some of the value in a case study or customer success story is tied up in brand equity (usually somebody else’s brand). When your sprinkler heads are keeping the greens at Pebble Beach verdant, or your encoding algorithms make Vimeo work, you want to be able to drop customer names.

But any marketing manager knows that, the bigger the name, the harder the approval process. Press releases and case studies have to run marketing and legal gauntlets in large companies, and sometimes even the most fantastic case studies die a long, painful death of terminal inbox.

Of course, you can try to strip particulars out of the piece to get your point across without using names. Here are three tips for doing this:

Remove or replace details that would allow an outsider to figure out the phantom customer. This may include rewriting bits of it to change geography, gender, application and more. Get as far away from your customer as possible while still describing the success.
Turn the study into a “caselet;” here’s an example in a life sciences context. These focus almost entirely on the problem you’ve solved, and the customer fades into the background. The marketing communications writer must emphasize the story and even add conflict to distract the reader from wondering who the customer is. Caselets are business-focused, and their audience is the decision-maker.
Turn it into a technical use case by focusing on the how-did-they-do-it. Include specifications, schematics, dimensions, quantitative data and programming code. There is still a role for persuasion in this, but you’re trying to persuade the technical people who will influence the decision-maker. You want them to say, “If they can do that for those guys, let’s find out whether they can do what we need done.”

Once you’ve played one of these cards, you’re in the clear – strictly speaking – and may do with the piece as you please. Still, in the interest of a good relationship with your customer, you should grant them a courtesy review of the neutered product. You should also run it by your own company’s counsel.

Doesn’t always work

Sometimes the named endorsement in a case study is omnipotent, and anonymizing is pointless. A business development manager for one of my Asian telecom clients told me:

There are only about 15 companies in the world who can use our technology. We have two of them so far, and the decision-makers in both cases asked to see a success story, then asked for the phone number of the person named in it.

But for a typical B2B sale, the anonymous case study still likely has value. After all, a good story is a terrible thing to waste.

How have you dealt with case studies when you couldn’t name the customer?

photo credit: Ben Schumin