Case studies can be low-hanging fruit for the marketing manager, but it’s easy to get them wrong and end up with ineffective content posing as a case study.

“I’ve got a series of webinars that are recorded interviews with customers,” the director of marketing said. “I want to have the webinars transcribed, then turn the transcripts into case studies.”

Great idea in principle. The customer has said good things about the product, we’ve recorded it, and the recording is ripe for pulling straight into a case study, right?

There are three things wrong with this idea, though:

1. The customer is not necessarily “on message.” Some customers think that the story is really about them, or some kind of “partnership” piece that trumpets their business, but it’s not about their business. It’s about their technology and how your product helps advance it, and your product may not be prominent enough in the transcript. Better: Have your marketing communications writer modify the transcript so that it does support your message. At the very least, use headers and subheads as signposts along the road you want the reader to follow.
2. The content first needs to be tailored to the ideal reader. The webinar audience has a different focus from that of the written case study audience. Your customer could go on for several hundred words about a business or technology situation; dropping that content into a case study is not the best way to tailor it to that would be better summarized in half a written paragraph. Better: Have the writer pour the transcript through the filter of your ideal reader. Separate the points that will appeal to him in writing from those he’d tune out if he were listening to the webinar.
3. Transcription is an inefficient way of doing almost anything in marketing. It might work for court reporting, but in this context, you’re just taking the mix of wheat and chaff from an audio file and putting it into text. It still needs to be distilled to satisfy points 1 and 2 above. Better: Have the writer listen to the webinar and pull out the useful bits himself. It makes for a better built story.

So, if you do have a full transcript, what’s the best thing to do with the eight or ten thousand words it yields? Hire a writer with the expertise to chop them up and use them for SEO bait on your Website. This content is rich in the kind of keywords for which you want to be found, so use it that way. Just don’t expect it to be compelling, attractive content right out of the can.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Joe Mabel

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When you hire a marketing communications writer, you should expect a description of her method. Ask for it, and be sure it makes  sense to you.

You’re evaluating a marketing communications writer to do a white paper or a case study for you. “So, how do you do this?” you ask her. “What’s your writing process? What steps do you follow in writing a piece like this?”

You should get an answer that makes sense to you, and that doesn’t sound like a rambling, off-the-top-of-the-head proposal.

Here are 5 steps a professional may enumerate for your writing project. If the writer includes these, so much the better; if not, at least you’ll know what to ask for.

1. Review existing materials. A good writer is willing to perform some research on your industry and specialty. To save her time and ensure that she avoids material that will muddy the waters, you should point her to the basic information – Web sites, analysis, published reports – she’ll need to know to conduct a fruitful interview.
2. Interview – Assuming the task is to take what’s in somebody’s head and get it into print, the writer will need to conduct an interview with those somebodies. This is not a grilling, broadcast journalist-caliber interview, but one designed to get the subject matter expert talking. Perfect interviews are rare, and few experts are adept at imparting their information flawlessly, but a professional marketing communications writer can always get something writable out of an interview.
3. Outline – For a paper or a report, it’s important that the writer lay out the piece and let you verify that it makes sense to you. While it’s not so important in short pieces like brochures and case studies, long pieces need to guide readers down a path to explain and convince. You need to see the path the writer envisions and ensure that it’s where you want to guide those readers, and the outline is the best way to do that. Extra credit goes to the writer who fleshes out the outline, say, by writing the introduction or conclusion, so that you can see whether she has picked up your messaging correctly.
4. Drafts – Once you’ve approved the outline, the writer hangs text on it and produces a draft. Most of the battle should be in the first draft, which should result in something close to what you had in mind. Circulate this, get comments, reconcile them and get them back to the writer for a second draft. The writer gets extra credit if she introduces ideas and angles you hadn’t seen before. This is one of the big advantages of hiring an outside writer: you breathe your own exhaust day in and day out; a good writer who sinks her teeth into your business provides outside perspective.
5. Final review – After the final draft, there’s not much for the writer to do, but her job isn’t yet over, either. Most content requires layout (Web, print, InDesign, Quark), and that effort begins after the final draft. You should have your writer review the piece once it has emerged from layout to find and resolve any discrepancies between her final draft and the pre-publication piece. (Hint: There will almost always be some, intentional or otherwise.) This is a good chance for the writer to clean up final typo’s and tell you what looks right and wrong before you go live with it. (BTW, as I’ve posted before, most companies omit this step.)

Don’t go into the writing process blind. Good writers have a method and they can explain it in ways that will make sense to you.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

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Je pense, donc j'essuie.

In a customer interview, your marketing communications writer can get more out of interviewees or subject matter experts if she can make them think.

Years ago, my boss at the time, a VP of marketing, gave me the secret to working with our infuriating, inscrutable, mercurial CEO:

You’ve got to make him think.

Frankly, I wasn’t adept at it then – hence, my being laid off some months later – and I’m still not good at it, but I’m working with a marketing communications writer who knows how to make our subject matter experts and even our customers think.

I heartily enjoy seeing them rise to the challenge.

Making the Customer Think in a Customer Interview?

This seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Why would you run the risk of antagonizing a customer or engineer who is doing you a favor by allowing you to pick his brain for a white paper or case study?

This writer is smart enough not to try to impress the interviewee with her knowledge of the business or technology. She doesn’t need to know more in those fields to make the interviewee think.

It’s all in the three questions she poses them to explain it.

1. “How cool is this technology, would you say?” She doesn’t ask about the novelty or even the cost-effectiveness of the technology. She’s looking for The Cool. In fact, she’s not even looking for it, but asking the interviewee to lead her right to it. Is the cool thing about predictive text entry on a cell phone that it only takes up a few KB of phone memory, or that it helps you text faster, or that it can guess which letters you want to enter next? And how cool is it?
2. “What can you tell me about this story that would get readers to want to share it with other people?” This is a big part of writing for social media, which she understands quite well. It’s thinking one step past the ideal readers, to their desire to share the story with their social network.
3. “If you were looking for a story like this on the Web, which search terms would you use?” Not everybody can get away with asking this question – I cannot – but she can. It’s the ultimate search engine optimization question, of course, and while interviewees can’t vouch for every possible keyword, their insight is valuable.

Questions like these might lead you to think that her drafts consist of keyword-stuffed, awkward copy. If she didn’t process the answers to these questions as well as she does, they would be awful copy. But, as a marketing communications writer, she knows what I want out of the piece, and she understands our audience very well, so she knows what to do with the answers.

By making the interviewees and subject matter experts think, she’s done more than tell our story: She’s told it without making our readers have to think.

(Tip of the hat to Steve Krug of Don’t Make Me Think fame).

photo credit: Dionetian

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In its report, “Social Media 10 x 10,” Beeline Labs calls these “the one social strategy with 10x the value of any other social media tactic.”

• An eVoc Insights study found that 48% of consumers need to read reviews before making a purchase decision.
• Neilsen’s research has found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of study participants.
• Embedded customer reviews are the best social media investment for realizing strong ROI.

The most valuable and under-used social media strategy is embedding customer reviews in your Web site. Not blogs, Twitter, communities or tagging.

Short Form: Customer Feedback Forums

There’s a lot of value in these forums, as noted in “Managing an Online Reputation,” by Kermit Pattison:

Study local search sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo! Local. Forums for customer feedback have sprung up everywhere — Google Maps, Amazon, Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Epinions and a myriad of online communities and niche sites.

Prospects speed-surfing for your products get a lot of mileage out of these reviews, especially since they tend to have a snowballing effect and they are highly organic.

But not every business gets reviewed. The reviews are valuable, but they skew to gregarious customers. There’s also the fact that the reviewers get credibility points in many of these forums to encourage participation, so they’re not 100% grass-roots reviews. Finally, while nobody would look the gift horse of unsolicited, positive feedback in the mouth, a business owner could look at a year’s worth of reviews and say, “Nobody talked about the strawberry rhubarb flavor we worked so hard to launch,” or “How can we get people to talk about our signal-to-noise ratio? It’s our biggest differentiator.”

For these comments, you need to create your own content with targeted customer interviews.

Customer Interviews and How to Write Them

It’s not hard to get this kind of content onto your buffet line. Set yourself the goal of generating 4-6 case studies or customer success stories over the next 12 months.

Your sales team can help you identify customers with interesting uses of your products. Keep in mind that generally, the larger the customer, the longer each success story will take, because of the approval hoops your content will have to jump through. You’ll probably find as much enthusiasm – maybe more -  with smaller customers, and the resulting text rarely has to get through a phalanx of lawyers before you can use it. (See David Meerman Scott on this topic.)

Hire a marketing writer with at least some experience in your industry to conduct and record the customer interview, which should touch on:

• the customer’s business
• why they need your products
• how they use them
• how your products save them time and money, and how much
• an anecdote or two about their experience with your company and your products

The interview should take 30-45 minutes. It’s important to make it clear to the customer that you want to use her name in the success story, and that she will have the opportunity to review and edit the piece before you publish it.

Using the Customer Success Story

Do you see how the resulting 500- to 1000-word piece has more and longer lives than a Yelp review or an isolated tweet? You can re-use the text from the story at multiple points along your content buffet: callout boxes in other content, sidebars on your Web pages, blog posts, tweets, brochures, e-mail marketing, press releases…

These stories reinforce your relationship with your customers, too. If I told you how much I like your products, and you used my quote on your Website, don’t you think I’d be gratified to see my name in lights?

No wonder customer interviews and the resulting endorsements are so powerful.

photo credit: Garry Knight

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“But if you want a technical case study, why interview the VP of marketing?”

“He’s the interview we can get. Make it work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. One of my best friends is a VP of marketing and a very technically knowledgeable guy. He can keep up with engineers, but he knows that writing is the process of taking the cut-up dead chicken parts that engineers use to describe things, and turning them into “finger-lickin’ good” marketing content.

Most VPs of marketing don’t think that way.

So, when we got him on the phone, the VP spent most of his time telling us about Zog Systems and its 24-carat, ironclad commitment to customer satisfaction, instead of how his employees use our products. I gently guided him back to talking about our tools, but it was obvious from his bland remarks that he didn’t know much about them. He also pointed out that he couldn’t tell us much about his customers (“too confidential”) or very much about the applications on which Zog Systems had used our tools (“mostly consumer and high-tech electronics”).

Also, since our product manager was on the call, the VP misinterpreted the interview for a focus group, first by telling the product manager how to make the tools better – to which lecture the product manager studiously listened -  then by educating us on how we should position the tools against competitors.

After the call, I confided to the product manager that the interview had left me with little more than a bag of rocks, but that I was pretty confident I could make something of it. That the conversation had been a flop was lost on the product manager.

“I thought that went pretty well, didn’t you?” he asked.

Nyet.

So I wrote up the case study and the product manager liked it. He asked me to send it to the VP at Zog and to get some graphics from him to include in the piece. That was in September. After several empty assurances via e-mail that he would review it “right away,” I reached the VP by phone in late November. “I’ve got too many things going right now and I can’t focus on that until next month,” he barked.

I told the product manager that I didn’t want to strain a lucrative business relationship over a two-page case study, and that it was his call, since it was his relationship. In February they conversed, and after a few more weeks Zog’s VP gave me approval on the case study along with a graphic.

It wasn’t a disaster, but it certainly didn’t go well.

Morals:

• There’s something about VPs of marketing as subject-matter experts that doesn’t always work to the writer’s advantage.
• Record your interviews, because if you can’t find any meat on the big bones, you need to be able to pick through lots of small ones to salvage a decent story.
• Inform any of your co-workers on the call that the objective is to get a story, not to collect product requirements.

Not only that, but I’m glad there’s apparently no such company as Zog Systems, a name I just concocted. Maybe I’ll buy the domain just so I can use it in future posts…

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I’ll cut to the chase: Interviewing and writing up a customer success story or case study goes well when the customer contact is a clever person, and when the writer, if need be, can get a story out of a rock.

It’s also important not to focus on your product or service, but to let your customer do that.

A clever customer

We’ve interviewed over a dozen engineering companies for a series of case studies. Life is like a box of chocolates with these people – sometimes we get an animated small businessman, sometimes an M.D., sometimes a VP of engineering, sometimes a director of marketing.

The best content and the best case study experience has been with people smart enough to understand that we were after a conversation or a story. Once they have that mindset, everything else falls into place: the technology we’re trying to describe, the software tools of ours that they use, the business and technical benefits we want to convey to the reader, even the images and diagrams that accent the final piece.

How do you identify a clever customer? That’s the hard part. It’s not even guaranteed that every company has somebody who fits that description, let alone that they’re in a position to talk about your product.

Getting a story out of a rock

My old roommate , Arthur O’Donnell, used that term to describe the task of coaxing interesting content out of uninteresting material (or people).

Here’s an analogy from the world of optics: If the interviewee is the light source, the writer is the prism who generates the prism from bland light. For a case study to go well, the writer needs to understand what the ideal reader wants to see.

In the technical series I’ve described, the audience consists of engineers, and engineers usually want to know the answer to one main question:

How’d they do it?

It’s not been easy in this series, but we’ve managed in almost all of these pieces to explain the technical problem – usually in the area of chip design – and tell the story of how the customer solved it (preferably using our tools).

When you do that, you don’t need to tell people how great your products are. Your customers do it for you in the interview, and your readers catch on.

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1. Tell the writer about the interviewee’s specialty and personal characteristics, the kinds of information to elicit, and what you want out of the interview. If I know that I’m trying to get information from an engineer on how the company’s technology was developed, I’ll steer him/her away from discussions of product marketing and trade shows. When you provide this kind of background, you save yourself time and money in the long run, even if you have to brief the writer a bit.
2. Tell the interviewee what you’re trying to accomplish in the interview and in the written piece. Most interviewees never get this picture. The writer can provide it during the conversation, but it’s awkward, and you as marketing manager are in a better position to describe the goals in terms that will mean something to your co-worker or customer.
3. Take part in the meeting or call. It’s a good idea to be part of the conversation yourself, especially with a new writer or a new project. If your writer has done six case studies with your customers already, and you’re confident about the work product, then there’s no need to attend. But if you’re asking your press release writer to interview an investor, you should plan to be a fly on the wall to keep the conversation going the way you want it to go and help the writer through unfamiliar territory.

Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense. But so does flossing your teeth, and a lot of people don’t do that either. This is really cheap insurance on the project for which you hire a new writer.

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