When marketing and brand directors are looking for information on an agency, most of the time they want to see real-life examples of how you have solved businesses challenges, business challenges similar to theirs. It’s best practice to have a bank of case studies for each client project that you can then pick and choose from when you have pitches or need to send information to a prospect.
As soon as a client project is finished you should have a process in place whereby assets are collated and a case study is written. Trying to write one month later will be really hard and you’ll miss out on key elements of the project.
Here are some tips that will help you write better case studies:
Get the lowdown from the account manager and creative teams who worked on the project. You want to get a real understanding of the project including the initial brief, any challenges with the project, what worked well and what didn’t.
Demonstrate clearly what the business objectives were and how you achieved them. Pull the key points from the initial brief and show how they were delivered.
Take them on a journey, tell a story. Use the information from the account teams to really take the reader on a journey. Whilst you want to use facts and figures, you also want to keep the reader interested and engaged. Here’s an example of a great case study that really does use storytelling at its best. It’s long but it doesn’t matter because the language and tone of voice hooks you in from the start.
We always hear that marketers want to see what results you were able to achieve however we all know that clients aren’t always willing to share KPIs with their agencies. To overcome this try to write the requirement to share data into your contract from the start. Also when you start working with a client, set measurement targets together with them - they will value you as an agency much more for doing that. If you can encourage your client to allow you to enter an Award, then that’s a good way to get them to share data with you. Finally, Hubspot has listed some useful reporting tools in this blog post.
Support with images have a strong visual element. Get some good, quality images of the work that you can use to showcase the project.
Keep it short and break up the copy with headlines, testimonials, and quotes. You want it to be attractive and easy to read. Remember that attention spans are short these days. People want to very quickly be able to scan read case studies and pull out the key points quickly.
Finally think about using moving image to bring your work to life, include face to camera shots to talk about the project.
Case studies don’t need to be too long, use them to tell a story of your project, think about how you will keep the attention of the reader and sell your agency’s approach and services.