Guide: the foundations of a great case study
write better case studies by making CLEARER decisions about who you speak to and what you ask them.
First, a summary
This post is a bit on the long side, so if you just have a few minutes, here are the main takeaways:
The most important aspects of your case study are who you talk to and what you ask them.
Figure out who to talk to by:
Reviewing what you’re trying to achieve with your case study, and finding a customer who matches that goal.
Reviewing your existing content, and finding a gap to fill.
Figure out what to ask them by:
Deciding which messages you want to convey
Choosing benefits that best-convey those messages
Okay, lets get into the details
I see lots of organisations agonising over case studies. They worry about whether it should be written or video. They worry about how long it should be. They worry about how much to spend on it.
But when people focus on these things, they’re missing the forest for the trees. A good case study actually depends on just two things: who you interview and what you ask them.
These things are important because a case study is, fundamentally, a story. It has a main character. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has tension. It has a challenge that the main character needs to overcome. And at the end, the main character is in a different, better position than they were when they started. If this story isn’t interesting and compelling, then no amount of production values and agonising can save it.
Conversely, if the story is compelling, then you don’t need to spend that much time or money making it into an amazing production. And any time and money you spend turning it into an expensive production just adds leverage to your already-good story.
So here’s how to make better decisions around who you speak to, and what you ask them, when you’re writing case studies.
Choosing the right customer
When I get hired to write a case study, my first question is always “why this customer?” And here are some of the more common answers:
“They’ve been with us for a long time, and they’re one of our favourites.”
“We just finished a big piece of work with them that we’re really proud of.”
“They got in touch with us and asked.”
None of these are good reasons to choose a customer for a case study. Rather, you should make this decision based on the goal you're trying to achieve.
I wrote about this in my newsletter a few months ago:
Let's say you own a landscaping business. You do all kinds of work - from design, to lawn mowing to outdoor construction.
You're pitching for a big, ongoing contract for the body corporate of a new development. The business that wins this contract gets to mow all 250 lawns in the development, every two weeks, for the next three years.
You figure a case study will help bolster your pitch, so you go to one of your favourite customers - someone who just hired you to build a whole bunch of retaining walls.
What do you think that case study is going to be about? And how useful is that case study going to be? The answers are "retaining walls," and "not very."
This is the case regardless of how well-written your case study is at the end of the process. It's talking about the wrong things, so it doesn't really matter how clear the writing is.
This is a highly simplified example, and your business will probably be more complicated than that. But the fundamental point still stands, regardless of how complex your business is
You need to be pretty ruthless about this, because otherwise you risk wasting valuable time and money on a case study that adds very little value.
Review what you’re trying to achieve
The first thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of goal you’re trying to achieve with this case study. Are you going after a new customer segment? Are you promoting a certain service? I imagine you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what you want your business to look like 12 to 18 months from now. The case study you produce today should help you achieve that goal.
I can give you an example from my own business. My longest-standing client is fintech startup Sharesies. I’ve been writing regular blogposts for them for more than two years now. They’re a great client. 18 months or so ago, I wrote a case study about my work for them. I did that because I wanted to expand the ongoing blog work portion of my business. That’s exactly what happened - now I write regular blogposts for three or four other companies.
Fast forward to today, and I’m looking to expand into three specific service offerings: case studies, email sequences and landing pages.
If I wanted to publish a new case study, it wouldn’t make sense for me to shoulder-tap one of the other companies I write blogposts for. I’m not currently prioritising ongoing contracts writing blogposts for clients, so there would be little point in writing another case study about this kind of work.
That seems obvious, but it’s very easy to end up making this exact kind of mistake! This is because we prioritise what’s available. If a significant proportion of my work is blogpost writing, and I want to produce a new case study, my first inclination is going to be to write a case study about blogpost writing. It’s top of mind.
So your first step when choosing who to talk to is to figure out what you’d like to see more of in your business. Then, choose a customer that helps you develop that part of your business.
Review your existing content
The next thing to look at when you’re choosing your customer to talk to is any existing case studies you have.
Let’s look at my business again as an example. Like I said, I’m looking to fill more of my time with email sequences, case studies and landing pages. Now let’s pretend for a minute that I’m more on top of things than I actually am, and I have a great case study about some lead nurturing emails I wrote last year.
Would it be worth writing another case study about another sequence of lead nurturing emails? Probably not - I would still have huge gaps in the case study and landing page sections of my case study library.
Once you’ve covered a broad customer group with a case study, you start to get into diminishing returns. If I have one case study about email sequences, and no case studies about case studies, I’m far better off focusing my next case study on case studies, than I am writing about another email sequence. This is true even if the second email sequence has significant differences from the first one - at its heart, it’s still an email sequence. At the end, I would have two case studies about email sequences, and zero case studies about case study writing.
You can think of this as gaps in content. Right now, I’m aeons behind on my case study production, so I have three gaping large gaps: one for case studies, one for email sequences and one for landing pages. Once I fill one of these gaps, I can move on to the other two. Once I fill all three, I can start producing more specific case studies for each of these three areas. Once I do that, I can get even more specific.
So this is something else to look at when you’re deciding who to talk to for your next case study. Look at your existing case studies, then try to find the largest gaps. These gaps will get smaller and smaller as you produce more case studies, but it makes much more sense to plug the large ones first, before plugging the small ones. Use this information to choose who you talk to.
This is also a good opportunity to ask yourself if you need a new case study at all. Remember, your customers and prospects are not as close to your content as you are. For example, if you’re running a campaign, and you need a case study to support it, you might have one in your archives. If it’s relevant to what you’re trying to say, it really doesn’t matter if it’s three years old.
And don’t be afraid to repurpose, either. If you’re looking to make a video case study, why reinvent the wheel? If you have a written case study that lines up with what you’re trying to achieve, just contact that customer and ask them if you can send a crew around to video them. All your groundwork is done, so you’re taking a lot less risk than you would be if you were starting from scratch.
Asking the right questions
There’s a certain stage-managing aspect to case studies. You really want to have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to write about before you start your interview. That way, you can tailor your questions so you get the information you want.
This comes down to two things: the benefits you want to communicate and the details that support those benefits.
What is your message?
First, you want to figure out the messages you want to communicate ahead of time. Again, let’s look at my business. I have three main messages I like to communicate in my contrnt. They are:
I write well (kind of a given)
I’m easy to work with
I’m strategic
(PS - if you’re a client, and you think I’m great for a different reason, let me know.)
A case study that covers all three of these things in equal weight is going to be overly long, a bit of a hodgepodge, or both. Ideally, any case study I produce should really focus on just one of the three. And it’s up to me to decide which one I want to focus on.
Once I do that, I can structure my interview questions around the message I’ve decided to focus on. If I want to communicate that I write well, my questions are going to be very output-focused. How happy were they with the final product? Was it clear, to the point, concise, etc?
But if I want to focus on the second message, my questions are going to be more process-focused. I’m going to focus on whether I hit deadlines, whether I did what I said I was going to do, and how receptive I was to feedback. The output of those questions will be very different from the first set of questions!
Finally, if I want to focus on the third message, my questions are going to be a lot wider. I’ll be asking questions about how I helped a client decide what kind of content to write, how I helped them decide what to focus on, and what kind of wider impact that had on their business. Again - widely different set of questions.
What about the benefits?
Your benefits are the facts that support your message. Say you’re selling cars. Your message might be “this car is fuel efficient.” But the benefit is “you save money on fuel costs.” It’s the reason to care about the message in the first place.
In a case study, you want your benefits to be as concrete and quantifiable as possible. And when you’re interviewing a customer, they are not likely to just volunteer that information. You have to specifically ask for it.
So when you’re putting together your customer interview questions, think about what kind of facts would back up the message you’re trying to push. Then, structure your questions so that you get those facts. It’s tempting to try to get this through a generic question, like “what was the impact of that?” But if you do this, you’re unlikely to get the really meaty information you need to make your case study worth reading. You need to sit down ahead of time, figure out what kind of benefits your customer actually got from working with you, then ask them a question that delivers that exact answer.
This will vary from customer to customer because everyone expresses themselves differently! For example, when I was at Xero, I did some case studies of accountants. Some accountants referred to the day-to-day accounting work (like bank reconciliation and so on) as “transactional accounting.” Others called it “compliance.” And others still called it “bookkeeping.”
To get really solid sound bites out of people, we needed to use terms they were familiar with. That meant we needed to find out ahead of time which term they used, then feed that into the questions we asked them. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get the strong quotes that we needed to make a great case study.
My process - how to get there from here
If this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t worry - I’ve been doing this for awhile, and I’ve put together a process that you’re welcome to steal. Here’s how I tackle this groundwork:
Step 1: Write your interview questions
This feels a bit about-face, but remember what I said above about your case study being stage-managed. You have goals you want to achieve, and messages (supported by benefits) that you want to get across. With this in mind, it actually makes more sense to start with your interview questions, because this helps you narrow down the kind of customer you want to talk to (more on that in a second).
Step 2: Create a short list
One of the most common things organisations do is to choose a customer, then just barrel on with the case study. This is a mistake. Not everyone is going to be suited for a case study. They might be too busy, they may not be willing to share the information you need, or they might just be publicity-shy. Or they might have to put the draft through a compliance team, who will immediately reject it with no suggestions or feedback (this happened to me a couple of years ago - it was a real drag).
Or it might just be something straightforward, like they’re going on holiday for three weeks, a week after you interview them, which kills your project’s timeline.
Point is, your customers are busy people with lives of their own and constraints of their own to operate under. If you just choose one person, and they end up not being suitable, you have to decide between walking away and embracing the sunk cost fallacy to get something across the line. Neither of these are ideal.
Step 3: Vet your short list!
This is so important. You need to actually talk to everyone on your shortlist. This doesn’t need to be an ordeal - just a five or ten minute phone call. In that call, you want to find out:
How interested they are in participating
What information they’re willing to part with, and, more importantly, what they absolutely will not talk about.
How aligned their story is with your goals.
Their timelines (to reiterate - are they going on holiday?)
Their internal constraints (is there a massive compliance team, and how sensitive are they?)
You can also gauge on your own how forthcoming they are with information. Do they happily share long, detailed answers? Or do they give one-word answers? For the sake of your own sanity, you really want to focus on people in the former group, not the latter.
Finally, this is where you find out how they describe things. That’s the transactional/compliance/bookkeeping thing I talked about earlier. Keep a keen ear out for any differences between how you’ve described things, and how they describe things, and amend your questions accordingly.
This process is also a great way to find out how available people really are. People are nice, and that niceness sometimes makes them over commit. If someone says they are happy to participate, but you can’t nail them down for a five minute pre-interview phone call, you are going to have a hell of a time getting them to have a 60 minute call, then review your case study.
Step 4: Choose your customer, and crack on
Now you’ve figured out the best customer to talk to, and what you’re going to ask them, you can crack on. From here, you have a much better shot at writing a case study that really connects with your customers and helps you achieve your goals.
Wrapping up
Let’s review real quick:
This might seem like a lot of work, because it is! But it’s ultimately less work than firing off a case study that misses the mark. You want your case studies to make a positive impact on your business. If you cover this stuff before you start interviewing customers and writing case studies, you might produce fewer case studies than you’re used to, but each case study will have more impact.
And in my experience, this process can speed you up, not slow you down. I’ve seen far too many case studies slow to a crawl because they got stuck in approval hell. Spending a bit of time vetting your potential subjects ahead of time can help you avoid this pitfall - and ultimately get your case study out the door faster.
So do your groundwork before you start firing off case studies. You won’t regret it.
PS: Download this checklist if you want to get started on case studies right away. It helps you make sure you capture all the information you need to create a case study that stands out and achieves your goals.