Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

Publish Customer-Specific Content that Converts

How to Create a Case Study for Your Website

A case study is a unique content marketing tool that can be used effectively to drive leads and sales. In a B2B Marketing survey, case studies were found to be the most effective content format. Not surprising at all, because we know that everyone loves a great story! While there is so much emphasis on storytelling in online content, case studies are not as common as blog posts or video in content strategy. Let’s talk about case studies and how to write one that works for your business.

What is a Case Study?

A case study is a ‘story’ about a customer who used your product to solve a problem. It focuses on the customer, who is the protagonist. Just like a good story, a case study will have a beginning, middle and end. Don’t write a case study just to talk about your products. A good case study isn’t an advertisement. It’s the customer’s journey about why they needed to find your product and how they achieved their goals by using your product. It’s more than a testimonial, but it is a real-life example of how your product really fits into someone’s life to solve a problem.

How to Write a Case Study

Writing a case study is a little different than writing a blog or a whitepaper. You’ll want to find the right angle. Your story needs to be compelling. It needs to sound real. The easy part is, you’ll be working on a real story, so you don’t have to be good at creating fiction!

Choose a Customer that Others Can Relate to

Not every customer has a story that is relatable. Think about your favorite books and what makes the characters so captivating. Because your business will be taking a supporting role, the customer needs to shine. You’ll want to let the customer tell the story as much as possible. Use direct quotes to give the customer’s perspective.

Use a Story Framework

  • Act I introduces the customer and the problem. You want to draw the reader in by giving them enough information to keep them reading without overwhelming them.
  • Act II introduces the solution. This is the meat of the story where you want to explain the customer’s goals and needs, which in turn leads to how your product solved the issue.
  • Act III includes the resolution. This is where you may want to include hard data that supports the customer’s decision to use your product.

Make Your Case Study Easy to Read

Case studies need to be formatted like you would format a blog post or article on your website. Break up long chunks of text with images and bulleted lists. Use headers to hold the attention of readers that skim content (almost all of them). You may even want to appeal to customers who don’t like to read, by creating a case study video or podcast.

Share Your Case Studies

Once you’ve done the hard work of creating a case study, don’t just put it on your website and hope people will read it. Promote it on your home page. Share it through social media. Use analytics to determine its strength in your SEO strategy. Learn what works and replicate your success by creating more case studies.
Grow your business through effective content marketing, including building a portfolio of online case studies. Discuss your content needs with the MintCopy team to find solutions that help you convert more leads into sales. Ask us how our SEO writers can support your business.

Use our online form to get in touch. You can also follow us on FacebookLinkedIn, and Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest content marketing trends.

Resources:

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/12/2023 15:49

Draw Insights from Your Competitors' Success 

According to Ahrefs, organic search drives over 53.3% of global traffic. Creating an SEO strategy is key to increasing your reach through search. As you’re setting new SEO goals for 2023, it may be useful to analyze what is working for your competitors. Also look at what they’re missing, to build that effectively into your own SEO strategy.

Sheetal Pinto - 12/15/2022 15:14

5 Proven Ways to Improve your Website Ranking

The rules of SEO can often feel elusive, as if SEO is a great big experiment in which the parameters keep changing. Search engines keep updating the algorithm. User behavior is evolving and adapting to circumstances, all the time. You don’t have any control over how pages rank, or do you? Google will never share how it determines SEO ranking. Customers change how they search and shop. We may not fully understand the complexity of search engine algorithms, but we can test different elements of a webpage to see how customers and search engines respond to your content marketing strategies. It’s called split testing.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/24/2022 16:42

Good today and gone tomorrow! That is the way of trends in the world of SEO and content marketing. What may generate interest right now can fall out of favor due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. What can you do to ensure that you’re up to date? One useful method is to utilize Google Trends to find useful metrics that help you stay relevant. To make your way to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to use a variety of proven methods to create quality content. Read below to learn how Google Trends can help you gain insight on popular trends, seasonality, regional demands, and your competitors.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/10/2022 06:00

Revitalize, Refine, Repurpose

The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your best results will come from 20% of your efforts. When you apply that to a creative endeavour like content marketing, you might be undervaluing some of your content creative efforts. It can be expensive to create content, from scheduling videographers, photographers, models, or even having quality copywriters write a blog post. Chances are that you have some valuable content that can be recycled or repurposed with a little elbow grease.

Sheetal Pinto - 10/27/2022 06:00

How to Create Content that Ranks Higher on the SERPs

With every Google update, there’s always some concern about page rankings. The most recent update, “helpful content,” is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to make sure that users get quality content in search results. If you’ve been using SEO best practices and providing content that is relevant and useful, you shouldn’t lose page rankings. It’s always a good idea to check your content marketing strategy and make sure it aligns with Google’s algorithm updates.