Customer success stories–also referred to as case studies–are a terrific way to bolster your marketing efforts in Web and print. They can be more effective than other marketing communications materials because they provide third-party testimonials of how a customer used your product or service to solve a significant problem.
You can write customer success stories as narratives (like magazine articles) or structure them in a format you believe works best for your business. Both approaches work well, but I prefer the structured of format approach because I can get the point across with less copy than a narrative.
Business people are willing to read more than consumers but I still believe brevity is better for case studies, especially when published as Web pages and in e-newsletters. One or two pages does the trick for me.
My approach to writing success stories is to first state the problem, then describe how the company’s product or service solved the problem, and then wrap up with the benefits of the solution or what most business people would call their “return on investment.”
The ROI could be hard dollars and that’s the most compelling story you can tell, but not all solutions are so easily quantifiable. The customer may refuse to say just how much money he saved for competitive reasons, or he may think it’s none of your business, or some other reason.
Here’s an example of a typical structure (overlook that the design is dated).
The best case studies are based on the experiences of customers with attributable quotes, but I’ve seen plenty based on the experiences of real customers who declined to be identified, and some studies that were plain fiction.
Okay, so let’s say we have a live customer on the hook–someone who has agreed to recount their positive experiences working with your company. Here’s a format and structure you might use:
What was the problem?
Joe Bates, the proprietor of Fish Washing Co., was stumped why the traffic to his Web site was so low. He had hired his nephew to design the site and the nephew assured him that he knew all about Web design. But it slowly dawned on Bates that the work his nephew might not be so terrific after all. “We were scrambling,” Bates says. “We really needed our traffic to increase and we were living from check to check. I knew I had to act fast.” And so on and so on.
How did your solution fix the problem?
Bates called us, Zapruder Web Design Inc., to find out whether one of our designers could help improve the look and feel of its site and to make sure that it was properly optimized for search engines. In stepped Jane Johnson, one of Zapruder’s top designers. “It was evident the layout just wasn’t working for Fish Washing,” Johnson explains. “The colors were all wrong, the navigation was hardly intuitive and the graphics just weren’t working hard enough to support the company’s brand.” Then, on you go to explain the solution you provided.
What were the benefits for the client?
Fish Washing was back online with an entirely new design in a matter of weeks and Web site traffic began to steadily increase at the rate of 5 percent per week. Better still, Fish Washing saw its revenues rise 15 percent, thanks to the new shopping cart system Zapruder designed.
Fish Washing also was now able to update its Web content on its own because the newly designed site had an easy-to-use content management system. “That alone saved the company $1,000 per month because we no longer needed to pay my nephew to keep the site up to date. Also, most of the software Zapruder installed was open source and that went a long way to making sure we were able to come in on budget,” Blow adds. And so on and so on.
Quantifiable benefits count most to readers. Make sure you’re clear about what the big payoff was in dollars saved or earned, time saved, efficiency, productivity–whatever measures you can come up with.
A couple of other details
If I have the space, I like to include an abstract a few sentences long on the page so the reader can quickly see what the case study is about.
I’ve also worked with success stories whose layouts were identical but were color-coded for different market segments, say blue for healthcare, and green for an environmental nonprofit. Creating a family of case studies and tying them into other marcom materials with similar look and feel is the way to go.
Post the case studies on your Web site in HTML and PDF to increase search engine visibility and to make it easy for prospects and customers to download them.
Last words…
I prefer to use actual customer quotes because they’re more credible but it’s okay to paraphrase and attribute the comments to the person who said it.
Include an infographic that depicts how your product or service works, a Web design you have done, or something similar. You can explain how a product of process works far quicker with an image than with words and use less space while you’re at it.
Finally, use all the tools in your writing kit: Keywords, proper keyword placement, links to your site and that of your clients, formatting in lists and bullets, images with captions and filled in alt tags–the whole burrito.
