How to create a case study the right way (focusing on your champion buyer)
build trust with prospects, establish differentiators, and get your champion buyer closer to the deal
Let’s be real: How many of your prospects are actually influenced by your case studies? Ten? Five? Zero? Does your champion buyer even comes across this case study ever during the discovery to conversion funnel? What happens once the case study is published? Does your sales team have a roadmap for it?
Premise
In my experience of working with early/growth stage startups and B2B MarTech enterprises, there’s one thing that almost always comes across about case studies: “we want them to act as our social proof and stand as strong testimonials on our owned channels (think: website).” There’s nothing wrong with the goal here. I’d go as far as to say, it’s the perfect S.M.A.R.T goal for case studies, regardless of your company’s growth stage, niche, and audience.
The problem is, there’s not much thought given into how to actually use these case studies as bottom-funnel assets (which most agencies and fractional marketing managers claim it is).
Just because you’re interviewing your customer and sharing their story on your owned channel (and possibly a URL on LinkedIn too), it doesn’t “automatically” qualify as a bottom-funnel content asset. Neither does it work as intended — drive qualified prospects closer to the funnel.
Customer case studies should be designed for three things:
1/ Your brand’s messaging
2/ Your brand’s differentiator
2/ Your buying teams’ objections
Sure, customer case studies are great for strengthening relationships with your existing customers. But they’re a time-intensive, resource-consuming, and expensive asset to build. You need them to work across channels, teams, and goals to make them worth their while.
And remember, if your product sucks for a customer, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later and your case study wouldn’t be the hanging thread in your relationship anymore. It’s a nice add-on, but it won’t save a churning customer if there’s no product-need fit anymore.
Here’s what’s covered in this edition of the The Content Playbook Newsletter:
👩🏻 How to create a case study for your champion buyers and communicate your product’s value
🪜How to build a case study process that doesn’t suck
🕒 How to shorten case study approval timelines, what questions to ask your customers, and stakeholder management for complex case studies
How to create a case study for your champion buyers
3 things to focus on when creating a case study for your champion buyer
Before we dive in to the good part, I want to define champion buyers — who are they, what they do, and why they are important target readers for case studies.
Champion buyer is the person who spearheads the decision-making process by actively researching solutions for their needs, booking demos, taking notes, comparing different solutions, and ultimately, communicating the value of the chosen solution to the broader decision-making team.
When you create case studies, it’s important to write for your champion buyer. This means, you’re writing for someone who already has the intent to purchase, affinity towards your brand (maybe your solution came up in G2’s or Gartner’s recommendations), and is considering moving a step closer to the purchasing decision.
Things are looking great till this stage. Now, you can use customer case studies to further propel your champion buyer to 1) move closer to booking a demo request or 2) understand your product’s value during a sales call.
Without further ado, let’s head into the three core things you should focus on when creating a customer case study for your champion buyer:
1. Forklift your messaging by focusing on product-prospect fit, not product-market fit
Heads up: If you have an incredibly narrow ICP (ideal customer profile), feel free to skip this part. But if you cater to more than one verticals/audiences/challenges, this part is important.
When I joined a B2B MarTech enterprise org as their Content Head of APAC & SEA, they had minimal (read zero) content functions in the region. Sure, they had a U.S. marketing team that used to create great content (including customer case studies).
The problem was these customer case studies didn’t resonate with our specific region’s prospects even though they had amazing product-market fit because 1) they were designed with a one-size-fits-all approach 2) substantially lacked in communicating the value & differentiator that was critical for APAC & SEA brands.
This org was catering to at least 7-8 different verticals. So, building a content positioning strategy from the ground up for such a diverse and broad ICP was….tough (freaking tough). And then nailing it down to how individual content assets would be designed to align with our key content positioning strategy was even tougher.
But things got easier once I got the product, customer, sales, and marketing team together. Once I had a solid idea of who the champion buyers are and what are their most pressing challenges/objections, I created a case study process that would help me execute ideas faster, generate interest from our champion buyers, and
Let’s flip this on you for a hot second so you know exactly what I mean.
Imagine you’re a mobile linking and attribution tool catering to two different verticals: retail and quick-service restaurants (QSRs).
Here’s what a quick brief on your champion buyer would look like:
Champion buyer: performance marketers
Goals(s):
Retail - reliable attribution to understand what offline and online channels drive most growth and double down on them
QSRs- drive growth to its own mobile app, while minimizing dependency on super apps (UberEats if you’re from U.S./ Zomato if you’re from APAC)
Great, you’ve got all the context now. Let’s take a look at how you would go on to create customer case studies for product-prospect fit that appeal to your champion buyer.
When you set out to create customer case studies, imbibe your champion buyers’ goals throughout to establish a product-prospect fit.
For example, if your customer is KFC and they adopted your solution to drive growth for their own app, set a strong narrative about how and why KFC adopted your product. From its discovery to implementation, before and after, technical objections — integrate all of this information in your case study via text and visuals. This would then go on to be a perfect bottom-funnel asset for moving the champion buyer of Pizza Hut a step closer to the final conversion.
If you’re creating a case study about Target U.S., create compelling graphs that show how they were able to track attribution across their offline and online channels. Add as much context as you possibly can to educate the champion buyer of a prospect like Walmart. Talk about any seasonal sales (black friday, new years, back to school) where they used your product to identify their winning channels and doubled down on it.
Once you understand the art of messaging and designing content for product-prospect fit, you’ll be able to create resonance with your prospects better and faster. They’ll be able to see themselves in your customers’ shoes and go “Oh yes! We have struggled with this same challenge last year and we just couldn’t figure out a good solution.”
So your champion buyer knows they have a pain point and probably goes a lot deeper and impacts the bottom line more than they knew. But, there are other solutions (your competitors) out there, so WHY YOU?
2. Differentiator that showcases your product’s value
Establishing differentiators throughout a customer case study is crucial. They help you communicate your product’s value to your champion buyer, clearly highlight where your product sits in the market, and what gaps do you fill in.
This also means, sometimes (most of the times), you’ll have to paint a clear before and after picture on how your customer tried using another solution but couldn’t solve their challenges or drive enough ROI for it to be sustainable.
And before you go all “But we want to be the bigger person and not name our competitors, and we don’t want to look down on our competition, yada yada yada.” hear me out.
Differentiators help build an alignment between your champion buyers’ needs and your product. It’s not simply mentioning your competitors’ names in customer case studies and saying “WE ARE THE BEST”. It’s about educating your champion buyers with testimonials, social proof, and strong metrics on how your product is more ideal for their needs and goals.
So let’s say if you’re competing against Salesforce and you know it’s the best option for your champion buyer, reeling them in with your product that doesn’t align completely with their needs will lead them to churn sooner or later. You don’t want that.
What you want is for your customer case study to serve as an evergreen content asset that clearly highlights your differentiator and influences champion buyers that are an ideal fit.
3. Handling objections for the broader decision-making team
Matthew Dixon conducted a large-scale study of more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations — spanning both transactional and complex sales — and found that anywhere between 40% and 60% of deals today end up lost to customers who express their intent to purchase, but ultimately fail to act.
These customers will often go through the entire sales process — consuming valuable seller time and organizational resources, perhaps even engaging in extended pilots or proof-of-concept trials — only to end up not crossing the finish line.
So many deals are lost because of customer indecision. Customer indecision is driven by a separate and distinct psychological effect called the omission bias, which, in this context, is the customer’s desire to avoid taking action that might lead to a loss (ref).
So, how can you use customer case studies to sell in such an incredibly tough market? How do you help your champion buyer transform from a state of indecisiveness to committed to your product?
By handling objections for the broader team.
Look, if you nail the first two steps — forklift your messaging and establish your differentiator — you’ll have successfully communicated your product’s value to your champion buyer. But, there’s a much larger buying committee involved behind-the-scenes that could ruin your deal in an instant and your champion buyer would then be left alone to vote for your product (failed deal!).
Let your customer case studies be an opportunity to handle objections. For instance, you already know the C-level exec is primarily concerned about the numbers (ROI). And the tech team wants the new tool to integrate with everything they’re already using. And there’s also an expectation of onboarding and training.
Answer as much as you possibly can in your customer case studies. To go a level deeper, when you’re interviewing your customers, ask the objections their team had. This would give you visibility into not just the broader objections prospects have, but more specific, nuanced questions they have around your product.
How to build a sustainable and repeatable case study process
For this part, I did a quick interview with Joel Klettke, Founder of Case Study Buddy. He helps mid-size to enterprise companies scale their case study and video testimonial production and transform every customer story into a full campaign’s worth of content (written, video, social, etc).
Safe to say, Joel knows a lot about creating case studies (he has delivered thousands of them, worked with multiple companies, interviewed customers across verticals).
When asked about what’s the single biggest challenge brands face when creating case studies, Joel said, “There’s a complete and total lack of internal processes and clear accountabilities for the stories. They don’t have an SOP or any clarity on who should be involved or what they should handle.”
And I strongly agree. In my experience of working with early/growth stage startups and enterprises, I’ve seen case studies being tossed around like they’re another “blog.” Since there’s no SEO research involved in case studies, writers are simply given the transcript of the customer interview and asked to fill in a template of “challenge, solution, result.”
With this part of the edition, I aim to share the framework that helps brands create a better case study process — right from qualifying the right customers to interview to helping writers ask better questions and establishing clear POCs for easier communication.
Let’s dive in.
Step 1: Create a qualification criteria
Context: Your CMO wants you to focus on the high ticket-size logos that give you market pull. Your product team wants you to promote your latest product update/new feature. Your head (or director) of marketing wants you to interview all the event attendees and create case studies.
Every team has a different goal they’re trying to achieve within an org and when this happens, there’s a lot of confusion (chaos) around what to prioritize. And when it comes to content assets, especially case studies, there’s no playbook. But when you have a qualification criteria that’s tried and tested in terms of conversion, market pull, organic growth, and pipeline, that’s it! You hit jackpot.
Joel also suggests to look at the potential impact of the stories based on the most urgent needs of the overall business and the most significant overlap across goals between teams. Asking questions like “What stories will be most instrumental in achieving or closing the gap on those goals?” is the starting point, says Joel.
Strategy: Analyze which case studies worked best and the common themes across them — were they around specific products, did they come from big, global brands everyone recognizes leading to a natural brand affinity towards you, or were they just promoted better? Do this on a quarterly basis and create a list of customers you want to interview.
Make sure you involve success reps early on in this process to double-check you’re chasing the right customers.
Tactics:
Speak with your director of marketing/CMO to figure out what are the factors you need to take in account for when selecting customers for case studies.
Case studies are a time sink, only when chased at the wrong time though. Plan your case studies around quarterly/yearly renewals — this gives an added boost to your customers’ media presence while building a better relationship.
If your org hosts annual/industry awards, that’s a great time to reach out to customers. Invite them on your podcast, plan co-marketing activities, or co-write a thought leadership piece. Imbibe your case study as an add-on or a standalone activity then.
If your org hosts VIP events, network with customers, ask them to participate in surveys/reviews (keep it as simple as possible — could be a “hey, how is X working for you? Would you like me to communicate any feedback to the team so we can make this better?” If they’re happy and willing, ask them if you could publish a case study with them as the HERO in it.
Again, you could always go to Salesforce and segment customers vertical-wise/category-wise/product-wise/ticket-size to figure out who you want to reach out to.
Maintain an active spreadsheet with details around your qualification criteria, who you’re planning to interview in the upcoming quarter, and other relevant info. Share it with key internal stakeholders.
Step 2: Automate case study admin tasks
Context: You schedule a call, record it, ask your writing team to manually take down important notes, create multiple docs (a client version and an internal version), collect data and screenshots, follow up on emails, get internal reviews, more reviews, and finally wait for a sign off from the customer.
The process of creating a case study is freaking long and I’m surprised how many people don’t talk about it. There are so many steps you could automate in between of these stages (interview to publishing) to reduce burden on your team and improve publishing velocity.
Strategy: Focus on automating the admin tasks most — kicking off new projects once the recording is done, automatically sending emails for first review/data collection from customer success, or dynamic document creation.
The idea is to reduce as many manual (and irrelevant but time consuming) tasks you possibly can so your writers can focus on crafting a better narrative, your review committee is kept in the loop, and the overall time to publish is shortened.
Tactics:
Build a lean and mean tech stack: Zoom/Google Meet,Otter.ai, Asana/Notion, Zapier (to create subtasks automatically like create a google doc, assign a writer/strategist to extract important information etc)
Add your marketing pod in case studies after it reaches a certain stage. So, if you have a graphic designer, let Asana automatically assign them a task to create case study assets after it has marked as “ready for design”. Note: Set timelines mindfully - you don’t want to have a full-fledged design kit fleshed out before you get the actual sign-off from your customer.
Assign important stakeholders based on teams and product usage: dedicated AE or customer success, product head/product marketers, lifecycle marketers.
Step 3: Build a centralized use-case repository
Context: Imagine if you could have a deck with all of your customers’ screenshots of product flows in action. It would be such a time-saver. Not just for case studies, but for other content assets too — think blogs, newsletters, social media posts, pillar posts, webinars, trainings and workshops.
When you create case studies, you’re actively collecting data first-hand from your customer and your internal teams. Store it. Secure it. Share it.
Strategy: Create a centralized use-case repository or an SSOT (single source of truth) that internal team members can refer to. Use this for inspiration, content ideas, and distribution.
Tactics:
Create a simple Canva or Google Slides deck to collect all the use-cases of your product. Learn and explore what your “product in the wild™” looks like.
Structure your repository with organized categories and industry segments. This ensures that use cases are easily navigable, and teams can quickly find relevant content based on their needs.
Integrate version control features to track updates and changes. This ensures that teams are working with the latest and most accurate information, reducing the risk of using outdated content.
Define user permissions to control access levels. Different teams and individuals may have varied needs for the information, so tailor access rights accordingly to maintain data security.
Make sure you include a bold visual element that states whether an asset is permitted to be used or not. Sometimes, you’ll have approved assets from customers, other times you might be collecting “product in the wild” visuals from your company’s Slack channels.
Develop user guides or documentation that outlines how teams can effectively utilize the use-case repository. This ensures that everyone understands the structure, purpose, and functionalities of the repository.
Foster a culture of contribution, encouraging teams to add valuable insights, customer interactions, and new use cases to the repository. This ensures the repository remains dynamic and grows over time.
How to shorten case study approval timelines
“An ounce of planning is worth a pound of begging. Shorten timelines by properly priming the customer with the story you want to tell, the metrics you’d like to cover, and a potential launch date - before they ever get on the call. This gives them a chance to come prepared and run potential issues past their stakeholders. Stay consistent in follow-up, and make sure whoever is creating the story is deeply immersed in the context of the relationship: they need more than a transcript, they need a brief”, says Joel and I couldn’t agree more.
More marketers get caught up in case study approvals & reviews than you could imagine. From your customers’ legal to ops, HR, director of product/marketing, and sometimes even CEO, reviews and approvals can be painfully long…
Joel further adds “Brands need to have some structured conversations internally between sales/CSMs and marketing to get on the same page in terms of story strategy, accountabilities/ownership through the process, and the final formats to produce, and then translate those conversations into SOPs and ongoing connection points to keep aligned and keep their programs humming.”
Combining the advice from Joel and my own marketing experience, here are some of the best practices I recommend to keep approval timelines short and sweet:
If you have an internal content review team, make sure you mark your case study as “important” so they know it is indeed important. Such committees are usually pulled in different directions and it’s easy for your email to get lost in a sea of other blog, newsletter, podcast script, event invitation, or whitepaper draft approvals — make sure yours is marked as time-sensitive.
Encourage parallel reviews: this is a mistake I did for the longest time. I used to keep waiting for one person to review and then move on to the next. After a couple of months I knew i could no longer sustain this and started parallel review requests. Surprisingly, reviews went faster, edits went crazy down, and customers got the draft at least a week before the deadline..
Create an escalation plan in case if it’s a big client that has a big ass team (more so, if they’ve got a Harvey Spectre legal team).
Create a conditional approval system for your internal team review committee: when i was working as the Content Head at my previous org, there were times I got notes saying, “Signing off - this looks good. but if we could get this one extra metric/detail, that would make it GREAT.” If I could get my hands on the requested addition, great! If not, I still knew it could go to publishing without further approvals or updates to the commentator.
If there’s PR involved, get your company’s PR team to create a press release asap and share it with the customer. More often than not, you’ll notice the customer’s PR team lagging behind or asking for multiple revisions, which leads to unexpected delays. A lot of marketers send PR as an add-on doc at the end, right before publishing - don’t do this.
Have simple design templates you can plug and play in different case studies
Make sure you clearly communicate timelines and there’s a mutual understanding on the target final publishing date.
Work with the AE or whoever is closest to the customer to be actively chasing the client in case your follow ups go unresponsive.
Here’s what questions you should ask for creating case studies
And how to tweak them based on different verticals
Part 1: Flashbacks and flashforwards
Get more context on what’s the backstory of a customer, what led them to make a decision to buy your product/service, and follow along their journey AFTER they’ve implemented your product/service...
Use flashcards
Use these flashcards to craft an authentic dialogue that reveals your customer’s story — the hardships, objections, assumptions, hypothesis, dicovery, activation, ROI, gaining momentum — all of it..
The objective is to break down every single touchpoint/action they took in the process of becoming a paid customer. Whether they were a freemium customer or discovered your product on LinkedIn, these flashback cards make it easier to map out their entire journey from scratch so you can craft a stronger narrative for your case study..
some more context on why we’re using flashcards....
The goal is to go beyond attribution tools and UTM tags to get more context on why exactly your customer chose to become your customer.
were they a consumer of your freemium model?
if yes, what was the series of campaigns that led them to move to a paying model?
if no, how did they go from discovery to final activation?
These questions will help your team understand:
how your product is positioned in a customer’s tech stack?
how do you fare against your competitors apart from your own SEO research?
what features are your customers’ top favorites?
(psst...if you cater to various verticals [think retail, RMG, travel, ecommerce, QSRs] you can identify industry-specific top features and share that data w/d lifecycle marketing teams)
Part 2: Adaption and implementation fit
Adaptation and implementation fit isn’t just limited to figuring out the placement of your product within your customer’s existing tech stack.
It’s also about:
how does the product integrate with other tools in the customer’s tech stack?
is the product compatible with commonly used platforms and technologies?
in what ways does the product enhance or complement the functionality of existing systems?
how does data flow between the product and other components of the tech stack?
are there any challenges or complexities in the integration process?
Tech stack positioning template
This is more of a one-off exercise for each vertical. So, if you’re writing a case study for a retail customer (eg: Target), conducting this (thorough) research just once should help you understand how exactly your tool fits in a niche ecosystem. More often than not, other retail customers would also be using your tool in a similar fashion. What would differ is “HOW” they use your tool (more on this in the next section).
Part 3: Narrative and context setting
No two stories are the exact same, and this holds even more true for case studies. Regardless of your customers being in the same vertical/niche, ticket size, products usage category, how they actually use your product is almost always unique.
Position your customer as the protagonist, not your brand.
Your protagonist — their choices, goals, objections, struggles, and transformations — create the crux of your story. Bring them at the dead center of your story and branch out your arguments from there.
Here are some interesting storytelling techniques you can use to craft a better, stronger narrative..
Storytelling techniques
There are tons of storytelling techniques out there, but these are my favorite ones for crafting case study narratives.
I could give you 100 questions on narrative and context setting and it still wouldn’t be “one-size-fits-all”. Instead, I’ll leave you with 5 core questions you could ask any customer, regardless of their niche/products purchased, to help you develop a unique premise and stronger narrative.
What challenges were you facing before our product and how was it impacting the day-to-day ops of your team?
Could you walk me through the journey of discovery to implementation?
What are your favorite features and how do they bring value to you in both qualitative and quantitative sense?
Could you specify 1-2 instances where our product helped you drive great results?
Looking ahead, what are your organization's future plans in terms of leveraging our product? Are there upcoming projects or expansions where our solution will play a key role?
Part 4: Measurable impact and ROI
Companies are always reluctant giving out metrics and data. They need approvals from higher-ups and there’s always a “but there were other tools that helped us achieve this growth and we can’t attribute it to you completely..”
Things can get tricky if you don’t have the right metrics. Your internal team will be pushing you to get numbers that position your product as a growth driver. On the other hand, your customer might be handing off slightly vague metrics because of internal pushback.
At this moment, you need to be careful around how you intertwine your story and data. Your narrative will heavily influence whether your draft gets external stakeholder approvals or not. More importantly, it’ll affect what and how you can include metrics in your case study.
Make sure before you hit send, you get it reviewed internally from the committee or a single POC who knows the entire background of your customer. If your customer is reluctant in sharing exact numbers publicly, chat with them to figure out an alternative metric (you’ll be surprised how easily this can be solved if both parties work together).
But in case you need some reference questions around measurable impact and ROI, here are some starters for you:
What specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) were you tracking before implementing our solution, and how have they changed since?
Can you quantify the financial impact our product has had on your organization? This could include cost savings, revenue increase, or any other measurable financial outcomes.
How has the adoption of our product influenced time efficiency within your team or organization? Are there specific processes that have become more streamlined or accelerated?
Have you observed any changes in user productivity since implementing our solution? This could include faster task completion, reduced manual effort, or increased output.
In what ways has our product facilitated scalability for your organization? Have you been able to easily expand operations without significant disruptions?
How has the implementation of our solution influenced your customer acquisition cost? Have you seen any improvements in cost-effectiveness in acquiring new customers?
Stakeholder management for complex case studies
Depending on your customer’s profile, popularity, and product implementation, a case study could be simple or complex.
For example, if I were to interview an early/growth stage startup where founders are actively doing sales outreach (still) and sales is also serving as success & support, I could be looking at shorter review/approval times. They’d also most probably remember me and my time since there’s less internal hand-off.
Contrarily, if I were to interview a Series E funded enterprise org where there are 7 stages of approvals and 4 different teams involved, I could be looking at strangers emailing me or other folks in my team, unaware of who’s responsible for what, when’s something due, and more.
To overcome this, follow this simple tactic: share point of contacts (POCs) in the first email as soon as you start communication over email (pre- or post- interview call). Having proper POCs your customer can reach out to for specific questions will make collaboration easier and faster.
Primary POCs: Head of marketing/content and the writer
Secondary POCs: Customer success or account executive
Creating case studies is tough, and while this process may seem a bit extraa, it’ll help you build a repeatable process that your entire writing team can replicate with minimal to zero hand-holding — all while crafting a unique narrative that directly speaks to your champion buyers and drives measurable pipeline.
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