Importance Of Case Studies To B2B Business
Ratings, reviews and word-of-mouth play a very important role in B2C consumers’ decision-making. In similar ways, B2B clients bank on case studies when evaluating potential vendors they will work with.
Case studies are a collection of a business’ previous work that serves to exhibit their problem-solving capability. You can showcase various analysis and solutions that you have done for your previous clients.
More than just listing out your capabilities, case studies present actual numbers, details about the problem, and the value your business delivered. Including clients’ reviews or testimonials can also enhance the reliability of the account and act as a social proof to your services.
As a B2B business, here’s why case studies deliver value:
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Showcase your services
Case studies can give potential clients a clearer idea of what you can do and achieve beyond your specified job scopes or products and services. This is also done by adding a layer of realistic and contextual background to the information you are presenting.
Overall, case studies would help your potential clients go through their consumer journey, which for B2B businesses, often centres around vendor evaluation. By providing enough information and content, you would make your capabilities more apparent and make it easier for them to do their due diligence, giving them greater ease and all the more reason to choose you over others.
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Increase your credibility
Case studies offer greater credibility as they are written around real-life experiences and proof of your work, not just hypothetical anecdotes. With real, measurable performances and results, you are able to back the ‘promises’ your business makes with concrete evidence.
In addition, case studies can act as industry peer reviews where your clients can see how you solve similar problems that are particularly relevant to them. By incorporating direct quotes from your clients, you can benefit from this ‘word-of-mouth’, which is significant in boosting businesses’ credibility.
Such quotes convey your previous clients’ satisfaction with the results, because not only did they use your services in the past, but they are also pleased enough with your work to be included as a case study. These client relations can also serve as leverage to your business, especially if you worked with well-known clients whose apparent success can easily vouch for your performance.
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B2B storytelling
B2B storytelling might differ from the usual emotional and people-focused B2C storytelling, but many of the traditional storytelling principles still hold. At the core, you would want to explain the process of service delivery. You can show your thought process, the factors you considered and how you ultimately achieved the final solutions.
Furthermore, your previous customers can act as the subjects of the story, with whom your potential clients can identify and resonate. Instead of being all formal and filled with “hard facts,” you could insert some components of the emotional and experiential journey. By asking accurate questions that really speak to their concerns and challenges, they might see themselves in your previous clients and recognize the value that they can get by working with you.
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Content marketing
Case studies can certainly bring many benefits as a part of your content marketing strategy. You would be publishing original content that are specific to your business and cannot be easily replicated by your competitors.
While putting together a case study can require great effort, the main case study can be reused and repurposed in other forms such as: tips, interviews, articles, presentations or trivia facts, over an extended period of time. Together, using case studies as part of your content strategy can increase brand awareness as well as search engine optimization (SEO).
Things to watch out for when putting together your case studies:
- Don’t make it about you
Yes, you are essentially showcasing your capabilities, but you should shift the focus away from what you did to save your customers, to what you did to support them. Place the focus on them and how they successfully thrived with their efforts as well.
By positioning your customers as the hero of the story, you would empower them by making them feel and look good, a positive response you would want for your marketing strategy. Moreover, recounting the story from your customer’s perspective will definitely lend greater weight to your customer reviews and the overall case study.
- Clear delivery of the message
While you want them to stay interested, you have to be direct and straight-forward in conveying your points. You should present your information in ways that are easy-to-read or easy-to-digest, which is done by using attractive visuals, design and simpler language, instead of jargon-heavy big chunks of text.
Including clear infographics and headings/sub-headings can definitely help readers grasp the flow of the case studies (before and after; from problems to suggestions to results) better.
How To Develop An Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta
These days, it’s harder than ever for businesses to attract the attention of their audience. No matter how good the products or services are, there will always be hefty competition gunning for your customers. While it might be easy to start some sort of bidding war between you and your competition, it’s more effective to begin building a relationship with your audience to establish a sense of trust and thought leadership. You can do this with an effective content marketing strategy. A content strategy utilizes the content that your organization develops to achieve any particular business goals that you have in place, whether it’s driving brand awareness and engagement or pushing a new product. Below, we discuss how to develop an effective content marketing strategy to achieve your business goals.
Define Your Goal
First thing’s first, you need to define exactly why you will be developing content for your business. Why do you want to produce content? What will you hope to accomplish? What types of content will you use to achieve our goals? By answering a lot of these why questions, you will begin to define and establish a goal for your content marketing strategy.
Conduct Persona Research
After defining what you hope to accomplish with your content marketing strategy, you will need to clearly define your content’s target audience – the buyer persona. The buyer persona will be a fictionalized ideal of your best customer. When you know who you are writing to, it will make it much easier to conceptualize topics and put them in terms that your audience will understand.
Decide What Content You Will Create
As important as it is to understand who you are creating content for, it’s also important to decide what type of content you are hoping to create. Different pieces of content will accomplish different things, so you need to understand how each works. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most popular types of content:
- Blogs – A tried and true method of informing and educating your audience, the blog is as traditional as it gets in the digital era. However, it’s important to understand how effective blogs can be for lead generation and brand recognition for your organization.
- Videos – With the aid of technology, video production has never been more accessible or more cost-effective. Video is a great tool for simplifying complex topics and driving engagement and brand awareness.
- E-Books – As a long-form content piece, e-books are a great way to get very specific about different aspects of your organization. E-books are great for services, products,
- White Papers – When it comes to generating content about your industry as a whole, white papers are a great resource for your audience. Use statistics and pull quotes to support your copy.
- Email Campaigns – Email campaigns allow you to drive your audience directly to the website. You can keep your audience informed on the latest advances in your industry as well as any new innovations from your company.
Publish and Manage Content
Finally, you need to set up a publishing cadence for all of your content. Blogs are a weekly contribution, so it’s important to keep to the cadence that you set up. As for any other pieces of content, trial your pieces with A/B testing to figure out what works best. At the end of the day, finding a process that fits your business is more important than maintaining some sort of industry-wide consistency.
How Marketing Eye Can Help
Marketing Eye is a results-driven marketing agency that specializes in elevating the marketing efforts of small to medium-sized businesses. We work with you to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges your business faces and develop a marketing strategy that meets your needs. Our marketing experts are uniquely equipped to design an effective content strategy that achieves the goals of your organization. Contact Marketing Eye today to learn how we can help you.
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta