What’s the best way to show your customers how you can solve their problem?
By showing them how you solved the problem for someone else.
And not only are you showing how you can solve a problem, you’re also giving customers an insight into your little world, how you work and what they can expect from you. Whether it’s a particular way of working or a process you use, they can get to know more about your business and hopefully want to work with you.
Show you understand your customers
A case study can help to show understanding – you understand a customers problems and issues and have come up with a solution that has worked in the past.
Reassure your customers
You can reassure your customers that a similar problem have occurred for other people and it’s been successfully resolved.
Potential customers will empathise with the problem – not only are there other people with the same issue, but it’s been sorted out. Could the same solution work for them?
Help sell your products or services
If you have a sales person or team, a good case study can gives them confidence and proof that your business can deliver results when they’re selling. It’s a useful reminder and confidence booster for sole traders too. Yes, you’ve done a great job and helped your customers.
Tell your business story
You can tell the story from start to finish. Often the finished product or service doesn’t show the journey the client has been on. You can explain how you understood your customers challenge, how you implemented a particular solution and how you resolved their issue. And as a result you have a very happy customer!
Give your customers confidence
Customers need to be sure they’re making the right decision – they don’t want to be wasting their time or money, or both. A good case study can help give your customer the confidence to take the next step towards solving their problem.
Build trust with your customers
By showing your expertise and trustworthiness, you can build up trust.
Be relevant to your customers
Remember to be relevant to your specific audience – each potential customer needs to identify themselves in the case study. You may need to produce a number of different ones if you have customers with a range of different problems.
Show Return on Investment
A case study can show the benefits of your solution – you’ve saved your customer time, money, space, lost inches, improved health, improved their life in some way – what it is your business does.
I’m not just talking about B2B – you might be a florist who created the perfect bridal bouquet or a nutritionist who helped a client with a health issue.
Inexpensive marketing
It’s a fairly cost effective way of marketing. You’ve already done the work so just remember to take pictures and then it’s the time/cost of writing the document.
Build future business relationships
You can send the case study to your customer as thank you and it can help grow your business relationship and potentially lead to future referrals.
What next?
Once you have your case studies written you can use them in a number of ways – as a blog post, on your website, as a social media post, part of your newsletter, in your email signature or even create a video.
Let me know in the comments if you use case studies in your marketing or if I’ve inspired you to do so!
Liz x
