What is a Case Study?
To define what a case study is and how to best utilize it in your marketing strategy: a case study is a real-life “experiment” used to provide evidence on how and why a consumer should use a brand’s product. Promoting this data in case studies can be a great way to market your product because the goal of a case studies is for consumers to gain more knowledge and insight about the product and its benefits.
Essentially, a case study is a tool that businesses use to tell a story about customers’ perspectives on the results they should expect with product use.
Define a Target Audience
Before it’s time to create a case study, take some time to think about who your target audience might be. Defining your target audience is a critical step in creating a successful case study because without knowing who your consumers are, how else are you supposed to market your product?
Things to consider when defining your target audience:
- What is your product, and what type of person would benefit from it?
- Understand your demographics and find patterns in age, gender, location, hobbies, political affiliation, occupation, and socioeconomic status. Finding repetitive consumer patterns will help give you a better understanding of who is buying your product.
- Analyze your competitor’s demographics – Are they similar?
Creating a Case Study
When it’s time for the construction of a case study, always remember who your target audience is. Once your audience is defined, then you can start the first step.
- Ask insightful questions to your audience.
- Receiving feedback, both positive and negative, is a great starting point to see where your product stands in the opinion of your audience.
- With this feedback, make necessary adjustments that best fit your consumer.
- Designate a format for the case study. Choose one of the formats below that might work best for your case study report.
- Report format
- One-page report
- Video format
- Infographic
- Write the case study.
- Introduce the consumer
- Introduce the problem
- Introduce the product and how it acts as a solution
- Highlight the results from the product
- Provide evidence the product works with valid reasoning
- Conclude with a ‘call-to-action.’
Once you complete these three steps, go back and edit your draft. Make corrections and add visual elements to make the case study just as aesthetically pleasing as it is informative. Remember, a case study should be short and to the point. Implementing charts, graphs, quotes, and images is a great way to break up the text and humanize the product in an enticing way – grabbing the attention of the reader.
The next time you are struggling to find a marketing strategy that works for you, develop a case study and be sure to follow these steps!