Case studies can get you high-quality leads. According to marketers, case studies are some of the most effective techniques to help you create winning content strategies. When buyers research a brand, product, or service, they mostly look at testimonials and reviews, but more importantly, they look for case studies that can help them understand how they work.
So, when incorporated effectively into your content strategies, case studies are essential tools that can help you win clients.
The Role of Case Studies in Content Marketing
Content marketing is a powerful and valuable tool that can help your business grow manifolds quickly. As a content marketer, you look at different ideas to promote your brands and devise strategies to bring them to life. In such cases, you can bank on case studies to create great content strategies that help your products sell.
Since the primary goal of a brand is to let customers know about their products or services, content marketing uses compelling content to connect with potential prospects that can convert to leads and bring in more business. Many resources are available to help promote your brands and products via content.
The point here is to deliver the message, and this is where compelling content strategies come in handy. Creating and executing a content strategy requires understanding the content marketing circle. The content marketing circle suggests the steps you need to take to execute your plan.
Here’s what the content marketing circle is all about.
1. | Create |
2. | Optimize |
3. | Publish |
4. | Promote |
5. | Measure |
6. | Link |
7. | SEO |
8. | Social Media |
The primary objective of the content marketing circle is to let customers know about your brands and products and, more importantly, the solutions they are looking for, develop a strategy, and deliver the content.
How to Use Case Studies to Create a Selling Content Strategy?
There are many ways case studies can help you craft excellent content marketing strategies that would want to make customers side with your brands. You can also share those case studies with consumers via different channels so that they know their value. If cost concerns you, determine which channels to use to get your case studies to your customers.
Here are a few ways to inform your customers about the case studies you created to promote your brands, products, and services.
- You can include case studies on your website.
- You can also incorporate them into your email marketing strategies.
- You can have them in your video marketing strategies.
- You can also add them to your blog.
- You can place case studies on your landing pages.
- You can even share them on social media.
- You can create e-books based on your case studies.
As you can see, there are many ways to incorporate case studies into your content strategies for better outreach. If you are a marketer looking to win more potential prospects that you think can convert to leads and boost business, you should promote them using different channels.
A Few Examples of Inspiring Content Marketing Case Studies
Educating customers about the brands and products and why they should buy them is one of the primary objectives of a content marketing strategy. Here are a few examples of case studies from top companies to better understand how they work.
- Lenovo
Lenovo is among the largest manufacturer of computers and peripherals. Their main product lines include desktops and laptops.
The company’s marketing team developed a content strategy to create awareness about its products and build consumer trust. The plan included creating content and distributing it using multiple channels. Lenovo also developed a platform that could help them in this process—a digital content hub called Tech Revolution. The content hub helped the tech giant deliver tech news and other information to the IT industry across Asia-Pacific.
Key decision-makers could use this information to attract and engage with their target customers. With this, Lenovo could generate leads and route them back to their website to reach their target audiences.
The strategy helped Lenovo position itself as a thought leader in the IT industry. The platform had 250 articles, which allowed them to get more than 34 million impressions and 308 clicks, not to mention, 170000 new users.
- Sales Force
Sales Force is among the most competent CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software providers in the IT industry and is one of the world’s most prominent CRM vendors. The company decided to change its content marketing strategy in the UK to boost business and increase paid traffic.
So, here’s what Sales Force did to deploy its content strategy to boost business in the UK.
- The company created entertaining videos about sales and marketing to engage with customers.
- They also came up with the world’s first stop-motion slide-sharing platform.
- Sales Force also developed a Prezi presentation that helped them showcase their customer success stories.
The CRM giant was able to achieve a lot from this campaign. For instance, there was an 80% boost in web traffic, where they could get 10,000 users to download their e-books. Besides that, the premier was able to get about 6,500 users to sign up for their emails and newsletters and a staggering 2,500% growth in traffic from social media.
Conclusion
The above two case studies prove that you must develop innovative content marketing campaigns to achieve staggering growth. The content marketing strategies of giants like Lenovo and SAP are highly successful. They have generated quality leads, showing that content marketing is a different league.
So, understanding content marketing strategies and, more importantly, why and how case studies come in handy for creating them can help your brands sell, get quality leads, and boost business.
How to Write the Perfect Content Marketing Srategy using Case Studies
Wondering what all the rage about a content marketing strategy is and how to write one with case studies? Read on! In this article, we talk at length about teh importance of a content marketing strategy, how to write one, and cover some unique examples of case studies which strengthen a strategy.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing refers to the creation and publication of content that provides value to a targeted customer segment. The content is usually free and aims at engaging customers with the brand with the ultimate goal of selling them a product/service.
A content marketing strategy refers to the plan and initiative a company makes to prepare for its content marketing efforts. This includes:
- Types of content to be produced
- Distribution of Way Content
- Targeting the right audience
These steps will ensure that your content marketing aligns with your business goals and objectives.
Why is it important to create a Content Marketing Strategy?
Although content marketing can be a powerful tool, it is important to plan carefully and if you plan it ahead of time, there’s a chance to reap many benefits.
Take a look at this table to see how a unique strategy can benefit your business.
What to do | How it helps |
Mantain consistency in messages | This will ensure that the material remains consistent with your business goals and prevents customers from being confused by inconsistencies. |
Know your target segment | Identifying your target customer segment and and understanding your target audience helps you understand how to market to them. This will result in more effective marketing that keeps customers coming back. |
Consistently produce content releases | Your content releases can be planned ahead of time, so you can plan your marketing channels and content type in advance. This will let customers know when new material is expected and simplifies your resource planning. |
Measure and track success | Content marketing strategy planning process allows you to define KPIs that will help measure the success of your campaigns. It is possible to identify what is working well and make adjustments where necessary. |
How do you build a content marketing strategy for your business?
- The Content Audit
If you don’t know your past, you can’t see where you are going. A content audit is the first step to creating your content strategy plan.
Gather all the content produced by your company, including keywords, blogs, websites, and social media. Next, create a content inventory spreadsheet to track how successful each element has been in your content strategy.
Take some time to review the results.
You’ll need to identify the content that was most popular and which didn’t. You can get an idea of the reasons for these outcomes.
- Determining Your Audience for Content Marketing
Now that the audit is complete, you can move on to the most important step in your content strategy development: the final. This is where you will need to clarify the purpose of your content strategy.
Although the purpose of a website is a broad topic, it boils down to two key elements: Who are you targeting with your content and What do you want them do with the information that you provide?
To see who is responding to which content, review the information you have compiled from your content audit. This will help you to realize that not all of the issues or trends in business may be relevant to your strategy today.
- Matching Content to Your Audience
Once you have identified your audience, it is time to think about the actions you want your content inspire.
Start with the content audit information to find out. Take a look at the content areas that were most successful and ask yourself these questions:
What message does this content convey?Who are these messages directed towards?Why was this piece so successful?
These messages still resonate with the right audience.
You can start to develop your content messages by analysing what content was most successful with which audience.
- Create Your Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar, in short, is the document that gives everyone involved in the content effort the information they need to create, deliver, and promote your content strategy plan.
Your editorial calendar must answer the crucial questions of ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ as well as ‘when’. ‘Why’. Who is responsible for creating, posting and promoting the content? Are you targeting customers, prospects, or the entire market?What? What is the purpose of the content? What information should it contain and what action do you want the reader take? All these questions are important.
- Monitoring and Reporting on Your Success
We have been pointing out that sharing your content strategy with other people in your company will help you to get their support and show how it supports other marketing initiatives. It is important to maintain that spirit of collaboration during the reporting process.
Ask your company what metrics are most important and make sure you have the data.
Do case studies help with content marketing strategies?
A case study is a detailed analysis of a situation in order to show an effect. Generally, this involves showcasing the client before, during and after your services were rendered. You might write a case about a client who was having trouble selling. This will show the results of your sales consulting efforts. You could also take well-known names as an example.
For instance, Asana leads with their impact. They include basic information about their clients on the right side of the page to give reader quick bite-sized background information. In another case study, Shopify included a video and multiple images of Bombas products in their case study. This allowed both companies to benefit from the case study, potentially generating customer interest in Bombas socks.
If case studies are relevant to your industry, they should be a part of your content marketing strategy!