Ep 139 - How To Build A Case Study And How To Amplify It When You're Done

Case study is a great piece of marketing collateral that can work for your brand in many ways. Not only is it a great way to showcase your successful skills, but it is a good way to generate positive content for PR purposes including press releases, blogs, proactive pitching angles and more. 

We always recommend that you get early buy-in from customers at the contract stage of the process so that you have some ammunition going into a relationship. Listen more on how to maximize the use of your case study to develop more business and brand awareness.

To discover more - check out our latest blog post with in-depth analysis and hidden tactics used by the Pros...   Building case studies for PR | THE SILVER TELEGRAM

These ideas & tips will make you look like a PR hero to your customers and to your own team members. 

Be sure to like and subscribe for our next episode release.  

Transcript

 EPISODE 139 How to Build a case study and amplify it when you're done.

Ronjini Joshua: Welcome to episode 139, Sorry for the short break, I've had some personal issues come up and sometimes we have to take time for those. But today we are gonna be talking about how to build a case study and how to amplify it when you're done with it. There's so many reasons to build a customer case study specifically validation improve points for future customers, but it also builds brand awareness. You can also use it for press releases. So a case study is an amazing marketing tool that you can leverage for a public relations, which is why we actually also help our customers do case studies and get those completed. Now, I always tell people when you're talking to customers New entering new customer relationships, Try to get some of this PR case, study marketing, materials, kind of wedged into the contract so that there's no surprises later. Give your customer the intention that you are going to probably do

Ronjini Joshua: Some kind of public relations or marketing with them or you'd like to in the future, that's an extra bonus for them, but it also gives you more of a reason to excel at what you're doing in and your relationship with them. So I think it gives them a little bit more confidence as well. So I think having this plan up front when you're talking to customer. is a great way. To show them that you're invested. And then also you could say also we have these case studies from previous clients so other customers or clients have been invested in giving them case studies as well. It just kind of helps the whole situation. So first of all, identifying a case study is probably the first thing that you need to do. You can't necessarily do this when you first start a relationship. So you have to kind of wait about, I would say three to four months or when you get some solid milestone results from that initial work that you're doing that customer.

Ronjini Joshua: So, wait till you get those results, make sure that you have an established and positive relationship with that client. And when you start seeing it and usually for us, it's kind of like, hey we're getting all these great results. This would be a great case study of this particular thing that we do. obviously in PR It's like, this is a great media relations case study, or this is a great crisis management case study, or this is a great management and Great case study in reputation building. So you can identify it doesn't have to be all of your services. It could be a specialized part of your services or it could be all of your services and one. So identify what case study that you want this to be. The next thing that we do is we build a set of questions specific to that particular case. So you can always have a template to work off of and then you can adjust the questions as you need to.

Ronjini Joshua: Make sure that your questions are really specific. Then I either get for us. We are the PR agency that helps interview the client so you can get your PR agency or your marketing person or yourself to interview the client and kind of go over the questions. you probably have answers to milestones and data and the overall success. But you want to dig in to get a little bit more into their brain if you can get this on video, that's awesome. And sometimes they're open to doing a video case study but at the least, you can do a question A session via zoom or Google meets or whatever and ask them these critical questions of, why they selected Why they loved your product or service, for

Ronjini Joshua: the benefit of you guys, improving your services in the future. You might want to ask what they would like to see improved. And that could be something that maybe leave out of the case, study overall. But, ask them to dig into the deeper questions of why they feel that the relationship was successful, and then the metrics of what exactly resulted. So you want to have those metrics and if you create infographics or data the bigger, the better. If they're small numbers, you can actually manipulate them to sound different. So, let's say the number is 10. But previously, the number was zero, that's 1,000 percent return. So

Ronjini Joshua: you could play with these numbers a little bit to make them benefit you and then people don't typically ask for extreme detail. They just want to know that the customer is happy and the relationship was successful. I mean, that's really what it is. It's additional validation. So make sure you grab those answers and then create the story in the next step. And what we typically like to do is if we do interview a client, we'll do a press release if they're open to doing a press release. Now, some customers are not open doing practices because that is a formal announcement. That you have an agreement and sometimes they want to keep some of Their proprietary things, a secret, or they want to keep their special sauce, a secret. And you might be part of that special sauce. So

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Ronjini Joshua: What you can do is just say, Hey we're gonna produce this case study, we're gonna put it on our website, or Do you mind if our media team pitches this as an example? And so they might be open to doing interviews about it, to get them brand visibility, but maybe they don't necessarily want to do a press release about it. So, that could be an option too. And then you obviously put together the case, why of what happened in that case? And then create maybe a couple of assets that support it. have a couple of images, maybe a graphic on data if data is relevant to that particular case study and then I would definitely put it on your website if you are not allowed to

Ronjini Joshua: Published on your website. Maybe you can use it for email marketing. You can use it for proactive media pitching and you can use it for customer referrals or references. When someone asks you, a new potential client asks you for a reference. So those are the various ways that you might want to use that case study.

Ronjini Joshua: Then you have this, amazing piece. That's been approved. I would always float the case study by the customer just so they could check it out And you can even just give it to them as an FY. Just say, Hey, We finished our study in case you wanted to see it. Here it is, you're not really getting approval from them, right? You've already gotten the green light to make the case study. You don't need to get approval from them from that's really your marketing material. And then from there, like I said, you can do a blog post, a press release and the best case scenario. But if you can't, then you can do a proactive pitch angle reaching out to vertical markets or business markets depending on what the case study is about. And then I would also.

Ronjini Joshua: Try to enlist the spokesperson or your contact from that client to maybe do media interviews if they'd be open to or interested in doing media interviews. So as you can see there's a lot of different ways that you can maybe use a case study. I'll make sure to write this all in our blog. So you have a handy and can kind of review how to build that case study and how to amplify it when you're finished. I hope this was helpful as You can always send questions my way ronjini at the Silver Telegram and just as an FYI, you can join our DIY.

Ronjini Joshua: DIY PR for Startups group. We have a newsletter on LinkedIn. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, please join the newsletter group. I produce newsletters every Friday, and we're gonna be having a teachable session, that's going to be a teachable course. Sorry, that'll be coming out at the end of this month so stay tuned for the teachable. Course it will give you all the juicy little tidbits in details of how to do PR and your organization and pretty much the same style as this podcast. But with lots more detail and lots more tips and lots more access to myself to help you out and get you moving on, your R goals. Thanks for tuning in and we'll talk to you next time.

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