What are case studies or success stories?
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 6:19 am
When it comes to consolidating businesses and motivating transactions that have a value proposition, trust is an important attraction. Therefore, generating it should be a priority for those companies that are dedicated to offering a product or service to the market. How is this trust generated today within inbound marketing and how have case studies or success stories contributed to it?
Without a doubt, success stories, case studies or business cases have been used to reflect those experiences in which the acquisition of a product or service has had a positive effect both qualitatively and quantitatively in a real environment, with the aim of attesting to its success in the market and in the daily lives of its users and buyers.
Defining: What are success stories?
In this sense, one of the most commonly used arguments by companies to gain the trust of their customers is success stories. Success stories , as their name easily suggests, are real-life situations that show how a product or service has been a great success, either because it satisfies a need or provides an important solution in the life of a community or target audience.
Success stories will depend greatly on the depth with which they wish to be treated, the messages that the company wishes to convey and its track record in the market. However, some common characteristics can be established in the case studies that have been used by companies, including:
They present a problem or a need that was solved thanks to a particular task (how were the company's services contracted? How did the problem evolve? How was it resolved?)
Include brief testimonials from satisfied customers
They emphasize figures, statistics and data that legitimize the results obtained.
They rely on both audiovisual tools (videos) and text ( whitepapers ).
Success stories serve to convince people that our services or products are the best solution to a problem, but told from the perspective of our clients. In a success story, the client must be the star and as such, it must be that person who tells in first person the obstacles or difficulties they encountered before implementing our solution and the benefits they obtained after it.
Redundancy aside: How to create a successful case study?
Now that we know what this business strategy is based on, it is important to know the basic concepts that will allow us to create effective and highly impactful success stories . Inbound marketing and content marketing specialists recommend using storytelling to create a success story that not only contains important information for users but also has a characteristic narrative.
In this sense, a case study should be structured as if it were a story, that is, an experience that you want to tell (in this case told from the experience of a client). To do this, we recommend that you base yourself on the following parameters:
Approach: This is the presentation of the problems and needs that your clients had before using our product or service.
Knot: In this part we must talk about the search and discovery of the solution by your client, for example, after implementing a technological platform designed to meet their need.
Conclusion: You should always conclude with a description of the benefits or advantages obtained (quality of life, increased productivity, savings, scalability, etc.) using data that validates this information.
The importance of success stories in inbound marketing
When people are about to make a purchase, the first thing they do is research, either online or with friends, how the product or service has worked for other people. The buyer's journey is a tool that the inbound marketing methodology relies on to find out exactly when a buyer is: whether in the consideration, recommendation and decision stages.
Success stories are very useful in the last two stages of the buyer's journey because they are an incentive that motivates them to complete a purchase. In inbound marketing , success stories are considered content offers that are offered to customers when they are in the recommendation stage of the purchasing process, where they mainly evaluate the options available on the market to solve their needs. Thus, the case allows the user to identify with other customers who have turned to the same company.
It also works in the decision-making stage , as case studies are an experienc cellphone number philippines e that has already been proven, legitimizing the acquisition of that service or purchase. H2H (human to human) connections are essential when promoting a case study , since according to studies, 88% of consumers trust online reviews in the same way they trust the opinions of acquaintances.
On the other hand, Search Engine Land conducted a survey in which 85% of respondents said they read up to 10 reviews on the Internet before deciding on an option on the market, that is, they look at options that legitimize a service and/or product. This shows us how people reinforce a purchase stimulus when receiving a recommendation from another person, because case studies are nothing more than an attractive way to express a recommendation.
For the general public, these cases end up being convincing because they trust the opinions of a company's customers more than those of a salesperson. Personal opinions generally create empathy and connect better with audiences. However, according to some studies in Latin America, 64% of consumers trust recommendations from professionals or opinion leaders, so at least these recommendations tend to stand out more if the source who issues them is impartial, objective and professional.
In this way, case studies represent important tools that allow us to provide valuable content, legitimize the quality of a service, promote a purchase, close a sale and obtain a client. In inbound marketing, they acquire great importance because they connect deeply with the philosophy of this methodology, which has as its main objective: to educate above selling by offering useful and valuable content.
Without a doubt, success stories, case studies or business cases have been used to reflect those experiences in which the acquisition of a product or service has had a positive effect both qualitatively and quantitatively in a real environment, with the aim of attesting to its success in the market and in the daily lives of its users and buyers.
Defining: What are success stories?
In this sense, one of the most commonly used arguments by companies to gain the trust of their customers is success stories. Success stories , as their name easily suggests, are real-life situations that show how a product or service has been a great success, either because it satisfies a need or provides an important solution in the life of a community or target audience.
Success stories will depend greatly on the depth with which they wish to be treated, the messages that the company wishes to convey and its track record in the market. However, some common characteristics can be established in the case studies that have been used by companies, including:
They present a problem or a need that was solved thanks to a particular task (how were the company's services contracted? How did the problem evolve? How was it resolved?)
Include brief testimonials from satisfied customers
They emphasize figures, statistics and data that legitimize the results obtained.
They rely on both audiovisual tools (videos) and text ( whitepapers ).
Success stories serve to convince people that our services or products are the best solution to a problem, but told from the perspective of our clients. In a success story, the client must be the star and as such, it must be that person who tells in first person the obstacles or difficulties they encountered before implementing our solution and the benefits they obtained after it.
Redundancy aside: How to create a successful case study?
Now that we know what this business strategy is based on, it is important to know the basic concepts that will allow us to create effective and highly impactful success stories . Inbound marketing and content marketing specialists recommend using storytelling to create a success story that not only contains important information for users but also has a characteristic narrative.
In this sense, a case study should be structured as if it were a story, that is, an experience that you want to tell (in this case told from the experience of a client). To do this, we recommend that you base yourself on the following parameters:
Approach: This is the presentation of the problems and needs that your clients had before using our product or service.
Knot: In this part we must talk about the search and discovery of the solution by your client, for example, after implementing a technological platform designed to meet their need.
Conclusion: You should always conclude with a description of the benefits or advantages obtained (quality of life, increased productivity, savings, scalability, etc.) using data that validates this information.
The importance of success stories in inbound marketing
When people are about to make a purchase, the first thing they do is research, either online or with friends, how the product or service has worked for other people. The buyer's journey is a tool that the inbound marketing methodology relies on to find out exactly when a buyer is: whether in the consideration, recommendation and decision stages.
Success stories are very useful in the last two stages of the buyer's journey because they are an incentive that motivates them to complete a purchase. In inbound marketing , success stories are considered content offers that are offered to customers when they are in the recommendation stage of the purchasing process, where they mainly evaluate the options available on the market to solve their needs. Thus, the case allows the user to identify with other customers who have turned to the same company.
It also works in the decision-making stage , as case studies are an experienc cellphone number philippines e that has already been proven, legitimizing the acquisition of that service or purchase. H2H (human to human) connections are essential when promoting a case study , since according to studies, 88% of consumers trust online reviews in the same way they trust the opinions of acquaintances.
On the other hand, Search Engine Land conducted a survey in which 85% of respondents said they read up to 10 reviews on the Internet before deciding on an option on the market, that is, they look at options that legitimize a service and/or product. This shows us how people reinforce a purchase stimulus when receiving a recommendation from another person, because case studies are nothing more than an attractive way to express a recommendation.
For the general public, these cases end up being convincing because they trust the opinions of a company's customers more than those of a salesperson. Personal opinions generally create empathy and connect better with audiences. However, according to some studies in Latin America, 64% of consumers trust recommendations from professionals or opinion leaders, so at least these recommendations tend to stand out more if the source who issues them is impartial, objective and professional.
In this way, case studies represent important tools that allow us to provide valuable content, legitimize the quality of a service, promote a purchase, close a sale and obtain a client. In inbound marketing, they acquire great importance because they connect deeply with the philosophy of this methodology, which has as its main objective: to educate above selling by offering useful and valuable content.