Lockdown Marketing Tips: Gather Case Studies

Last week we wrote about using this time to maximise your online presence – investing time in your website now instead of putting it off until a rainy day. That rainy day is here.

We thought it would be helpful to continue with some guidance – not only to help your business through these challenging times, but hopefully to put in place some sound marketing solutions that mean you will be quick out of the traps when normality returns. We are writing a series of helpful articles to give you some marketing tips. 

Gathering Case Studies

Storytelling

Case studies are an excellent way to show off your work. We’ve talked before about the importance of telling a story when it comes to ‘selling yourself’. The best way to get your target audience to imagine using your product or service, is by showing people like them using it. And reaping rewards from it!

Case studies compliment your sales process and provide proof that your service or product has worked well for other people. Facts and figures, quotes and other relevant material can add significant weight to a proposal. When it comes to tenders, having case studies allows you to flesh out that all important detail, bringing the document to life.

Measure Results

You should always measure the results that your products or services provide for your clients. At Big Red, we find that easy to do in a lot of cases – how much business is generated from a website? How much ROI is a marketing campaign generating? But we also try to measure more intangible elements as well – how easy is our system to use vs an old system? How much time, hassle, resource is saved? These are the real benefits that a client sees day-to-day.

Ask for Testimonials

Always ask for feedback. People rarely do! Now is the perfect time to speak to your clients. Why did they choose to work with you in the first place? What benefits (tangible and intangible) have they seen? What benefits do their team see? What could you have done better? Ask for quotes that you can use directly in your marketing material. These will lend credence to what you’ve written.

Use Photography

The old adage rings truer than ever – a picture tells a thousand words. Ask your clients for pictures of what you’ve supplied - or better still organise to have some taken that both you and they can use. The more professional, the better. A camera phone these days can take sharp images that can be uploaded quickly onto your website. However, quality control needs to come into play here unless your client happens to be a pro-level photographer. We've lost count of how many photographs we've had to reject because a stray finger has gone across the lens at the last second, the wrong area of the shot is in focus, or there is something completely unrelated that draws the eye from the subject matter.

Use Video

Clients who are less camera shy may be willing to give you some video testimonials. This is an excellent way for your clients to do your sales work for you! A short ‘talking head’ clip, from a real person, talking about your business, the service received and how good your product/service is can be a highlight of your web page.

Communication is Key

The additional benefit of using this time to get the data for case studies, is that it allows you to maintain contact with your client base. Your existing clients may be going through a difficult time, but this allows you to check in with them and have a positive conversation. It will remind them just how good a job you did for them and that you are there for them. For example, one of first things we did when the Coronavirus lockdown started was to contact all of our clients and reassure them that we were fully operational and available to help them in any way we could. This produced many positive responses. It even provided us with some unsolicited testimonials!

So, business owners can use this downtime wisely. Gather as many case studies as you can now and publish them on your website. You’ll see Big Red taking a leaf out of our own book and publishing a few new case studies of our own. Have a read over some of our recent projects. And if you need help writing them, give us a call – we can help you write them as well!

We hope you’ve found this useful. Next time we’re doing to discuss the benefits of article writing and give you some practical tips to get you started.