What Do Customers Want in a Case Study?

When it comes to purchasing a technology solution, potential customers look to your content for guidance and information. And case studies are a perennial favorite content type.

But it’s not enough to produce the type of content users are looking for. You need to package it the way users want to see it.

So how do potential customers want their case studies served up? The Eccolo Media 2014 B2B Technology Content Survey Report, provides some answers.

Ways People Present Case Studies

You have quite a few options for presenting case studies. These include: 

1. Video case studies—These are video clips of the customer talking about their experience with your product or service.
2. Audio case studies—These are podcast interviews of customers talking about their experience using the product or service.
3. One-page summaries—These describe the customer problem, the solution, and the qualitative and quantitative benefits with two to three bullet points each.
4. PowerPoint slides—This is  similar to a one-page summary but is dropped into a PowerPoint presentation. 
5. Traditional written case studies—These case studies take the time to detail the business problem the customer faced and describe why they chose the particular solution, how that solution addressed the problem, and the benefits the customer achieved from the solution.

What Do People Want?

According to the 2014 Eccolo Media report, “Buyers overwhelmingly prefer traditional written case studies to those presented as audio, video, one-page summaries, or PowerPoint slides. Small business buyers show a slight preference to one-page summaries, when compared to mid market and enterprise respondents, but even they prefer traditional case studies over other formats.”

Why Do People Want Longer Formats?

If people were just looking for a rubber stamp proof point—“Yet, this product works and provides the returns the vendor says it does”—then a brief summary or a quote snippet would be more than sufficient.

But this proof-point-centric view of the case study really focuses only on the vendor’s point of view.  Vendors want to validate their solution and bullet-pointed facts do that.

The issue is different from the buyer perspective. Yes, buyers want proof points. But more importantly, buyers want concrete solutions to real problems. They want to see what problems other people in similar situations have and learn how their peers are solving these problems.   

When you deliver a case study in one of the shorter formats, space limitations mean that the case study typically contains only highly abstract information. This makes it difficult to really understand what issue the customer faced or how exactly they solved it. In order to really explain the customer issue and the solution, a case study needs to take its time and go step by step.

Producing the right type of case study is all about understanding why customers read case studies to begin with. The fact that customers want longer case studies tells me that they want to take their time to see exactly how customers just like themselves are solving problems similar to the ones they face. What’s your opinion about the proper length for case studies?