One of the most powerful ways to promote your business is to get existing customers to talk about the outstanding results you've generated for them. So how do you do that?
1. Make it worth their time
Your clients are busy people, so why should they give up some of their already limited time to help you? Instead of just asking them to give you a testimonial from the goodness of their heart, think about what you can give them in return for doing this.
For example, where are you going to promote the case study and how will that help their business? You might be tempted to offer them a discounted service in return for a case study or some other financial incentive but it’s far better if you can make them want to do the case study for the promotional value that will give them in return.
A good way to ensure this is to hire a professional writer to not only do the interview and take care of all the writing, so this only takes up half an hour of their time, but also place the story in a decent media title or put it forward for an award. That way they know that in return for just half an hour of their time, they’ll get to have their initiative promoted to tens of thousands of people and a nice press cutting or award to boost their business.
2. Reassure them they're in control
If you’re not dealing with the owner of the company, your contact will almost certaintly have to get their boss, and most likely someone senior in the communications department, to approve the case study before it goes out.
Large organisations, in particular, are very sensitive about what third parties say about their organisations, so make sure you reassure your contact up front that their interview will be treated in confidence and nothing made public until they’ve reviewed and officially approved the story in writing.
It's also important that you get this in writing yourself. Don't be tempted to sneak a case study out the door, without going through the appropriate approval channels, as this will reflect badly on you further down the line. It's important to be professional.
3. Make the story mostly about them
The reason you want a case study in the first place is because your audience, clients and prospects, are far more interested in what you’ve been doing for your client and their experience of working for you than what you have to say about yourself.
Similarly, if you want one of those marketing and communications officers at your client to give permission for your case study to see the light of day, make sure you make the story about your client. Read their website to find out what press releases and other story’s they are putting out about themselves and think about how the small initiative you worked on them with links into their bigger organisational goals and objectives.
Not only will saying you want to write a story about how your initiative has supported them to achieve their bigger objectives make them much more likely to want to take part, but it will also make the final case study much more interesting and powerful. No one really wants to hear how you went about conducting a leadership workshop or setting up an employee benefits, they will want to read how this helped your client smash their sales objective or dramatically increase employee engagement.
Case study: Proving a return on investment for Validium
When Validium, the employee wellbeing consultancy, realised it needed to do more to ‘prove’ the return on investment it was generated for its clients, Benicate was tasked with persuading some of its clients to take part in joint Public Relations.
The results included powerful business impact case studies about initiatives carried out for Nationwide, Norfolk City Council and GWR, a cover story in Occupational Health magazine and being shortlisted for a prestigious Employee Benefits Award. View the project here