If you’ve been following along, you’ll already have chosen your direction for your case study, and done the copywriting for a great title. We’re going to continue along today with how to construct the body of the case study.
Just to remind ourselves, let’s recap on why we’re doing this, and what we’re focussing on:
- A case study is an indirect way of marketing your product or services. We won’t be doing any hard selling here, just relaying the facts and putting forward your solution to a specific problem.
- Focus on the problem, not the client (or yourself). This is all about showing how brilliant your solutions are, not who you’ve worked for in the past. It’s all about the near future and making a case to show why you (or your product) are the best choice for your prospect’s problem.
Stick to the problem
The basic outline for copywriting a case study should hang around the problem (not you). You can be more clever with the naming of the sections (like ‘insight’ and ‘innovation’), but essentially, the pattern for a solid case study is:
- background to the problem
- solution to the problem
- results of the solution
However you word it, just stay focussed on the problem you identified and solved for your client. In the background, explain the problem’s symptoms and pain points. If you can, also reveal here some numbers around how the problem was affecting the client.
In the solution, outline how you went about solving the problem. Include false starts and failures – this all adds up, showing how you care about resolving issues and working hard to get the right answer.
In the results, try to follow up on the numbers to show an improvement. But it’s not just hard numbers lovers that copywriting services. Also reveal how your client feels now, how the change is affecting the business, how it is improving the intangible things like customer sentiment.
Stick to the facts
Keep your case study copywriting factual. The more objective you are and the more you can show real information, the more convincing your case study will be. It’s not always possible to include statistics, or figures that give away too much proprietary information. However, you can still approach the results in an objective way.
- Percent improvement
- Actual increases
- Testimonials
- Before / after comparisons
- Screenshots
Coming next in the series: Testimonials and copywriting Part 1
