5 Ways Your Case Studies Can SCARE off Prospects

In the spirit of the (Halloween) season, hypothetically, how would you dress up a case study to scare off a prospective customer?

Here are a few ways:

1. Make it all about you
Send prospects running with a case study that sounds like all your other marketing materials recycled.

From web copy to webinars, most marketing is full of corporate-speak about how great the company is – the “bleeding-edge” products, the “best-in-class” service.

The customer case study may be the one place where your happy customers do the talking. So let the customer talk.

Minimize the amount of space you devote to product and service descriptions. Instead, make the case study almost solely about the customer’s experience.

2. Be ugly
Costume your customer stories with bad clip art and dense blocks of text.

Ugly may play well for Halloween, but a written case study or success story that’s not attractive will turn prospects off immediately.

Whether the case study is on your web site or a PDF version, get help from a professional designer to make it attractive to readers.

Some best practices design ideas:

• Keep paragraphs short to avoid dense blocks of text
• Use “pull quotes” – enlarged quotes from the customer
• If you use stock photos, try to make them relevant to the industry or story, rather than something generic like business people talking
• Keep some white space

3. Target the wrong audience
Doom your carefully crafted case study to the recycle bin by failing to target the reader.

No matter how interested the prospect is, they will be turned off if the story’s not created with them in mind.

If the reader is a business decision-maker, don’t make the story all about the technical specifications.

If the reader is in a technical role, don’t make it all about the business case.

Remember marketing 101. Know your audience and deliver the type of information they want and need – or they will give your case study the cold shoulder.

4. Ramble
Lead with paragraph after paragraph of basically boilerplate PR text about what the featured customer does.

A little is OK, but that much generic text would make your prospect stop before getting to the good parts.

The same goes for introducing your product or service. Say what it is in a sentence  or two and then get back to the customer’s experience with it.

A customer case study or success story truly is all about the story. Make sure every word contributes to the telling of that story.

Every. Word. Counts.

5. Make it impossible to skim
Make your prospects eyes glaze over (zombie-style) with lots of dense text and boring subheads.

Prospects are interested in your customer stories but they are BUSY.

Many may not read your entire customer story. If you’re to have a chance at all with them, make it as easy as possible to glean the highlights:

• Feature the customer’s #1 benefit in the headline
• Break up text with descriptive subheads throughout
• Feature the main benefits in a sidebar

You decide: Your customer story can make prospects run away faster than a haunted house, or it can effectively invite them in for cider and caramel apples.