Hey, I'm Samantha Hartley and this is the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. Today, I am talking about using case studies to build your business. Last week I talked about getting results for your clients and how to make it more easy and more doable for you to get results. And this week, I want to talk about how you can promote those results, because it's great that you get results but use those to grow your business. That's why this is one of my favorite marketing techniques. I call it, "I'll have what she's having."

You may remember that line from the movie Harry Met Sally. There's a dinner scene when someone is having a wonderful experience and someone else wants to order what she had had. You can Google that scene if you're not familiar with the one I'm talking about, because I don't want to turn this into an explicit rating on my podcast. I'll have what she's having. When I read a case study, I imagine myself as the person in the protagonist of that story, the main character, and what they were struggling with before, what process they went through and what outcome they got as a result. That's the story that a case study shares. Case studies are also known as success stories. And when you share your results in this form, it's so much less salesy, it's not like I'm great, I'm amazing, I do good work. It's like, well, don't let me be the one to tell you I'm just going to give you a story to read. And when we read that story, it has credibility, it builds authority. And it builds real interest in those kinds of results and desire to get them ourselves so that is what you're going to use your case study for. So I'm just going to go through the process that I used to develop case studies and going all the way from a quick success story, all the way up to a case study that you can use as a freebie or a PDF to give to clients to grow your business.

So the first thing is like the tightest idea of a success story. If you remember back in the jaw dropping self introduction episode, basically that kind of a dialog goes, hey, what do you do? And you say, I work with this kind of client who has this kind of problem. And they say, oh, that's interesting, what do you do for them? And you say, well, I help them to get this kind of result or outcome, if you haven't heard that, go back and there'll be more information on that and then comes the point where they say, oh, interesting, how do you do that or oh wow, that's cool tell me more.

And the best way to answer that kind of follow up desire for more information right then in that moment is with a success story. And a success story at that point, needs to be like three sentences. So a story in general is comprised of a beginning, middle and an end and it usually has a main character, a protagonist who we follow throughout that story from the beginning state when in business situations is usually like having this problem or condition. And then middle when we come in, work with them doing our process and then end, which is usually the result or outcome phase and so you're going to tell a success story that's three lines, three sentences and I like to follow this structure. “Well, I had one client who” and then I described that client. I like to include a name because it makes the story more engaging. It can be the client's real name or one that you're substituting to maintain anonymity of your client, protect the innocent and I like you to be really intentional with the name that you choose because there's a big difference between a name like Buffy or Molly or Prudence or Sam.

A name gives us a mental picture and something to identify with. And so I think that's an opportunity to create a little more affinity for your audience who's listening. So that first phase is “I had this one client, Sam, who” and then you're going to say what their challenge was, why did they hire you to work with them? And so a pain problem, situation, aspiration, whatever is that thing that they were that they brought you in for. And you can tell any story you want, but make sure that the person in the story has the problem or a challenge that you want to be solving in your business. So you may have had somebody who got a great result, but you're like, I don't want to do that anymore. So what is the challenge of your perfect clients? If you're a financial type, you can be called in to help with figuring out how to get our financial situation better. You can be dealing with an embezzlement situation or a bankruptcy, and there are going to be some of those financial situations you want to go into and some that you don't choose. So make sure that your success story that you choose to use in your marketing describes your perfect client and the challenge that you want to solve, then you move on to the process, part of it, the middle of the story, and you can say things like “so we came in and or they hired me and we” and there you're going to say a little bit about the process that you went through. Now, we've talked before about not getting into the process because it's too gory in the early stages of marketing to spend too much time talking about it. Generally in marketing, you want to have things like Pain Island and Pleasure Island, you want to have the before and the after, you can have the challenge and the outcome. Here in a story we do need to at least give a nod to the fact that there was a middle and this is your chance to say a little tiny bit about your process, about how you work or what you did.

And so say that there and then we move on to the end of the story. And I love to begin this section with “As a result...” and then say what happened to the client. My favorite thing to include in that as a result is the big tangible benefit that they got. Meaning the big solution to their challenge and how they felt about it. So it can be like, well, “as a result, my client found $300,000 in their business that they didn't know they had. Which meant that they could buy the trucks that they needed to make deliveries or which meant that the owner was finally able to take a vacation.” So a tangible result and then the benefit that will come from that. So if you heard that, that's the shape of a success story and that can also be a case study.

A success story doesn't have to be small. I'm kind of using these terms interchangeably but the thing that you say verbally when somebody has said, tell me more about what you do, that's a three liner. The thing that you give to someone who's interested in working with your business, that is, a PDF is going to be a few pages. So in between that story can expand or collapse accordingly. And I think it's really effective to have it in it in the 3 line version, the 3 paragraph version and the 3 page version, because that kind of flexibility means you're always going to be ready with that kind of a story, especially in interview situations, networking situations, standing up when everybody's going around the table, introducing themselves situations. You really want to be able to have that crisp story. And it should have those really jaw dropping results, choose the story of yours that people are like, wow, I want that right? I'll have what she's having. When you read a case study, it should make you say like, I totally identify with those problems, the process okay, sure sounds logical, right? I get it and then the outcomes like I want that, this is the job of the story and why it's effective and working on your clients or potential clients. So since we're talking about using case studies to grow your business, let's talk a little bit more about what needs to go into this for it to be that three pager or it could be 15 pages. It's how long is a piece of string.

What you want to have in here is a little more information about the process, but not presented in a boring way, you want to present it as teaching points so that when I'm reading it, it feels more informational, like an instructional thing that I can have takeaways from rather than a marketing piece. It should not feel like a marketing piece that is being salesy. So the frame in which you're putting these teaching points instead of just having or you know you could have a slide with some things that they need to know in it. And that's a fine way to teach something, here's like point one, know your value, point two, price your services according to it, number three, make sure your marketing message communicates your value. Like you could just have those teaching points in there or you can tell a story and illustrate how these teaching points actually come to life. And that's what I like to do. So you tell it as a story. You've got a little bit of creative flair you can put in there, you know, some dialog. Make it fun and interesting to read. This is really an edutaining piece. So it's educating and entertaining your potential client at the same time, it's edutaining and I think that is, you know people's guard comes down a little bit when they're being entertained and also they can learn better. At its core, I want my case study to be informative and to make people happy they read it rather than being tricked into reading someone's marketing materials. I want people to think, wow, I actually learned something and I can go and do something with that, whether they ever contact me after that or not. So figure out what are the teaching points from your client's experience that you can extract from there and then share with others and that becomes your case study.

You really need to have one of these in your business and when people come to me and they have had the situation that I described last time in the results episode where like I had a few years that my client just didn't get results. If someone says, yeah, I'm in that situation, I've been at this for a while, but my clients haven't gotten any results such that I could write a structured story about, I don't have a beginning, middle and an end and I would say, here's your goal, get a success story. Whatever you do, your next client or somebody you're working with right now, somebody you can go back to and work with again it's like your goal is to get a success story and then write a case study about it.

And as I mentioned last time, you can even when you're entering into the work situation with your client, you can say to them, I'd like to document this as a case study and a lot of times they're like, great, we want to be a success story, we want to have a happy ending from this. So you really need to have one and you can always add them as you get more successes in your business and what I think is wonderful is when I have something that's so fabulous and then I have a client whose results actually exceed that you know.So keep this as a focus for your business, writing many, many case studies that you can share with your clients because they illustrate how you work. This can be the core marketing piece in your business, and I sometimes get questions about them. So one of the questions I get is do I need permission from the client to tell their story? What I would say is you don't have to and you don't have to use their real name or the name of their business or anything but if it's going to be easily identifiable that they're in the story or if there's anything that potentially is embarrassing or they don't necessarily want to share, then I would go to them and you can change small details to respect their privacy.

Most people realize when they're reading a case study that it's true and I think they don't expect that they're going to be able to immediately know who this person is or contact them. So if you think that your client might be sensitive about that, then I would go to them and maybe even let them read it and share what's comfortable with them. So if you have any other questions about case studies, you're welcome to ask me and the Profitable Consulting Facebook group, which you can join if you're not yet a member. Or you can go to enlightenedmarketing.com/podcast where I now have the little widget where you can leave me a voice message with a question that I will promise to answer on a future episode.

For today, I hope you have been inspired to use case studies to market your business. There are incredible ways to sell without selling and they're fun to read and fun to write. To see an example of case study marketing in action you can go download the one I used. It is called the nine yes X formula and you can download it at THE9XYesformula.com and the link is in the show notes. So I will look forward to speaking with you next time. I'm Samantha Hartley and I'm wishing you a Profitable and Joyful consultancy.