What Makes a Great Agency Case Study: Joel Klettke from Case Study Buddy

All right, welcome into another week's episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie from Zenpilot. This week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on Joel Kletke, who is a conversion copywriter. He's also the founder at Case Study Buddy. We'll dig into what that is here in just a second. Joel, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to dig into the story. I don't know if people will catch it right away. You're located up in Calgary.

Calgary, yep.

I was listening to a. A podcast or an interview on YouTube rather, that you were on, and the moment you said process, I was like, yep, I know where Joel's located now. That was the giveaway for me right away. Um, I'm. I'm excited to dig into to your background, though. So you started out, I think, way back in the day. Were you in SEO first and then.

Yeah.

I mean, copywriting.

Yeah. Every job I've had, other than my first, like accounting, gopher type of job, is a field I didn't even though existed until I kind of worked in it. So I fell kind of backwards into SEO as my first job. Agency side. I spent almost five years there, kind of working on all kinds of different accounts, and it was in my work at the agency. I had always loved Trip and never saw a career in it. I never wanted to be a journalist. Fiction was not a predictable, viable career path in my mind. So I did a business degree just mostly as well use it for something, I'm sure. But through the agency, my eyes were kind of open to the whole world of digital marketing. And the big thing that stood out, though, for me was the whole. As the entire industry started to turn its head towards content and started to pay attention to content actually mattering and being an integral part of that. We'd worked with some freelancers who wrote site copy and blog and that sort of thing. And I thought, ultimately, why not me? Like, this is what I'm good at, what I love to do. So in 2013, I went out of my own and originally was doing most of the content side of things. Promptly crashed right into the world of conversion copywriting, which scared the hell out of me. Didn't really know it was a thing. Knew more about the direct response side of things, which I always felt was a little bit greasy because my exposure to it was alternative cancer cures and the ugly stuff. But when I came across fellow Canadian and queen bee of the conversion world, Joanna Weeb, that's where I really Saw the potential to do good with this stuff and that it wasn't that intimidating, that it was something that I could do and could do well. So kind of about a year and a half, two years in, sort of really focusing on the conversion side and was able to get a lot of good traction with that. It was on the back of a project on the conversion side with WP engine where someone who sat on their board said, hey, I've got a little company I advise who does needs a case study. Is that something you do and type of guy you just don't say no to? So yeah, sure, I'll figure that out. And that's where kind of the. If you trace the origin story of case study, but especially all the way back, that's kind of where the kernel of the idea started.

So you Launched Case Study 2016, 2015.

Yeah, that always gets fucked up in my mind. Yeah, we've been around over five years at this point. So one of the two, let's say 2016 to be seen.

So building that out, what was the initial off like? Was it, hey, we'll build you one case study, I assume one time project. And how different is that process at that point? Because you'd been copywriting, you already had a good sense for what makes great content. But what's been.

The idea was very productized. It was okay, I'll have a particular format because I didn't Insights that we look for are customer story driven. Anyways, what was going on in the business? What made the experience so positive and valuable for them? What kind of ROI are they seeing and how they talk about it? So it was really for me the reason it made sense beyond the business case for it, which I can also talk about. But these are assets that were hard to do but could be productized. There was no ownership internally for a lot of companies. And so I thought, well, originally the idea was I will do kind of a productized service. I will have a sort of set case study and it will be one at a time. I wasn't thinking down the road of how do they get buy in for these. And so like the complexity of it occurred to me as I started doing it more and more. But originally the idea was just a product test service or a pretty well defined content asset project to project better.

In the past year. But a lot of that is used as sales assets. We did very little. We're starting to push out more stuff, but there's still a big gap. So looking at hiring case study buddy to come in and Help us. But also being on the flip side where HubSpot is one of your clients right now. And I was just on the other side of a case study for the HubSpot's payments product and that interview conversation. Very tightly run 30 minute conversation from case study buddy. I smiled when I saw after HubSpot reached out asking about the case study and then introduced. I was like, yes, this is going to be fun to see what the service is like on the other side. Said But 30 minutes, there's a whole. It didn't. It was not scripted and robotic, but there's clearly a script. You guys have a process for what questions are going to get asked and what the follow up questions look like, which someone in my line of work appreciates a lot being the process nerd. But a lot of questions around obviously what was the situation? What were you feeling during that situation? The emotion tied to the situation and outcome as well. And then from a results perspective, what does that mean in terms of cost savings? What does that mean in terms of time savings? Does that mean in terms of your ability to go focus elsewhere and what's the impact of the time? It's not just how much time did you save but what did you actually do with that time? It's like the second order, third order questions that are impactful. So that is a huge, a huge tip and takeaway that I think we talked about this when I originally um, had a conversation with, with your team from the hiring side but living through it on the other side being asked that questions like oh, this is, this is cool to see happen on the back end of it. So that piece of kind of how do we get those questions and then pull that together? How do you. Obviously you've got a script and some training there. How do you train or how do you convey that back to like what are the practical ways that you give your copywriters and you give your account management team and you give the interview like each person, project management, each person on the case study body team, get them looped in so that they are building high converting or high very effective case studies.

Yeah, I think importantly we have, I wouldn't necessarily call the script. We have a formula. Our formula is BDA before, during, after and we have kind of questions that we go to. But one of the things that I hated about most case studies and listening to other interviewers because we would have clients over time parachute interviews that they've done and they're very wooden and it's obvious that it's like these Are the questions that I planned and I shall not deviate. We made a decision very early to separate interviewing and writing on the team. We have interviewers who just interview, we have writers who just write. It's not because both sides can't do it. There's some bandwidth, wins and things like that. But when we look for interviewers, one of the things that we want is that ability to get into the muck of an industry and understand what makes a question meaningful, where to push in, where to pull back within that VDA sort of framework. And so for the whole team, and this is one of the things honestly that we're continuing to work on because as we grow, it gets harder and harder to make sure it proliferates through everybody. But one of the things that we look for and try to communicate from the beginning is, hey, as a North Star, we're trying to tell a human, focused, impactful story. The customer is always at the center, their experience is always at the center. Focused means we're not asking about everything that happened, we're trying to zero in on a particular aspect, which makes for a much better story. And then impactful means that we're trying to again capture the full 360 view of that. What did it look like? What did it feel like? What did it make possible? Part of the challenge that we have with so many different roles taking part, the account manager, the project manager, the interviewer, before an interviewer even gets on a call, the AM, the PM have touched that project. We are hiring towards AMs who understand the world of storytelling and can look at a brief, identify a gap, push in and make sure that we're asking the right questions. One of the things that we're working on between the AM and PM team, and it's a constant work in process, is how do we make that interviewee feel as prepared as possible to tell a really great story. So for example, we're trying to make a really concerted effort to get our clients when they're making the ask, and then our AMMP or our PM team when they're making the introductions to say, we would really love it if you could speak to these elements of your story. So that interviewee comes in confident, knowing this is the type of thing I might be asked and these are the metrics that, that I might reference. When it gets down to the creation team, there it's about again, we set a vision, we set a North Star. This is what a great piece looks like, this is what the right level of detail looks like. And so everything up till then, from the brief to the way that the PMs and AMs engage has been oriented around how do we make sure we get not only the detail but, but the context so that when we pass this off, the interviewer, who can do what they do best, and the writer can take that great interview and all of the rich detail pulled out of it and turn it into a story that's worth telling and worth reading. So it is a concerted effort. It gets harder to do as we grow, but we have a lot of checks and balances throughout each stage to make sure that we're not dropping context off a cliff and to close this thought out. That can be challenging because the reality is in the case study side of things, most of our customers, even the big ones, are relatively unaware. They think case study is a case study is a case study. Why don't you just ask the same stock question? But then when they see the potential for something focused and strategic, aligned with a business goal rich in context, then they start to get it and then we start to get better briefs and have better outcomes and so on.

I have a couple very practical questions to ask. One is around medium. You guys do obviously the text. You know, you can put it on your blog, you can have a PDF, you can have a short snippet. You've got video, you know, short video or a long video. What is most popular right now? Obviously video is expensive to do, but are more, more expensive to do. But has there been a big rise in the number of companies who want to go video or is tech still the, the winner?

So we, we launched as a written only service. I think that's really important to say we're late comers to video. We are, you know, we've got a video team now. We're continuing to grow and deepen our offering there. So for us, the bulk of the work we do is still on the written end. I think, you know, there, there is a misconception. I love video and I think it's amazing. But there are times when a written asset is simply better. If you want to get into the guts of a story, the guts of execution, a video testimonial is wonderful when you want just the customer's perspective, hear the accolades, hear their experience. When you want to communicate what you did as an agency as part of that story, or what you did as a software company as part of that story, a written asset allows for a depth that you would need a five minute video for. And in that case, I can promise you nobody's watching a video longer than 2 1/2 minutes in most cases. So we have seen, especially through the pandemic, an explosion in demand for the remote video side of things. I think people are realizing depending on your brand, remote video can still be pretty polished. But the raw aesthetic as well, even if it's not for some brands, it makes a ton of sense. When you think of the coaching space, when you think of markets where you serve freelancers or different industries where you don't need that high production on location shoot video doesn't have to be that expensive and it can be a wonderful medium. So we've seen a big increase in video. But what I would say and what's encouraging to me because this is how the company has changed and kind of what we're hanging our hat on. So whether it's the tail wagging the dog or not, I don't know. But we are seeing an enormous increase in people kind of recognizing that hey, these aren't just bottom of funnel sales assets. They're not just give the PDF to the sales team or throw it on the blog. People are starting to recognize these can be full funnel assets. We can use an audiogram for lead acquisition, we can use a video in our cold outreach, we can use a one sheet on social media or we can use a narrative version of the study on our site. And so if there's anything that we're see, definitely an uptrend in the video side of things. The written is not going away, it's growing as well. But we are seeing more companies look at doing more formats because these are hard won assets. There's a lot of moving parts. If you're going to do them anyways, make it an investment and get as much collateral from it as you possibly can to use everywhere. So we're seeing a lot more companies kind of choosing multiple formats as well.

That makes sense. This is not related to. I mean this is related to your experience in copywriting. Is there. Do you have. This is probably more for the copywriting clients that you've got. Is there a hierarchy of copywriting? Let's take an agency as an example. Like the first thing you need nail is your homepage, then your services page, then your welcome email, then your about, then your case studies. Where do case studies fit in the hierarchy and what are the things? If you go to Zenpilot, 90% of the stuff on the main core pages I wrote, I enjoy writing. I'm not a conversion copywriter. If you were to come in and say hey, we should fix this up. Do you have a standard order that you look at solving those issues in?

I think it's less a hierarchy and more a conveyor belt. Because you can have, for example, a wonderful homepage, get leads in the door. But let's say you're a software company and you have no nurture at all. Well, that's wonderful. One part's working, the next part is completely broken. So when I think through it, when I'm working with clients, I try to diagnose where the conveyor belt is broken and focused there. But specific to agencies, the front end site is a huge deal. I mean, there are companies, you reach a certain point where your brand name carries you forward and at some point people want to work with you because of who you are and what you've done and what you've worked on. And that's great. I've worked on a lot of agency sites, I've consulted to a lot of agencies, and I would say the three most critical pages, without fail every single time. The homepage is obviously important because it's where you plant your flag. I promise you agencies who are listening to this, if you go to your analytics and you bring it up and you look at what's our second most visited page on the whole site, the vast majority is going to be our about us page. Vast majority. And people go there. And why do people go there and why do we spend so much time working on those pages? That's where your client figures out. Not just, okay, you're an agent, they figure out if they like you and if they see you mirroring the values they have and if they see you having the proof that it takes to get them over the lines. For example, when I worked on era, we spent a lot of time on nailing that about us page because that was the place. Yeah, the homepage is where you make it obvious who you are, what you do, what you're about. But the about us page is really more of an about you page for the client. It's why we are the best fit to serve you. So the homepage, the about us page, and then when you get into your services pages, I mean the contact page, there's a lot of like shoelace tripping that happens there. Making things like either needlessly complicated or not vetting leads well enough. So I'll spend a fair amount of time on that front. When you get into the services pages, though, being aware of how aware your customer is makes a huge difference because let's say you're an SEO agency, odds are unless you're serving small businesses like you don't need a section saying, what is SEO like? They know, right? It's more about how do you execute that, how do you take care of the client through that, what makes the way that you approach that, you know, unique or best for the audience that you serve. What I will say now, and this is I'm wearing my bias on my sleeve, but because I get to live in both worlds on the conversion side and on the case study side of things, social proof is the ultimate differentiator in that regard. Like other agencies can steal your headlines, they can steal your design, they can steal your service suite. You know, like in a world that's saturated and everyone's saying we're an extension of your team. A story that shows that is going to beat the pants off an agency that says that every single time. And so a really critical area of an agency site is the results page. There's a company called ClientBoost. Go look at how they let people filter their case studies. Because I'm not just saying it because I recommend it to them. It's really smart. They don't just have buy industry or whatever. It's like, show me companies who were really small or had a small budget or are unicorns now or whatever. So I would say start on the front end because that's your identity. But I honestly believe right after that point, if you've got leads coming in the social proof side of things, especially for an agency, that's where the rubber hits the road in terms of differentiation and really getting people, you know, lined up to contact you.

Client boost is. We'll make sure we link those in the show notes too. That's an awesome example. We've had Jonathan on the podcast before, but yeah, they collect so many, so many reviews, it's. It's absurd. And the ability to filter it down and find applicable stuff is really helpful. I think one of the underground, one of the things that is undervalued about that approach too is that takes a lot of the heavy lifting off of your sales team. We've got, you know, we're taking. This agency came from. They're an E comm agency that is 40 people and they came from Asana to ClickUp. This agency had a process problem and we fixed their process as part of that ClickUp was implemented. There's the pains, there's agency size, there's agency industry, there's agency geography. And a lot of that right now is on the shoulders of A sales of our sales team to know what pieces to prescribe at which stage in the process. Oh, here's the agency that's like that versus having all of that public and all developed. It becomes a lot easier for clients just to go find that stuff on their own, which is better prospects to go find it on their own, which is a better experience. The stress on the about page. Here's the next business for you. About page, buddy. We need to work on the name a little bit, but that would kill everyone. Stresses. Is there a more stressful page to write than your about page? I think this is what I mean. We did web design at our agency for a number of years and everyone's stressed about the about page. Oh, yeah.

It's because you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. You're like, what do I say about myself? They're hard to do because they take. You almost need to be an arm's length from yourself. And that's why my conversion work, for example, I don't go, yeah, I talk to the boardroom, I get in with the market, I do internal interviews. That's still very important to me. I want to understand the perspective of the company. But you are who your customers say you are, and it's good that you have goals and you want to evolve that and we incorporate that. But if you're stuck on your about page, the place to start is not the blinking cursor, it's close word or close WordPress or close whatever. Go talk to customers and ask them, what made you choose us? What did you find exceptional about working with us? If you were telling other people about us? Like, the great thing is, right? Like, if I was to ask someone to recommend their agencies, why did you choose that agency? They're not going to rattle off a list of 20 reasons. They're going to have two. They're going to say, you know, they communicate really, really well and we just love the experience they had in fintech, for example. It's like, great. Your customers distill down your value offering automatically on their own. Naturally, go cherry pick that. Right. How do they talk about it? And that's a good way to get started on the about us page side of things. But yeah, I mean, and further to your point as well, like, in terms of enabling sales, like, the thing is, stories are ammunition. We win. When we're in a position to say, someone comes in, a lead comes in and says, you know, I'm really interested in moving to ClickUp, but I'm just really I'm worried about the migration time. You know what? Actually we just dealt with a customer very similar to you, similar situation. We were able to migrate them in six months. A story is going to again beat the pants off. In that case, a metric every day. Or our migration is on average 50% faster, that's fine. But to be able to say, I know Tom at X company and we just did a very similar migration. Here's his story. Like, that is ammunition for the sales team and further too. Right. Like in the agency world especially, the thing that people are always critical of communication, reporting was I kept in the loop. Did I feel like they had my back? Do I feel like they went to bat for me? Stories are always going to be better at proving that to be true. So.

I've got two last questions for you here. First one is around tooling. Any. Any tools that stand out for you guys that are not kind of the somewhat lesser known tools? Not, hey, we use Google for email or whatever, but are there any tools that are core to your process in terms of it could be how you're recording interviews, it could be what you're using for transcriptions, project manager, any of those platforms?

Yeah. I mean, ironically, we're in the process of overhauling a lot of our delivery stack, so we're automating and changing some things. I'd say there's some tools that are especially for the interview side of things and facilitating the transcription side. I mean, we're in love with Descript. Fantastic tool. The ability for our writers to be able to select parts of text and drag it as we progress into video, to have the ability for someone who is not necessarily tech savvy to go in and make cuts and say these are the best responses, the best takes, and then pass to the video team or whatever. The script is so incredibly versatile, you know, so. So we, we do a lot of work in there. You know, beyond that, it's pretty, you know, this, the stag. It's nothing super proprietary or special. Like, we're certainly working, I think on our end, like I say, to automate and do some more kind of tech enablement for the team because we've just grown to the point that that's necessary. But I'd say Descript especially is one that we, yeah, we really like.

That's helpful. I know Descript's not super old, but for as long as it's been around, I think you're the first person who's brought it up on the podcast, so that's a great recommendation.

It's the team there knows what they're doing. And like I say, for me, the ability to visually edit audio and video is magic.

Yeah. Second one is around. Where do people go? What do they do? So first piece is for someone who wants to learn about case study buddy. Case studybody.com, obviously we'll have that in the show. Notes, is there any specific page you point people towards or anything that they should specifically check out on the site?

Yeah. You know, I would say again, the site's in the process of being overhauled as we grow. I would say, though, you know, the why Us page gives a good kind of sense of why we are passionate about this and why we're specialized and why that makes sense for a lot of companies not having to wrangle multiple freelancers or deal with that unpredictability and that sort of thing. But two, I would say probably the best place to see how our brains work is in the blog. We write a lot about issues you don't even know you have yet with customer success stories that I can guarantee you'll crash into if you decide to make them a priority. So those would be places that I'd look. We have our process on the, on the written studies and video studies pages, so that'll give you a good sense from a high level of how we work. But I would say the blog is if you really want to be good at this stuff or you want to see, well, how complex can it be? How much really is there to know? I promise you, you'll find some insight that surprises you on the blog. So I biased, but I would say check that out, you'll learn something for sure.

I want to point people one other place, which is Twitter. Yeah. Oelkletke on Twitter. Congratulations. I got your first name, last name on Twitter, but you've got in your bio. Pray for competitors after you hire me. They'll need it. Which I know has been taken and repurposed by many people many times over, I'm sure at this point.

But every so often, when I'm not currently drowning in growing the business as it is, I do try to share on LinkedIn and I have a newsletter as well. It's Linked from Twitter. I haven't been as active on the newsletter, but my philosophy towards all of those channels has always been just give it away, share as much as I can. I rarely try to sell anything. My mentality has always been if I can show people how I think either they'll go do something better on their own. Or they'll think I might be a good person to help them do it. So I'd say probably. LinkedIn or the newsletter are also pretty decent places where I try to share useful things and be a useful human.

First, I've tossed around renaming the component of the business, but your newsletter name is one of my favorite newsletter names, isn't it? It's legitimately useful. Is that what the newsletter is called? I remember.

I wish.