How To Create Case Studies That Get You Clients

In this video, I'm going to share with you how to document client case studies that you can use in your marketing. Because the truth is, getting new clients is overrated. It's what happens after you get the client, after you've created great results for the client. That's what helps you get more clients for years to come. Okay, so one client engagement ends up funding years of your business if you know how to document it correctly. And I've been talking about case studies in my content for a long time and for some reason no one's producing them. So obviously I need to create a more in depth video about how to actually do this because I've tried all different types of marketing. I've tried webinars, Facebook ads, content marketing. I've done it all over the last 10 years of my business. And case studies are one of the most powerful ways to get high paying clients for your business. And it works for lots of different businesses. It's not just coaching consulting, it works for basically any service business, even software businesses. So in this video, I'm going to break it down for you step by step. But let's start by talking about why case studies are so valuable and why I stopped producing testimonials. And I started producing case studies when I started my coaching business 10 years ago. I used to just ask clients for testimonials and testimonials. You pretty much know what they are, right? They're basically little endorsements or recommendations. And they roughly say, hey, this person is, is trustable. They helped me, okay? They don't really usually go in depth. And testimonials are better than nothing, especially if you can get a testimonial from someone who your ideal clients would recognize. So I have a testimonial on my homepage. It's from Leo Babauda of Zen Habits. And a lot of my ideal clients would recognize that blog or would recognize Leo. So to have that on my homepage is helpful for building credibility, building trust for people who don't know me yet. But there are a couple problems with testimonials. First of all, they can be hard to collect if you ask someone to send you a testimonial. Besides that being a little bit awkward, the person will usually procrastinate because they get intimidated by writing this thing up or by recording a video. And then you feel bad about yourself because you never heard back from them with the testimonial and you just assume, okay, I must suck at whatever it is that I do. The second problem with testimonials is that they often end up kind of awkward. Like they end up weirdly formal. The person doesn't really speak to a specific result. They're talking in vague language. And so it ends up not being that usable in your marketing. It doesn't help you get clients. Clients. The alternative to testimonials are case studies. Case studies are usually more in depth and they're more structured than testimonials. So case studies basically tell a story of where your client started, what the intervention was, how you helped them, and then how their life or business is different now as a result of your work with them. And this last part is important because if you can show a return on investment, financially or otherwise, that you helped a past client get, it has future potential clients trust you more, come into sales calls with fewer concerns, right? So this is really one reason why case studies are so much better. Case studies do three things. Number one, they help you make more money. If you just talk about how great you are, that's marketing, right? That's pushy, that's promotional. But when someone else says how great you are and actually speaks to specific results they got, that's a trusted recommendation. And this is especially important if you charge a lot for what you do. Number two, case studies help overcome imposter syndrome. Have you ever felt like, oh, man, I know I'm good at what I do, but sometimes I have this doubt, like, am I really a fraud? Am I really good at what you do? What really helps you build confidence isn't saying affirmations or playing some mind game with yourself. What really helps you overcome imposter syndrome? The easiest way, honestly, is just having proof. And case studies can provide that proof. When you're doubting yourself, you can say, okay, look at these clients that I've helped. Look at the results that they've gotten, and you can use that as a way to ground yourself. And number three, case studies help you celebrate your client's progress. Okay, now this is obviously marketing is great. It's great to make money. It's great to feel more confident about yourself. But also this is an opportunity for clients to look back at their journey and realize how far they've come with your help. And it can also be a way for them to promote what they do, right? So you're giving them a little platform for themselves, and it ends up being a win win. When clients can really perceive the value that they got from you by recapping it in their own mind, that makes them more likely to sign on again with you. And it makes them more likely to send referrals. Okay, so let's just break down the exact process I use to create these case studies. There's five steps total and we're going to walk through them one by one. Step one is to reach out to potential clients. We want to focus on and prioritize those clients who have gotten great results with us and who we love working with. So don't reach out to Chad, who didn't listen to any of your advice, quit halfway through the program and blames you for the reason why he's not successful. Reach out to the clients who have been great success stories and just start with one here. We just want to get that first case study in the hopper, in the bank, if you haven't done it already. I asked for case studies at the end of my client engagement. So the initial engagement with me lasts six months. So at the six month mark, about a week before their final coaching session, I reach out to them and I'm going to include all these emails in an article that I'll link in the description. So all the stuff I'm going to go over together, I'll give you exact templates. But essentially what I'm saying is, hey, you have your last session of the contract you in about a week. Here's what's going to happen. That last session is going to be a normal coaching session. Then you're going to get the opportunity to create a case study to share your results and celebrate your results. And then if you get that case study back to me, then I'm going to invite you to a bonus Next steps call, basically a free coaching session that they didn't expect. And that coaching session, I'm going to coach them. And I'm also, if I want to keep working with them, I can talk to them about continuing on. So I have this little carrot that I'm kind of dangling in front for doing the case study, right? And I want to actually pay them back for the time they spent doing the case study. So we're sending that email and we're inviting them to do a case study. So there's two ways to actually collect these case studies. The first way is really simple and you're just going to on the call with them, you're going to spend the first half of the call or so asking them questions. I'm going to include questions that you can ask them, but you're just going to interview them live on the call. The second way is that you can use a software called videoask and this is something that allows you to automate the interview process. So you just ask these questions using videoask. They go through it on their own time, respond to the questions, it collects the footage, and then you can go edit it. You don't have to jump on a call live with them. So for most people, they should just start with the live interview because it's simpler. You don't have to set anything up. But long term, as you start to collect more of these, Video Ask is a great option to automate and save you some time on the case studies. Okay, so step two is to film the case study. And like I mentioned, there's two ways to do this. You can just schedule a call on zoom with them and ask them the questions live and record the call, obviously. Or you can use Video Ask in the article, in the description. I'll link to, you know, the specific questions I use. But there's three main things we need to get. Okay, I have like seven or eight questions I actually ask. But the three main things show the arc of the story we want to tell. So the first is, where were you before we started working together? What was happening in your life or your business? What problems were you experiencing? Right. This is when your ideal clients can look at it and say, oh, I'm in that situation now. It's what catches their attention. The second is, what specifically did I do to help? Right. What did you enjoy about the experience? What were the specific things that allowed you to make progress? And this is what separates a case study. It's one of the things that separates a case study from a testimonial. Right? Because testimonials are usually just giving props to the service provider or speaking to a result. But we actually want to give some value here. We want to say, hey, if you're in the situation this person's in, here's a general sense of what might be helpful for you. And of course, people always pay you to help them implement the thing number three is what are the specific results you got? How is your life or business different now? So do you see how this tells a story of the before and then the after and the intervention that really supported the person? And this is Video Ask. So this is the actual software I use and I ask the question on the left and then people can record their answer on the right. And, you know, then I get it right, I can just download the responses. I also like to share some tips with clients before we record, whether it's with Video Ask or a live interview. I like to tell them, make sure you have good lighting, you have good audio. There isn't like things you can't edit out afterwards, like crazy background noise or their face is washed out or totally dark. Make sure that they're centered in the screen. There's not a ton of space above their head like this. I say you can write some notes to yourself, but please don't read from the notes, right? Because then it sounds scripted. Actually have them make eye contact with the camera or the webcam that they're using. And then I also have them refer to me by name. So to say, hey, when I worked with Greg, here's what I liked. Instead of speaking to me when I worked with you, because I'm going to take myself, I'm going to edit myself out of it. So it's just going to be them speaking about Greg. And I want them to use my name instead of saying you in the final version. Okay? So at this point, you've invited them to record the case study. You've done it using Zoom or Video Ask. Now it's time to download those responses, edit them into a video and. And a written version, a transcript that we can post on our website. And I like to use imovie for this. So I just download the responses from video after from Zoom, I cut them up and then I look for any places that are redundant or that I get bored. I tune out or the person pauses for a really long time and I create smaller clips. I'm trying to leave. I'm trying to get this video to under five minutes, if possible. You can record longer case study interviews with people if you have a client who just really knocks it out of the park. But for these shorter case studies, I like to keep it under five minutes and then I export it right out of. Out of Imovie. Just file share and then I have the file for myself that I can upload. I use Vimeo for this. So the reason I don't use YouTube is I don't want them seeing ads at the beginning. I don't want them seeing other videos to click on at the end of watching it. I want them to apply for a strategy session, right? I want them to work with me. So one of the things that you can do with Vimeo is you can have an end screen. So when the video ends, they see this, right? This could be you apply for a strategy session with Greg and they have this button that they can click which goes to my apply page. Okay? So you don't have to use Vimeo, but I like to use it because you get to have that customization. If you don't want to use Vimeo, just have it on YouTube and have the video as unlisted. Okay. So we're uploading it there. The next step is to get it transcribed. So I use a service called Rev, where you just upload the video. Right. I can say, you know, an AI transcript. They're not perfect, but they're the cheapest option. And then you can either upload a file or you can paste the URL if it's already on Vimeo and it will start transcribing it. I don't have an affiliation with any of these things. This is just what I've used. There may be a free way to get it transcribed that I don't even know about. But then I want to take the transcription, I want to put it into a Google Doc. Okay. And I want to create little subheadings. I don't want this huge block of text. I want to basically ask the questions that I asked them in video ask. Maybe not so many. You can kind of group the responses together and you can pull these quotes. What's cool about case studies is you can always take a testimonial from a case study, but you can't always take a case study from a testimonial. So I like to look for the most specific, clear result. Like here for Valerie. She landed her first business client, her first B2B coaching client, instead of individual. So I'm kind of highlighting that quote. The reason it's in a Google Doc is I don't want to publish it yet. I want to run it by the client and get their permission before it's on the blog. But that's essentially what we do. Take extra time with this headline. The headline should speak to the result. It should speak to the transformation, not about how great you are. It shouldn't say Valerie thinks Greg is a great coach as the headline it. Right. It's speaking to the result that she got. So if there's anywhere to spend some more time on after you've done the transcript, it's trying to find, how am I going to say, the main value or return on investment that they got from the coaching. So here are some examples for my case studies. Tripled her prices. Figured out what her best clients had in common. Doubled his old tech salary. Filled multiple group programs. Right. Increased his prices. So you can kind of see the theme here of. For me, as a business coach, I'm going to usually speak to getting clients making Money, things like that. And I try to, if I can show a before and after in the headline. Okay, so now you have the video edited and you have the transcript. So you can just stop here. That could literally be a full case study and you could just be done. I'll show you an example of what it looks like when you just have the video and the transcription. So this is now up on my blog, right? It has this client of mine who's a leadership coach. It has the video, which is about three minutes long, has some subheadings, it has this quote highlighted, and then you'll see that I have buttons at the top and bottom to actually have people go apply for a strategy session. If you don't have a call to action on your case studies, don't assume people are going to go find out how to contact you and become a client. Make it easy for them. So you can stop here, but what I like to do is I like to create a little narrative case study that I write and I use obviously their words as a jumping off point. But sometimes you can add details that the client forgot, or you can add your own little spice to it. And especially if you're a good copywriter, it's a good opportunity to take that raw material they gave you and make it even better. What's kind of cool about this is like this video is about writing a case study. But really you don't actually have to write the case study. Your client does most of the work for you and you just have to plug it into this structure, which I found works really well. So you're basically going to use the blog headline as the subject line. Sometimes I'll change it a little bit. And then you say, hey, this person came to me with this problem. We worked together and they got this result. So you're sharing the before and after. Here's how we did it. And then try to break it down simply into three main buckets of what you worked on. Obviously, when you actually work with clients, it goes all over the place. There's a ton of things that go wrong and that you work through. But we really want to make it feel simple and highlight the three main things. Hopefully your client's been able to name some of these takeaways or learnings when they recorded the case study. And you can just use those. A jumping off point. And then you're going to link to the longer video and the longer case study on your site. Then I like to put a P.S. that's a call to action that says, hey, if you want similar results to this, I take on one client a month, for example. So apply here, see if you qualify and we'll have a conversation. We want to try to insert some sort of urgency or scarcity, but we don't want to lie about it. We just want to highlight the scarcity or urgency that's already there. You probably have a limited number of clients that you can take on. You probably have a date by which they would need to start. Start. So in the article that I'm going to link you to, I have an example of one of my best performing emails. And you can read what that looked like. This is an example of a career coach. And you know how it breaks down. You can use that as a jumping off point for your own case studies. So that takes us to step four, which is to get permission before publishing. Okay, we don't just want to hit publish on all this stuff and not double check with the client. Hopefully in your agreement, you know, your contract, you've already gotten permission. But we just want to make sure they're totally comfortable with it. Because if they're really comfortable, they might even share it on social media or share it with a referral that they want to make to you. We put this on a Google Doc, then I'm going to send them an email that says, hey, I have this ready to go out, this case study. I'd love to publish it soon, but want to make sure you're comfortable with it. Let me know if there's any changes you want me to make. Otherwise I'll go ahead and publish it and you can share the time you're planning on publishing it by. If your client requests any changes, obviously make the changes that they asked for and run it by them again. Sometimes your client will not want this to come up on Google, like when people search their name. So there's usually a way with every website builder to just hide that one specific page from Google. So that's not a problem. If a client wants to remain totally anonymous, like they don't want their name used or anything, obviously they're not going to be making a video. But for a written case study, you can take their name out of it. I'll link to an example of that in the blog post that I found. But it's not as effective. Like, obviously, if we can get their name, their face, that's going to feel more legit, it's going to feel more real. But I understand some niches. If you're a therapist or something like that, you just Might have clients who want to share their story. They're willing to, but they're not willing to do it if their name is on it. And you can include other details that still bring it to life, but don't name them. Okay, so last step, Step five is when we publish and distribute the case study. This is the part where you get clients, so get excited about this. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to publish that video on Vimeo or YouTube and we're going to publish the blog post on our blog so that that's live. Anytime people come to our site, they're going to be able to see the case study. If you've produced multiple case studies, I like to have pages like the one I showed you on my site, which is a results page which kind of collates all of the different case studies and links out to them so that people just click on it and they see that specific case study. And this can be really helpful to get social proof because it's like not just one case study, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I found some other examples like this one from Michael Serwa. He has some beautiful video case studies on his site that are really well produced and they're all listed on this page with great headshots. So I know he's a high end coach, for example, so he really kind of is able to speak to a higher end clientele with that page. E Myth has these as well. And you can click in. They have these very well made videos and they document the case study of this kind of client that was their business coaching client. You can also use case studies throughout your site on key pages. So for example, on my Work With Me page, I have a whole space where I've listed all these case studies, all these results I link to this was the case study. But someone's able to just see that to give them confidence to apply and that I might be able to help them. The next thing we want to do if you have an email list is we want to put out that email that we create, created in step three and we want to send it out to the list. Okay, that narrative version that we created. Because that's the thing that's really going to get you clients quickly, especially if you have a big audience, especially if you haven't put out a case study recently. And then if you're on social media, we can either use that exact same copy or we can remix it a little bit to be better for whatever social media channel you're using, but the components are all going to be the same in terms of speaking to the problem. They had the result and then what you did to help them. Again, I have examples of this really well performing posts, emails and Facebook posts that I've put out that you can use as a jumping off point. So go to the article, the link in the description for that. It's not an opt in or anything, it's just all there and you can check it out and use it. Even if you send this stuff out and you don't get leads right away, the first thing to check is that you have a simple work with me page and you have a simple apply page, right? So like it shouldn't be cluttered, there shouldn't be a lot you can do. It's just like they either book a call or they apply and there's spaces available to book a call, your calendars and booked out. So double check all of that stuff. But if you still haven't gotten leads at that point, don't beat yourself up too much because remember, this is something that's going to be working in the background 247 on your behalf when new people come to the site. So even if it doesn't have that flash in the pan right away, you've created an asset that you can use in the future. One really nice way to use case studies is between sales calls. If you have more than one sales call for high end clients between the first and the second, you can say once you understand their situation, hey, I'm going to send you this case study of John who is in a really similar situation. It kind of explains what we did together to give you a sense of what's reasonable to expect working with me. And you can send that in between, really warm the client up, overcome objections. You're not having to introduce them to past clients when they ask. You already did all the work and you can just send them the case study. So I recommend going through this process for every success story that you create over time, you're going to have this huge burden of proof and you're going to be able to raise your rates. You're going to be able to attract more leads. I know this process can be a little bit overwhelming. There is a bit to it, but once you get it rolling, it's usually like a two to three hour process per case study. You can outsource a lot of this to your assistant. You can get a video editor if you want to. But I've tried to break it down and Keep it as simple as possible for you and have it still work. But remember this, you already did the hard work, right? You already helped the client get the result. That was the hard work. All you're doing now is just documenting and distributing that result and celebrating it for other people to see. I want to mention one more thing here. Just because this idea has been on my mind for a while actually is I know that some of you might love the idea of having case studies that help you charge more, that bring you more leads, that help you close more sales, but you don't want to do this process yourself. You either don't have the time, you'd rather just be on sales calls working with clients, or you know you have the time, but you just, you can't do it. Like you know that you're going to get stuck on the tech, on the video, whatever it is. So what I've been considering, what I've been mulling over is having a service where my team actually creates these case studies for you. So, so all you would have to do is just send me the client, the success story, send me their contact information, we would reach out on your behalf, we would get the case study made, we would get it up on your site, we'd have a beautiful case study created for you. Didn't take any of your time. Obviously we're going to get paid for that. I don't know how much we're going to charge. I don't really know if it's going to work or how much demand there will be. But if you'd be interested in having me create these four for you for your marketing, reach out, Send me an email greg gregfaxon.com or you can go to gregfaxon.com contact. It all goes to the same place. And just write in that email case study. And if I get enough requests, if I get enough interest, then I'll send you back the information and the details of what I've come up with. So either way, whether you end up working with my team or not on this, I hope this inspires you to go get some case studies created so you can get more high paying clients in the door because this has made a huge difference for me.