Marketing professionals understand why case studies are important. Vendors understand that case studies can highlight their products and services. There is more to case studies, however. Small business owners can use in depth analyses of B2B case studies to extract a lot of valuable data and metrics, such as how such studies are leveraged by their competitors, how the big players in the market use them, etc.
You can find this data online and go through it to assemble market insights and identify trends. We’ve done some of the hard part for you. Here’s a summary to get started:
• 90% of case studies are freely available, with no need to register or fill out any forms.
• PDF is the most popular format for case studies, followed by HTML. Videos are a very small part of the overall landscape.
• The heavy hitters in the B2B case study industry are Oracle, who has the top spot with nearly 2,700 case studies. Siemens follows with over 2,400 and Microsoft is third with over 2,200 case studies.
So how can you leverage the findings of case studies to benefit your company? B2B case studies are a remarkable resource for potential users to identify solution blueprints and equally for marketers to use as a tool to generate qualified leads. And you can do that in some creative ways, like the following marketers did.
Craft A More Precise Response To Customer Pain Points
Five9 is a contact center software solution, and the company was creating a ton of content, but their leads didn’t stick. After about three weeks, the leads brought in by content seemed to fizzle out. Why was this happening? Their marketing team conducted an investigation to find out what was concerning their customers the most; what was the precise pain point? The investigation consisted of in person interviews, surveys and demographic research. This led them to develop content that they repurposed in 60 different ways, including blog posts, lead nurturing campaigns and social media. The result? Four times as many leads and 300% more closed deals.
Qualitative And Quantitative Data To Make Decisions
Dun and Bradstreet provide commercial data, analytics and insights for businesses. Instead of using a single form or data, the company uses multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to make marketing decisions. This includes multiple-outcomes analyses, experimentation and testing, and customer and competitive intelligence. This has increased their click through rate from the homepage to other product pages from 25% to a whopping 175%
Make Marketing Campaigns Fun
People consider direct marketing as old news, in a constantly evolving market. But that doesn’t have to be true. Intronis is a data protection company that achieved a 700% return on investment from their direct mail marketing campaign. How did they do this? They sent out Atari gaming units and $200 gift certificates to a restaurant as incentive to their most valuable prospects.
Identify Content Gaps In The Marketplace
And fill those gaps! This is what SuperOffice, a customer relationship management software company based in Europe did. They proved the power of content, even when it has to be delivered in multiple languages. The marketing team created a methodical content marketing campaign that delivered content customers want to consume, via blogs, whitepapers, email nurturing and social media. They did so by determining the most popular keywords that had little to no competition, and built the content around those keywords. That increased organic traffic by 97% and leads by 43%.
Align Content Release With Buying Cycles
PR Newswire orchestrated content in every marketing channel to coincide with and accelerate the unique buying cycles of over 25,000 prospects and customers across the world. The results were nothing short of remarkable. Within a year, the company had achieved a 30% shorter sales cycle and increased their closed deals by 7%. Qualified leads went up by 8% and buyer engagement by 20%.
With all the data contained in B2B studies, and so many of them available for free to anyone, marketers can access more information than ever before, and use this information to develop content marketing that achieves a robust return on investment.
Read more relevant blog post:Business to Business (B2B) & Business to Consumer (B2C) Services