If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It: Building a Compelling Case Study

Case studies can be a very handy part of your marketing kit as a blogger.  While not an absolute requirement for working with brands, they can be a nice, polished way to present your influence, reach and effectiveness as a professional.  In other words, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.  The best case studies are concise, persuasive and visually dazzling.  Here are a few ideas for building a compelling case study.

Lead with a concise summary of the marketing activities in question.

In one or two carefully edited sentences, summarize what you did in partnership with a brand.  Mention the event, activation or other marketing activity that you launched along with the brand, audience and if relevant, key demographic involved in the activity.
Examples:

• “Curated a guest list for and hosted a holiday brunch with Local Cool Boutique followed by a sponsored post campaign on my blog and top social media accounts.”
• “Launched a one week Instagram shoe contest for London Shoe Designer targeting the East Coast market.”

Present your best “before-and-after” stories.

Think about the impact your marketing campaign/activities had on the brand partner.  You may not have access to some of the key analytics such as in-store sales, monthly unique visitors or other metrics the brand will likely measure about this particular campaign.  However, you can certainly measure analytics for your blog and key social media accounts.  You can also share anecdotes and stories about the effect your work had on qualitative measures such as sentiment and goodwill.
Examples:

• “On the day of the event and two days following the event, tweets about Local Cool Boutique increased over 150%.”
• “Over the campaign period, the sponsored post and related social media campaign resulted in over 5000 impressions for New York Bag Brand.”
• “The online activation resulted in increased engagement for Big Department Store.  Many of the comments on my blog in response to the campaign were positive with reader comments such as ‘Love Big Department Store for participating in this’ and ‘Thank you for the giveaway Big Department Store!’.”

Make it pretty.

Even the most professionally written, analytically sound case study will fail if it isn’t wrapped up in visually appealing packaging.  Remember to keep the text concise and tight and use the accompanying visuals and layout to sell your creativity as a blogger and brand partner.  Choose your best images to magnify the ideas in the case study.

Last but not least- edit with an eagle eye!

Your case study should be no more than 1.5 pages or 5 Powerpoint slides long.  So you will need to be a ruthless editor.  For every sentence in the case study or slide in your deck, ask yourself “Does this need to be here?  Does this make sense?  Is this boring?” Use common sense to strike out sections that are repetitive or don’t excite the reader.  Don’t be afraid to show the case study to a friend or third party to give your text and overall presentation an objective eye.

Would you put together a case study for brands?  Was this list helpful for you?