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Are you sharing your successes through case studies

Guest post by: Catriona Pollard

Article Overview: Case studies provide ideal opportunities to leverage business successes and can be used to reinforce your core messages through "story telling". They provide audiences, including journalists, with a picture of the benefits your business provides its clients.

Are you sharing your successes through case studies

Case studies provide ideal opportunities to leverage business successes and can be used to reinforce your core messages through "story telling". They provide audiences, including journalists, with a picture of the benefits your business provides its clients.

Market research consistently shows managers refer to the experiences of their peers when making purchase decisions. You most likely have many "stories" and it would be a shame if you didn't tell your audiences about the successes you have.

Case studies follow the same format:

Identify the challenge a particular customer faced.

Describe the solution provided by the company.

Illustrate the measurable results gained from using the service.

Many publications require case studies to be written in a specific way, for example Marketing Magazine submissions require the following structure:

• Background - what were the contexts of the case study?

• Objective - what did the company hope to achieve?

• Strategy - how did the company plan to achieve the objective?

• Execution - how did the company actually implement the strategy?

• Results - what were the results of the execution? Did they align with the objectives? What did the company learn from the whole experience?

When writing a case study we interview our client as well as their client so we can include quotes and get both sides of the story. The story should demonstrate how your company's product or service was a key factor in solving your client's problem. It doesn't have to be solely about your product or service, but your influence must be vital to the success.

As with any written material used to build credibility it needs to be written well and not be overly promotional. See a sample case study that we have achieved heaps of media coverage, or read a simple written for the web case study.

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Article Tags: case studies, Catriona Pollard, CP Communications, opportunities, public relations



Related Forum Posts
Facebook or MySpace? - Barbara - do you mind sharing some of your successes with MySpace? What are you doing to make it worthwhile and what results have you seen?
Re: Cheers from Phil Hogan.... - Hi Phil, So glad you found us. I'm sure you'll find a lot of relevant information. We have people from all walks of life and they are great about sharing their successes and ideas.
Bake Them 'No's' A Cake, I Say! - I've had a surreal thought. What if the no's really are the successes and the successes are the failures. It's like a metaphor I sometimes use with my clients, which goes like this. You drive a car journey. On the way there, you pass landmarks and notice them for what they are, where they are. They are fixed. Yet, on the way back, you see them from a totally different angle, yet they are the same. It's just the perspective that's changed. A bit like life really - it depends where you are standing!
Problem with "Today's Hot Forums" - Hi Evan, While my case studies are listed under "Today's Hot Forums", their links lead you to an error page that says "No posts exist for this topic" probably because I moved them to the new category. Is there a way to fix this? Thanks
Successes at My Space - [quote:37w3bsp7]do you mind sharing some of your successes with MySpace? [/quote:37w3bsp7] Hi, Evan Actually the successes I was talking about was with the Groups feature - there are soooo many groups there of interest to me, from the fiction to the sciences, that I've joined them all. I don't find Facebook's Groups stuff to be user-friendly at all. I will say that the more I browse, the more I just shake my head at what people do there (as well as on Facebook, of course). Profile pages where the text of everything is illegible, either because they have a dark, illustrated background - which looks nice but makes it impossible to read anything, or because they choose weird colors - one person I saw yesterday used light red text on a dark green background. And when you read their blog entries or even the text on their profiles... it's like they can't put together a coherent sentence, let alone spell any of the words properly. And I don't think they parse other people's writings very well, either... Well..end of rant I'm just annoyed because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm sure everyone's out in the fun and the sun instead of being at home surfing the web [and in particular my site]!


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