Well-written case studies are a great way to bring your products and services to life – demonstrating that you can deliver exactly what you say you will.

Tangible examples of your previous successes provide the best endorsement of your work and can be invaluable to your business in helping to attract new customers – making your marketing budget work as hard as possible.

Here are 5 tips that will help ensure you produce perfect case studies every time:

1. Do your research

Identify a customer who may be willing to help you with your case study and ask them directly if they’d be happy to talk. Make sure you’ve done your homework – brush up on the exact details of the project you worked on together, their role, what they do now and your key learnings. This will help steer the direction you wish to take with your case study.

2. Get your questions ready

Put together a list of questions in advance – making sure that they are open questions so that the person you are interviewing will be able answer freely and in detail. But don’t just robotically tick the questions off one by one – treat this as a conversation and be ready to think on your feet with new questions should any new information come to light. That way you will have plenty of material to pick from when you write your case study later.

3. Put people at ease

By agreeing to participate and allow you to use them for a case study, your customer is doing you a huge favour so make it as easy and pain-free for them as possible. Arrange a convenient time for them to talk– whether it is by email, over the phone or in person. Be friendly, professional and polite and make sure you explain to them exactly how the conversation is going to work and let them know they can take their time. If the interview takes place over the phone explain that if you go quiet, you are listening, you’re just taking notes and ask them to bear with you!

4. Agree clear next steps

Be upfront about timeframes, where the case study will be featuring, when your customer can expect to see it and make sure that they see a copy of the case study before it is printed or published anywhere so that they can make sure they are happy with it. Always quote them as closely as possible and be prepared to make any changes that they may request.

5. Use photos

Good quality photography is vital to back up your case study – whether this is of the person you have interviewed or visuals of the work you did. A perfectly well-written case study can be spoilt by lack of, or poor quality, imagery so make sure you have decent photography to bring your story to life.

Case studies are a great way of telling the world all about your products or services by illustrating how they have helped and benefitted other customers. If done right they can be the difference between a potential customer skimming past your site and generating real, profitable interest.