Case studies – what’s the best way to write them?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions concerning writing case studies lately from clients.  What’s the best way to write case studies?  Should I create templated case study forms?  Should a web case study look very much like an offline/printable case study?  What are best practices for case study writing?

My belief is that in terms of content, writing an effective case study needs to answer the following questions:  What was the problem/need?  How did your company/product address it?  What were the results?  So I do recommend forming a fairly simply template (working with a designer) around those sections.

Then be clear and concise in recounting the answers to the above questions – focusing on the takeaways that you want the reader of your case study to remember concerning the work that you did.  Remember that even though it’s something that you believe maybe of great interest to your reader, your case study should still be skimmable and contain bullet points and headers because it’s unlikely that your reader will read every word.  And I highly recommend putting in at least one quote from the client in each case study!

Finally I do believe that online case studies and offline case studies should each take advantage of their respective media.  That means that while you may use the same template for both case studies, that the content in each one might differ in some ways – for instance you might provide critical hot links in your online case study that you don’t in your offline version, or you might have different use of colors or diagrams or fonts that increase readability in your offline version that are not appropriate for the online case study.

Done correctly case studies are a powerful marketing tool – presenting your product/service in a context that often makes more of an impact than any other type of marketing collateral you might employ.