Case Study: CRM Story Driven Case Studies
Increasing organic traffic and conversions with a new type of case study
The CRM product marketing team at a major cloud software CRM firm had fantastic clients to showcase the platform’s advantages. However, the organization was creating traditional “problem, solution, benefit” style case studies.
The team predicted that changing their case study approach to be more story-driven while focusing on the customer’s ‘why’ rather than the product’s ‘what’ would have significant benefits. They thought that the case studies would be more compelling and usable across more of the customer journey. And that the case studies would be shareable because prospects would relate to the people in the customer stories.
They predicated that telling a more in-depth story would increase their web traffic. And that by telling a story, more people would visit their site and be interested in the CRM solutions they offer.
The team also wanted to expand the usefulness of the stories of their successful customers to build more awareness of their brand and solution. They hypothesized that they were leaving money on the table by deploying an outdated approach to case studies that only served the later stages of the customer journey. They wanted to create content so engaging that it could be used across the whole customer journey.
But the leadership team and their internal partners in customer marketing and customer evidence disagreed. They thought that case studies only served late-journey content requirements.
Besides, they had an established process and standard case study questions that served the ‘problem, solution, benefit’ style of case studies. Collectively, the team also didn’t have a defined storytelling approach or the tools needed to extract the correct information from customers and then turn that information into compelling stories.
The product marketing team approached their most compelling customers and invited them to participate in a new type of case study, a “customer showcase,” which would generate such exciting material that even the customers would want to share it on their websites.
The team identified elements of their content strategy that could benefit from story-driven content (such as events and campaign landing pages) where a budget existed to serve both planned activities and the customer showcase concept.
The team used Go Narrative’s 3D Story™ framework to create a new type of case study that rose like a phoenix from the flames of their old approach. With this, they started with the customer’s story instead of the CRM solution. They created landing pages for the campaign, one of which was built using this customer showcase approach. When they compared it to a regular landing page, they saw great results.
These included an overall 3.78x boost in page views as a result of the new approach. However, the most significant impact came from the page actions, which increased by 7.35x in conversions. The new method still fulfilled the old case study need for late journey proof, but it also demonstrated the power of customer narratives in influencing change.
Go Narrative ingredients: customer analysis, interview design, interviews, case study design and writing, 3D Story™ framework, TRIPS Storytelling™ methodology, Story MeET™ method, story design.