Anatomy of a Case Study: Wooing Prospects With Surgical Precision

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

Case Study
noun

1.      the act or an instance of analyzing one or more particular cases or case histories with a view to making generalizations

2.      a detailed analysis of a person or group, especially as a model of medical, psychiatric, psychological, or social phenomena.

3.      an exemplary or cautionary model; an instructive example.

You’d never be able to tell from reading these boring definitions how critical case studies are to your collateral arsenal when you’re marketing financial technology – or really when you’re marketing any B2B product, for that matter. The reason these definitions don’t do case studies justice is that all three of them ignore the most essential component of an effective case study: human emotion.

Perhaps surprisingly if you’ve seen some of the convoluted case studies floating around out there, the formula for eliciting this outpouring of human emotion is actually quite simple and quite repeatable.

Act 1: The Problem

Start any case study by identifying the problem – or ideally, the set of problems – with which the subject of the case study was faced. You need to be careful here, though. Your solution may solve a boatload of problems, and you certainly can’t dig into all of them in 900 words.

The perfect problem for a case study is one that is a) significant and b) common. But what if you have to choose? What if one problem is more significant and the other is more common? You might be tempted to focus on the more significant problem. Don’t. What’s the value in touting how you solved a problem that nobody else has?

A common problem lets you establish a bond with the reader – which is the whole point of the case study. By the time you’ve laid out the entire situation, the reader should be thinking, I can totally relate to that. In fact, I’m experiencing that problem right now.

Act 2: The Solution
Here you simply tell the reader in very straightforward terms how the subject used your product to address the problem. There’s a big temptation at this point to add marketing words to the story. Marketing words are bad in case studies.

What are marketing words? Here’s an example: Last National Bank used the incredibly mind-blowing power and flexibility of Product X to solve the problem. In a case study, this next version will do just fine: Last National Bank used Product X to solve the problem. At this point, the reader will fully understand and appreciate the significance of Product X solving the problem without you adding any fluffy marketing words.

Act 3: The Results

Now the question you need to answer is: So what? What’s the big deal? Show me the money!

Exactly how you showcase the results will vary from product to product. For example, if you market an IT automation product, you might be able to show results in terms of hours saved. If you market home banking software, you might be able to talk about increased customer/member adoption. You get the picture.

The problem is, not every products lends itself well to measurable, empirical results. For example, suppose you’re marketing a fraud-prevention product. It’s pretty much impossible to measure how much of something didn’t happen. But maybe you got high marks from your auditor for deploying Product X. That’s a result a lot of people would like to achieve.

Don’t Blow It
There are a few common mistakes that seem to creep into a lot of case studies. The biggie, as I mentioned earlier, is the use of marketing words. Your role in a case study is to step back, get out of the way, and let the customer tell their story. Sure, you guide the story, but the customer still tells it. When you start using marketing words, you essentially steal the story away from your customer. Shame on you.

I’ve seen some “case studies” that were nothing more than question-and-answer interview pieces. Maybe this would work if you had a couple of thousand words to play with, but there’s no way you can tell a complete and compelling story in 900 words by simply typing out customer answers to four or five questions.

Lastly, don’t get too clever with document features, e.g. charts, graphs and grids. I’m not saying to never use them; just don’t feel like you’re required to use them. Remember, you’re telling a story – or more accurately, your customer is telling a story. Anything you add that doesn’t contribute directly to the telling of that story is a waste of your time and, more significantly, a waste of your prospect’s time.

That is all.

Don’t Let Your Goals Screw Up Your Opportunities

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

From an early age, we’re all taught that it’s important to have goals. The more detailed the goals, the better they are. And the more closely and single-mindedly we pursue them, the better we are. Sound familiar?

That may seem nice on the surface, but it’s my sincere belief that this is a flawed approach to life – and I’m absolutely certain it’s a flawed approach to marketing.

My issue with goals is that they’re based on a snapshot of the world as it exists today and at best a SWAG (that’s short for scientific wild-ass guess) at what we think the world will look like tomorrow. The problem is that, as anyone who’s been alive more than 15 minutes knows, things seldom turn out exactly the way we expect. That means the goal you set for the future probably won’t be appropriate for the future once it arrives in the present.

What’s worse, if you’re single-mindedly pursuing your goals, that doesn’t leave you any “mindedly” to address opportunities as they pop up. And that’s usually how opportunities appear – they just pop up, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man popping into the head of Ray Stantz.

When you get to that fork in the road, are you going to choose your old goal or your new opportunity? Opportunities are riskier than goals, to be sure. But with great risk come great rewards, or some crap like that. There are probably a hundred pithy sayings I could dig up to convince you that opportunities are worthier than goals. Only you can decide what’s right for you.

I know what you’re thinking right about now. Okay, Johnny, this sounds like a load of philosophical BS. What does it have to do with marketing?

If you read my blog last week, you saw my list of eight things that marketing is and isn’t. Numbers one and two were marketing is not a process and marketing is reactive. Blindly following a process is the marketing equivalent of single-mindedly pursuing a goal.

For example, one former employer of mine required marketing to be planned and budgeted (pretty much down to the penny) in one-year increments, with virtually no wiggle room. Six months into it, something would invariably happen that nobody expected.

So rigid were we in following our plans that it would be a struggle to deal with any new situation. To add to the frustration, it was a separate and equally difficult challenge trying to find the money to deal with the new situation. Our perpetual goal was to stick to the plan, and the plan always ended up sucking.

When I say that marketing is reactive, what is it that marketing is reacting to? Opportunities, of course. Granted, these opportunities may come disguised as challenges, obstacles or downright disasters, but trust me – any sudden, unexpected change in the marketplace is definitely an opportunity for the one who figures out how to best respond to it.

Am I saying you shouldn’t have goals? No, not really. What I am saying is that your goals should be broad. Your goals should lead you in a general direction, not to a specific GPS coordinate. And most important of all, you should constantly tweak and massage your goals as new data comes pouring in. That way, when opportunity does come a’knocking, you’ll be ready to respond quickly and decisively, and more to the point, you’ll be ready to trounce your befuddled competitors.

That is all.

Marketing Is … (8 Things You Need to Know)

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

What is marketing? That’s a question I’ve attempted to answer many times, in many different ways, both for myself and for others. And while my answers have always been accurate and truthful, I can’t honestly say that any one answer has ever been complete.

Marketing is (and isn’t) a lot of different things, depending on the context. With that thought in mind, here’s my stab at a list of the most important points about marketing.

Marketing is not a process. This is soooo important. Ask any past employee of mine. As a marketing manager, this is something I made an effort to instill in every person who ever worked for me. What I mean by this is that you can never reduce marketing to checklists, spreadsheets and reports. If you do, you’re missing the whole point. When you take a cookie-cutter approach to marketing, you get cookie-cutter results. And yet this is exactly what I see many marketing “professionals” do.

Marketing is reactive. Sometimes the word reactive carries a negative connotation. People seem to think that reactive implies some lack of planning. Planning is important, but no more important than being flexible and being aware of changing circumstance. If Google Maps tells you to take the bridge and the bridge is out when you get there, are you going to drive your car into the river for the sake of sticking with the plan? Or I could use a sports example. Ask JJ Watt if he thinks being reactive is a bad thing.

Marketing is cumulative. Marketing bureaucrats like to see results. Anything that doesn’t produce measurable results has no value. They want to see that someone clicked the link, hit the landing page, downloaded the white paper, initiated a sales contact, and eventually bought the product. This naïve approach totally ignores all the other times your brand likely touched that user before he or she ever clicked that link. Bottom line: There’s some very good marketing that just can’t be measured in this manner.

Marketing is not lead generation. Lead generation is a part of marketing – and an important part, to be sure – but it’s only a part nonetheless. Perhaps unfortunately, the digital age has conditioned many executives to equate marketing with only lead generation. That’s because digital marketing is very good at generating and tracking leads. But like its kissing cousin lead generation, digital marketing is only part of a successful marketing plan.

Marketing is not the realm of sales folk. There’s one school of thought that believes great salespeople inevitably make great marketers. Nothing personal, sales folk, but I’ve never actually seen this proven out in real life. That’s because salespeople only see the parts of marketing that impact them directly – like lead generation. And we all know (now anyway) that there’s more to marketing than lead generation. Marketing is a discipline unto itself.

Marketing is strategic. I wrote somewhere – I don’t remember where – that marketing is the strategic side of the coin, and sales is the tactical side of the same coin. Sales says, “Buy something from me today.” Marketing says, “Let me plant a seed so you’re more likely to buy something from me tomorrow.” Is that to say marketing is more important than sales? I’m not that delusional. A company can go a lot further with a great sales team and so-so marketing than with a so-so sales team and great marketing. The big payday comes when you have both great sales and great marketing.

Marketing is about people. You probably think your company markets technology products to banks and credit unions. Wrong! The people in your marketing department market technology products to people who work at banks and credit unions. If you forget the people part of the equation, your marketing will be stale, cold, clinical and ultimately ineffective.

Marketing is important to your company’s success. I know you have a great product, so this comment is really directed at the next reader, not you. Simply put, I’d rather have a mediocre product and great marketing than a great product with mediocre marketing. Just looks at McDonald’s. A McDonald’s hamburger tastes like an old shoe and is slightly less healthy, but thanks to aggressive marketing, they sell millions of them. Marketing makes a difference.

Do you have your own thoughts about what marketing is and isn’t? Leave a comment below or drop me an email.

That is all.

Is Your Newsletter a Snoozeletter?

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

If you’re publishing a company newsletter in 2015, consider yourself lucky. When I was responsible for the Symitar newsletter in the early 90s, it was an actual printed document. That meant, for one thing, that it was expensive – expensive to produce and expensive to distribute.

Cost isn’t the only thing that stunk about printing a newsletter. You had to worry about ridiculous details like ink color. The official Symitar color was Pantone 202, a burgundy. It was an okay color, but it was apparently a very difficult ink color to mix. More than once, I sent entire print runs back because my newsletter turned out a chocolaty brown instead of a rich burgundy.

And don’t even get me going on chokes and spreads and bleeds.

Today, thank the newsletter gods, we have PDFs, websites and email. With so much time and money saved not producing hard copy, you’d think companies would devote more resources to producing better newsletter content, right? Maybe that’s what you’d think, but my observation is that most company newsletters are still giant snoozeramas.

Don’t get me wrong. No company newsletter will ever win a Pulitzer Prize – nor should it aspire to. However, a company newsletter should be well-written, it should be informative, it should be relevant, and above all, it should support your company’s brand message.

To get the content right, though, you need to understand who your audience is. Here are my three simple rules for company newsletter audiences:

1.      Write it for your existing customers.

2.      Hope that your prospects will read it.

3.      Assume that your competitors will read it.

Let’s examine these more closely.

Writing for your existing customers means being humble. They’re already your customers, so there’s no need for a hard sell. Sure, you’re going to announce a new product now and then, but don’t copy and paste from your product brochure. That would just be lame.

If you’re not selling anything, what’s the point of having prospects read your newsletter? The truth is, you are selling something. You’re selling the experience of being your customer. You want your prospects to read your newsletter and think, yeah, that’s the kind of company I’d like to do business with.

Also, to this point, make sure to avoid any jargon that only your existing customers will understand. Put everything in terms that the uninitiated will easily comprehend.

Lastly, don’t tip your hand too far. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve read more than a few competitor newsletters over the course of my career. Most newsletters are benign, but every once in a while, somebody will let something slip that they might regret later. I have no qualms about capitalizing on someone else’s stupidity.

I’m sure I can write at least one or two more blogs about newsletter content, so I’ll let you go for now. In the meantime, if you want to pump up the news and tamp down the snooze in your corporate communications, drop me an email.

That is all.