How to Write a Case Study that Brings in Business

woman smiling giving a presentation

On your list of marketing goals, building trust with your audience should be somewhere near the top. As most customers will not consider working with you without thoroughly vetting others’ experience with your company, customer reviews are your first step. But, what if you want to take it a step further? That’s where case studies come in.

Case studies are some of the most beneficial assets that your company can have in its marketing toolbox. Not only are you featuring a positive experience with your company, but you’re explaining to your audience exactly how that customer benefitted—with statistics, quotes, and visual elements. To help you build your next case study, we’ve put together a few things that you should consider along the way, including how to get started and how to use it to attract new leads. Here’s how to write a case study that you’re proud of.

First, What is a Case Study?

A case study is an in-depth response project that allows you to highlight your business, products, or services and your real-life customers to share their experiences.

The opinions and stories of customers have incredible power over your prospects. Based on what people see or hear about a brand determines what judgment they have or what action they will, or won’t, take. Over time, by incorporating positive and genuine feedback into your various marketing strategies, you will gain more customers and drive more revenue.

Where Can I Use a Case Study?

You can use (and reuse) your case study in numerous forms that will attract your ideal client. The beauty of case studies is that it’s not what you are sharing about your service or product, it’s about what others are sharing, automatically creating an element of storytelling. 

Prove to potential customers that you have what they need by accentuating positive evidence through your:

  • Website: Often, your website is the primary location where potential consumers research information. By supplying helpful and authentic testimonials, you can help attract your ideal audience. 
  • Marketing Collateral: When creating your collateral pieces, use statistics or quotes found from the study to build your credibility. 
  • Social Media: You can design engaging graphics by utilizing takeaways or numbers found in your study.
  • Videos: Videos on all social platforms are becoming more and more popular each day. Repurpose your study results into movement creations with animated infographics, typography videos, or testimonials. 

Where Do I Start?

You first want to determine the purpose of your case study. In most cases, the purpose is to demonstrate how a common issue of your target audience is solved. An efficient way to determine what these issues are? Ensure your entire team is actively collaborating to compare existing or potential problems. 

After establishing the purpose, other key elements you want to implement are to:

  • Find the right candidate: The person or company you choose to focus the study on makes or breaks your case study. Choose someone who is willing to (enthusiastically) provide you with all the necessary information.
  • Emphasize your product or service: Be sure to let your audience know exactly which services or products you utilized in the case study. This way, they will become more familiar with your brand, and which features they are initially interested in pursuing. 
  • Be creative with your visuals: Did you help with a business’ website? Did a client have a transformative impact? Include content, photos, or screenshots of the candidate results to make the case study easier to follow and more attractive to view. 
  • Display numerical results: Numbers don’t lie, so it’s important to incorporate the “hard” facts into your final study. Present your impressive stats with pride, there’s a reason people like you and others should know that, too.  

Build a Reputation Management Strategy with Green Apple Strategy

Interested in taking your case study to the next level? Green Apple helps businesses like you improve their marketing strategies. Contact us today to schedule a consultation. We’re happy to learn more about you and help you accomplish your desired marketing goals. 

10 Ways to Promote Your Upcoming Webinar

working-on-a-laptop-with-headphones

You have plenty of wonderful ideas and expertise to share with your audience. What better way than a webinar? The thing is, though, that a hefty amount of thought, planning, and design goes into creating a webinar. And, after all the work you’ve put into building this resource, wouldn’t it be great if someone attended? Of course, we know you want as many people as possible to see your webinar. So, we put together a list of ways that you can promote your upcoming webinar.   

1. Send an Email Blast 

First up, send an email to your newsletter subscribers. Because they already follow you, they’ll be interested to see that you’re providing them with helpful content. You can increase your chances of a successful email by adding an eye-catching subject line and segmenting your list to narrow in on those who would be most interested. In your email, make sure to include all necessary details along with a clear explanation of the benefits of attending.

2. Add a Line to Your Email Signature

Consider adding a line about your upcoming webinar to your email signature. That way, you always have a reminder there for clients and prospects. Be sure to add a link so that they can find more information! 

3. Feature it On Your Home Page

Try featuring information about your webinar on your Home page. When clients land on your site, they’re already looking for insight. Imagine how excited they’ll be to see that you’re offering to share your know-how!  

4. Create a Paid Social Campaign

Help your followers find your webinar with a paid social campaign. Before you put money behind your ad, make sure that you determine which of your social media platforms performs the best and where your audience spends the most time.

5. Write a Blog 

Writing a blog to announce your webinar and feature a high-level overview will give you a multi-purpose piece of content that you can use on your website, social media, and in your emails. It will also be great to send to those who ask for more information.

6. Add a Pop-Up to Your Website

To draw even more attention to your webinar, try adding a pop-up to your website. You can use this as an opportunity to encourage visitors to sign up or learn more. 

7. Collaborate with Influential People or Businesses in Your Industry

Many people in your industry have access to your target audience—social media personalities, podcasts, industry experts, and bloggers, just to name a few. Connect with these people to offer your insight on their next project (e.g., guesting on their podcast) to create an opportunity to plug your new webinar. Since your audiences are so similar, you’ll find that many of their followers are there for precisely this type of content.

8. Hand Out Flyers at Your Next Event

Have a trade show coming up? Design an engaging informational hand-out that you can give to attendees who may be interested. These events are also an excellent opportunity to collect email addresses from those who would like to receive more information.

9. Post Consistently On Social Media

Add a consistent routine of posting about your webinar on your social media accounts. Feature fun, informative content that lets the user know exactly what they would gain by attending.

10. Tell Everyone You Know

Word of mouth is a more effective marketing strategy than some may think. Tell everyone you know about your webinar, and be sure to send them follow-up information if they seem curious.

Need Help Building or Promoting a Webinar? 

Green Apple builds and promotes webinars for clients in various industries, and we find that it’s an incredibly robust marking tool with a high return on investment. Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation.

How to Empower Employees to Create Content for Your Marketing

coworkers working together

Empowering employees to help create content for your marketing might seem like a big risk, but it can also create one of the biggest rewards for your business. That is why I encourage businesses that their marketing department should own organizational culture. Marketers that understand the power of employee advocacy can empower them to create content that improves brand awareness, educates buyers, increases search engine visibility, and creates more meaningful connections with potential customers. 

How to Empower Employees to Create Content for Your Marketing

Here are four specific ways you can begin to empower employees outside of marketing to help you create content to attract the attention of your potential customers: 

Invite employees to contribute to podcasts or webinars as subject matter experts.

Your employees likely have a deep level of experience that could be beneficial for potential customers. Empowering them to become thought leaders in your industry by inviting them to create content is one of the simplest, yet most effective ways to maximize their knowledge for business development. It could be something as simple as hosting monthly webinars that put your employees in the spotlight or creating a podcast where you interview employees about how to overcome specific challenges your audience is facing. 

Make it easy for employees to share content they care about.

Having your employees share your content—whether it’s emailing it to a prospect or promoting it on social media—is the perfect way to increase your reach.

But just because you create the content (and even ask them to help promote it), doesn’t mean they will share it. 

That’s why it’s important to create marketing content employees actually want to share.  It could be a story about your employee or one of your clients or a tutorial related to your product. 

Equip and reward employee advocates.

According to recent research, 31% of fast-growing companies have set up an employee advocacy program. These businesses recognize that employee advocacy encourages their workforce to expand their role from “employee” to “brand ambassador.” And, this type of approach can create tremendous dividends for the overall health and success of your company.

Let employees take over your social media for a day.

Instead of paying thousands to influencers and brand ambassadors, let your employees leverage their social media influence to increase awareness of your products and services. Give them the resources, tools, and leeway to develop their expertise in the niche. While you might have one person who owns the responsibility of improving your brand’s social media presence, making sure he or she isn’t doing it alone is critical to success.

Leveraging employees to help create content for marketing is an incredibly valuable way to humanize your brand. Employees might be your most effective content creators because they know the challenges your customers face every day and have a deep knowledge of your product, service, and industry. 

Contact Green Apple Strategy to discuss how you can leverage content marketing to improve SEO, develop your brand story, and generate leads.

4 Steps Your Small or Midsize Business Can Take to Improve SEO

If there’s one thing we know about small business leaders, it’s that they are incredibly busy people. While many small business leaders recognize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as an important marketing tactic, most don’t have the knowledge or bandwidth to execute everything that needs to be done to optimize their website for search. At the same time, most small businesses have limited digital marketing budgets.

SEO is a game-changer for small and midsize businesses. It’s what makes small, local companies able to compete with the big companies. No matter what industry you’re in or the size of your business, consumers are looking for brands like yours online every day. Investing in SEO, or at least having a working understanding of the basics, is one of the best ways to reach these potential customers.

4 Steps Your Small or Midsize Business Can Take to Improve SEO

While SEO can seem overwhelming, there are four steps we typically encourage small businesses to consider—from simple basics to more complex tactics:

Step 1: Create a website (that’s optimized for search).

One of the reasons small businesses struggle with SEO is because their website isn’t built with search in mind. Sure, your website might look good, but if it’s not structured correctly, you can lose out on a significant amount of search traffic.

In case it helps, here are some of the most important local SEO factors for small and midsize businesses.

Step 2: Optimize the meta-descriptions on each page to reach local customers.

More than likely, you already have a website. But making sure it has relevant keywords that matter to your customers—and therefore search engine results—is an important second step.

The next step for SEO is to make sure all of your primary landing pages are optimized for the keywords you discovered. In other words, you must utilize the appropriate keywords in your titles, meta descriptions, and body content for each page. Also, ensure that every page on your website has a unique meta description and title.

Pro tip: It’s helpful if your metadata description doesn’t exceed the length at which Google begins to truncate the text. In addition, try to make sure that the description will entice users to click-through to your site.

If you need to optimize your meta-descriptions and website content for search, here are a few details and rules you’ll need to consider.

Step 3: Set up and optimize your Google My Business page.

Google My Business should be a focal point for any small business, especially if you want to maximize the power of search. It’s incredibly simple to set up your Google My Business page, and it can make a big impact. As a small business, you should leverage every element of Google My Business pages to your advantage—images, videos, Q&A, reviews, and posts you publish.

Step 4: Look for creative opportunities to increase reach outside your city or region.

Many businesses serve clients across the country or region and are looking for ways to rank high in searches outside their cities. One of the most common questions we get as an SEO firm is, “How do we rank beyond the city where our headquarters is located?”

This is where you can begin to get creative with your SEO tactics and strategies. You might consider creating content focused on specific cities or regions. Taking this approach allows you to build up the authority of your site with quality external links, and you could increase your search rankings for location-specific keywords.

If you want to rank high outside of your business’ physical location, here are a few specific tips to help you rank in searches conducted outside your area.

You don’t have to execute every step mentioned above, but if you’re looking to take advantage of everything SEO can offer your small or midsize business, I’d encourage you to take the next step. SEO success doesn’t happen overnight for any business. That’s why it’s incredibly important to take action to address the basic issues and then tweak as you go.

5 Questions to Evaluate & Enhance Your Content Marketing

video editor working on a laptop

One of the primary purposes of content marketing, and no doubt one of its most compelling benefits has always been that it helps to connect what marketing is doing with what sales is doing. However, the trends that have led companies to focus on content marketing have also raised some very important questions from business development professionals, one of which being, “How do we not only connect our content marketing to our current sales process but also ultimately enhance our processes along the way?”

In this blog post, we’ll highlight five questions you can use to make sure your inbound marketing efforts are worth it.

Here are five questions to evaluate your efforts and enhance your content marketing campaigns moving forward:

  1. What are the biggest gaps in your current sales and marketing process? Everything you do when it comes to content marketing should enhance your current sales and marketing process. Do you need more leads? Does your sales team need resources to close more sales? Are leads going cold? Taking time to identify the biggest gaps in your sales or marketing processes will help you find ways to use content marketing to help you overcome them.

  2. What questions do people have in different stages of the buying cycle? The entire goal of content marketing is to address the questions your prospective customers have at the appropriate time. Spend time thinking through the journey a prospective customer takes from learning about your brand to becoming a customer. What questions are they asking throughout that process? What problem are they trying to solve?

  3. What type of content can you create to answer those questions and give your prospects confidence in your company? Providing content that addresses the specific needs of where a prospective customer is in the buying cycle is critical for success. For example, new prospective buyers might be looking for helpful information like eBooks or infographics. Prospective clients who are considering doing work with your business might need case studies or product spec sheets to make a decision.

  4. What would help your sales team promote your content marketing resources: email script, suggested social updates? By encouraging your team to use tools for cultivating relationships with current clients and leads, you’re able to essentially kill two birds with one stone — generate new leads & equip your sales team with resources to help them succeed.

  5. How can you give people a reason to stay interested in your business? Consistently providing prospects with quality content is a great way to keep them engaged during the buying process. Don’t think of what you want to tell prospects, think of what they want to know.

Are you ready to overcome the obstacles that keep a lot of companies from experiencing the benefit of an integrated inbound marketing and sales process? Contact Green Apple Strategy to see how we can enhance your content marketing efforts for greater results.

5 Ways to Equip Your Sales Team with Content Marketing

Equip your sales team
A common frustration among content marketers is seeing their well-crafted content being ignored by sales reps. Depending on who you ask, the estimates for how much content goes unused by sales vary from 60% to 90%. So how do you get sales to get on board with content and leverage the content you’re producing? Many times, salespeople see the primary function of these pieces as lead generation tools. However, by encouraging your team to use them as tools for cultivating relationships with current clients and leads, you’re able to essentially kill two birds with one stone: generate new leads & equip your sales team with resources to help them succeed. 5 Ways to Equip Your Sales Team with Content Marketing Here are five ways your sales team can use the resources you generate from content marketing to cultivate relationships, shorten the sales cycle, and close more leads:
  1. Send the downloadable content to a decision maker who has stalled in the buying process. This is a legitimate opportunity to see if you can get things moving forward again.
  2. Blast the downloadable content to your existing clients to remind them that you are still there. Everyone likes to know that others are looking out for them.
  3. Print the downloadable content out in color and include that with seminar or workshop materials. Give them something of value that doesn’t ask them for a signature at the end.
  4. Include it as part of your follow-up to a conference call or onsite meeting when appropriate. Again, this is another way you can separate yourself from the competition and interact with the prospect in ways that benefits them and you.
  5. Use downloadable content to add credibility to your product or service. Independent research, case studies, and white papers remind the prospect of what you discussed and can be used to affirm your position. You’re also helping your internal champion “sell” you to all the people involved in the decision process.
Take Your Content Marketing & Biz Dev Efforts to the Next Level Content marketing does more than help you generate new leads — it can also drive the success of your sales team. If you invest in content marketing, be sure to develop a process for equipping your sales team with the resources you create and encouraging them to share the content. If you want to learn more about how to integrate your content marketing and business development efforts to maximize ROI in both areas, don’t miss our latest eBook Biz Dev’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.