» Use Customer Success Stories to Promote Your Web Design Business- tutorial blog

Customer success stories–also referred to as case studies–are a terrific way to bolster your Web and print marketing business. They’re convincing because they provide third-party testimonials of how a customer used your service to solve a problem.

You can write customer success stories as narratives (like magazine articles) or structure them in a format that you use with all your success stories. For marketing, I prefer the structured approach because I can get the point across with less copy than a narrative form.

Business people are willing to read more than consumers but I still believe brevity is better for case studies, especially when published as a Web page or in an e-newsletter. One or  two pages does the trick for me.

My approach to writing success stories is to first state the problem, then describe how the company’s product or service solved the problem, and then wrap up with the benefits of the solution or what most business people would call their ROI, or “return on investment.”

The ROI could be hard dollars and that’s the most compelling story you can tell, but not all solutions are so easily quantifiable or the customer simply refuses to say just how much money he saved for competitive reasons, or they think it’s none of your business, or something else.

Here’s an example of a typical structure (overlook the fact the design is outdated).

The best case studies are based on the experience of named customers, but I’ve seen plenty based on the experiences of real customers who declined to be identified and some that were plain fiction.

Okay, so let’s say we have a live customer on the hook–someone who has agreed to recount their positive experiences working with your company. Here’s a format and structure you might use:

What was the problem?

Joe Blow, the proprietor of Acme Co., was stumped why the traffic to his Web site was so low. He’d hired his nephew to design the site and the nephew assured him that he knew all about Web design. But it slowly dawned on Blow that the work his nephew did might not be so hot after all. “We were scrambling,” Blow says. “We really needed for our traffic to increase and we were living from check to check. I knew I needed to act fast.” And so on and so on.

How did you fix it?

Blow called us, Zapruder Web Design Inc., to find out whether one of our designers could help improve the look and feel of its site and to make sure that it was properly optimized for search engines. In stepped Jane Johnson, Zapruder’s top designer. “It was evident that the layout just wasn’t working for Acme, Johnson explains. “The colors were all wrong, the navigation was hardly intuitive and the graphics just weren’t working hard enough to support the company’s brand.” And so on and so on.

What were the benefits?

Acme was back online with an entirely new design in a matter of weeks and traffic began to steadily increase. Better still, Acme also saw its revenues start to rise, thanks to the new shopping cart system Zapruder designed. Acme was able to update its content daily because the newly designed Web site also had an easy-to-use content management system. “Most of the software we used was open source and that went a long way to making sure we were able to come in right on budget,” Johnson says. And so on and so on.

If I have the space, I like to include a quick abstract of a few sentences somewhere on the page so the reader can quickly see what the case study is about. I’ve also worked with layouts that were color-coded for different markets, say blue for healthcare and green for an environmental nonprofit.

The benefits count most. Make sure you’re clear about what the big payoff was in dollars, time saved, efficiency, productivity–whatever measures you can come up with.

Last words…

I prefer to use actual customer quotes because they’re more credible. It’s okay to paraphrase and attribute the comment to the person who said it.

Include a design you may have done or an infographic that explains your process if you can. You can explain how the design process works far faster with an image than with words and use less space while you’re at it.

Use all the tools in your writing kit: Keywords, proper keyword placement, links to your site and that of your clients, formatting in lists and bullets, images with captions and filled in alt tags–the whole burrito.