Canright Communications

Content that connects

Collin Canright

Communications Conversations: August 01 – August 05

Text Case Study typed on retro typewriter

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

Case studies are influential, yet often underestimated, marketing tools that help a company create credibility with potential customers.

Used on a website, as an email, or as a leave-behind for salespeople, a well-written case study illustrates how you resolved a specific problem or met a need. By letting a customer speak about the results they receive as a result of your product and solution, you gain credibility as you educate potential customers on how your product or service works.

You build even more credibility when your case study gets published in an industry publication, as has happened with previous Canright clients. For example, one of our case studies that examined how one of our clients grew its business without increasing staff was published in AFP Exchange, the journal of the Association of Financial Professionals, the treasury industry’s primary professional group.

The Canright Process 

The Canright process of crafting a compelling case study involves a handful of important steps, including a questionnaire and outline. A comprehensive Case Study Research questionnaire and outline gives a framework for researching product and service case studies that interest and educate. Most case studies do not need this much detail, but the more you have the better you can show how your product or solution helps clients achieve their business goals. 

During the questionnaire and interview phase, we spend time meeting with clients to understand their vision for the case study. We like gathering background information about the client and information related to project challenges, solutions, costs, benefits, and results.

From there, we begin plugging that information into an outline and flushing out the content until we have a completed, refined piece.

Client Case Study Spotlight

Canright writes frequent case studies for the North Central Terrazzo Association (NCTA). Often times these case studies spotlight the completion of large-scale projects or trending news in the terrazzo industry. One of our recent NCTA case studies covered a terrazzo project at the Clinton Airport in Arkansas. Titled “Over an Arkansas Sky Captivates Visitors to the Clinton Airport,” the process of writing the case study included a brief questionnaire, interview, and outline before its completion.

For more information on how Canright writes case studies, read our “Outline and Questions for Case Study Research.”

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

Outline and Questions for Case Study Research

Canright Communication’s comprehensive Case Study Research questionnaire and outline gives a framework for researching product and service case studies that interest and educate. Most case studies do not need this much detail, but the more you have the better you can show how your product or solution helps clients achieve their business goals.

These are the typical sections included in a good case study:

Background

  • Client’s name.
  • Purpose and mission of organization.
  • What is the essence of the solution?
  • How does the company stand out in its market?
  • What makes it unique or interesting?
  • Annual revenue.
  • Publicly traded / private / not-for-profit / government / individual.
  • Locations.

Challenges

  • What problem was the client trying to solve?
  • What were its goals for the program?
  • What Product-Service elements did you use?

Solutions

  • What did Product-Service do?
  • How did you use the Product-Service?
  • How did implementation work? What was required from you and what did your client do?
  • What problems did Product-Service overcome?
  • What was the process and time to implement solutions and bring online?

Costs

  • How much did the solution cost?
  • What components go into determining solution cost?
  • What cost options did the client consider?
  • How did the client justify the cost?

Benefits

  • What benefits did Product-Service in general and Product-Service in particular offer?
  • How much were cost reduced?
  • What process efficiencies resulted?
  • How much did the solution save?
  • How easy was it to use the services?

Results

  • Enhancement of market position, customer retention, customer satisfaction, internal attitudes, cost savings, etc?
  • What services worked best and why?
  • What were unexpected surprises? Any “good news” surprises?
  • Data on results, preferably data that can be charted into a visual.
  • How has your institution changed in the eyes of your customers?
  • Learns, such as, “Are online billing customers more profitable?”
  • Growth, grounded in data such as change in number of customers or accounts, revenue, profit, market ranking, changes in product line, customer retention rates, etc.
  • What did the client learn?
  • How did Product-Service enhance overall marketing performance?
  • How did client’s products or services change case study organization’s rankings?
  • Have your services helped attract new customers?
  • How are retention rates?
  • Movement toward ideal state. What’s next?

It’s important to note that benefits refer to the actual benefits of the products and services. Results are the outcome(s) of those benefits.

Empowering New Hires with Focused Onboarding

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

In this week’s Canright newsletter, we take a look at different ways to present information to new hires during the onboarding phase. With focused and digestible onboarding, we can avoid overwhelming new hires with information.

Focused and Digestible Onboarding

New hires face an overwhelming amount of information when they start out. From logging into email to understanding a full proprietary product suite, it’s an undertaking to absorb all the information you need and hit the ground running. To give new employees the best start, it’s best to focus on key areas, give the employee the resources they need, and provide information in digestible bites.

Why

  • Empowering the new hire without overwhelming them will promote a good employee experience.

Use Cases

  • New hire briefings and demos
  • Reference resources

Method

  • Use in-person demos as an opportunity to connect the new hire with key contacts in the organization. But keep it light! Keep in-person demos and overviews short and targeted.  Follow up with recordings and other resources so that the new hire can review at their own pace and reference when needed.
  • Gather helpful resources tailored to the new hire’s responsibilities. Group them by areas. For example: HR, Organization Background, Product Overviews, Team Resources, Day-to-Day References.
  • Link directly to topics of interest in knowledge bases and other organizational resources. This will help them get used to the layout, contents, and user experience without making them search for an unfamiliar system.

Onboarding Knowledge Base

In highly technical businesses, having a clear, concise way of presenting information internally is often a struggle. It can lead to slower onboarding and overall less clarity in exactly which practices make your business run well.  A strong knowledge base collects all of the data and documentation needed to make a business run and presents it in an easy-to-follow format.  

Why

  • Lends internal transparency to how onboarding processes and procedures work.

Use Cases

  • Onboarding documents to let new hires know how processes really work and how to use tools and software.
  • Clarity on what the day-to-day looks like from an outside or executive perspective.
  • Identifying areas in which new documentation is needed, or where current practices may not make sense.

Method

An ideal knowledge base isn’t that hard to set up — wiki software allows for a well-organized, fully searchable archive of all relevant information, split by topics that pinpoint exact areas of focus throughout your business. For the best results, aiming for a holistic view of what a business does, in a process-oriented way, can make a huge difference in shining a light on exactly how your business really operates and what’s being accomplished.

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

What Makes a Good Thought Leadership Piece?

Abstract thought leadership picture with silhouettes of four people.

What makes up a good thought leadership piece? Many things, actually. For example, strong, impactful thought leadership pieces should always be persuasive, influence the greater good, strike the right tone, be genuine, and have a strong call to action. 

Thought Leadership is Persuasive
It provides the background to justify policy. Businesses can use these pieces to advocate or defend against proposals to change government policy, corporate policy, or industry standards. Technology or engineering companies can use these pieces to introduce new advancements.

Thought Leadership Seeks to Influence the Greater Good
Credible, informational content looks out for more than your own self-interest (though, it will surprise few readers if your own self-interest is part of the greater good being advocated). Content that advocates change that appears counter to your self-interest is even more interesting because it implies you are a visionary; that you aren’t afraid to think beyond today’s circumstances.

Thought Leadership strikes a tone between formality and accessibility
It is not a glib sales pitch. It is not an advertisement. Rather, it is a marketing piece and should speak to your reputation.

Thought Leadership is Genuine
If your information is too promotional, it’s not going to connect with your audience.  People can see right through a hard sales pitch, and no one wants to be tricked into reading a commercial. Your content should be authentic to your brand, but not action-driven; you’re seeking to offer perspectives that inspire, not to sell.

Thought Leadership Includes the Right Call to Action
You need to be genuine, but don’t forget you’re still writing marketing content. You need to make a targeted call to a specific audience somewhere in your content. That requires understanding exactly who your audience is, and who your pieces attract. 

Remember, above all, to soft-sell. This means providing your readers with useful information to solve problems they can relate to, without mentioning your company’s product or service. This creates trust and credibility for your company which results in sales leads.

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Chainlink & Decentralized Finance

Chainlink launched in 2019 as the first to market a decentralized oracle network. Since then, it has become the de-facto standard in how DeFi & smart contracts interact with the real world. By building a framework for decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink empowers hybrid smart contracts for expansive use by providing a secure foundation for connecting oracle data with real-world, off-chain computation. Contracts rely on external information for fulfilling term agreements. Online, Chainlink can automate that process and remove third-party arbitrators by utilizing blockchain oracles. 

By employing a data feed, oracles enable the validation of ongoing terms for related parties while contract stipulations are still being met. This allows all parties to know in real-time where the contract stands without any interruptions/interferences.

Chainlink oracles gather and collect external, real-world data and interact with blockchains to comb through relevant information to feed smart contracts for predictive modeling. In this way, Chainlink compiles and validates data for advanced smart contracts in an automated and efficient way. To showcase its development, Chainlink has been experimenting with real-world use cases, such as bonds. Bonds are fixed-income instruments that represent a loan made by an investor to a borrower (typically corporate or governmental). Chainlink can replicate bond transactions as automated smart contracts by providing the external data required for loan settlement, such as interest rates, debt ratings, and fiat payments.