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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.  

Communications Conversations: July 04 – June 08

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

Ad agencies have long relied on creative briefs to provide assignment basics. Often structured in the form of a questionnaire, briefs give communications teams a common understanding of the requirements and key considerations that drive campaign deliverables. In our experience, the best briefs, whether for advertising campaigns or technical content, extract insights from project or campaign research, adding new layers of meaning.
 
Why

  • Provide new insights and priorities, and bring teams together.

Use Cases

  • Create alignment between product, development, and communications teams.
  • Develop product documentation for external and internal audiences.
  • Present new products or services to the market.

Method

  • Complete a content brief questionnaire for assignments. You can find creative brief templates online or download the Canright Content Brief. 
  • Include statements of organizational purpose, mission, and goals. Use what comes with the understanding that the project’s context may help refine them. 
  • Answer all of the traditional project questions while keeping an organizational context in mind. This may help refine your initial project purpose and goals. 
  • Research the product and service’s competitive market to further refine your content and communications project.  
  • Add any insights that the organizational, project and market contexts spark in the final write-up and share it with the product, creative, and executive teams. 
  • Gather and analyze responses and reactions. These may point to needs for product and service refinement, additional competitive analysis, or new communications directions.

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

Solutions Marketing for Consulting Services

Marketing for consulting services typically consists of long presentations that feature dense PowerPoint slides illustrating a firm’s philosophy, frameworks, and methodologies. What can be lost on clients are the solutions and benefits that will help move their business forward. The solutions marketing brochure fills the gap.
 
A solutions marketing brochure is not designed to explain all of the things you offer, your entire process, or your complete thinking about an industry. Rather, it is designed to show the client what they get and why you are the best ones to provide it to them. Brochures are sales tools.

Professional Services Brochure
Collin provides an overview of a method developed by chief marketing officer George Ravich, president of Ravco Marketing. George is a master of making professional services into marketable products and solutions. Our work on a series of brochures for technology consultancy Synechron crystallized our method of brochure copywriting.

Why

  • Captures interest and prompts buyer engagement.

Use Cases

  • Follow up to a sales presentation sent by email, posted on websites, or ideally as a printed piece left behind after an in-person meeting.
  • Detail the solutions and benefits that a specific service provides to clients.
  • Show how your firm makes a client’s business work better.

Method

Focus on the audience for the service: who they are, what level in the organization, and what problems you think they have. Write these content elements:

A short problem statement. George always instilled in us that the potential clients understood the problem better than we do. Our brochures did not tell the client what they needed.
 
What we provide. State clearly what you are selling to the client. Focus on a specific service, such as Cloud Capabilities Assessment, Payment Card Program Management, or Anti-Money Laundering Compliance.
 
Why we are different. Provide points of differentiation: the results you can provide to clients that other firms cannot.
 
Benefits to the clients. These are direct statements of what a customer gets, such as reduced costs. Ideally, each statement will be quantified in some meaningful way.
 
Proof. Short case studies and examples are woven into the copy, set off in a sidebar, or used as pull-out quotes.
 
Features and technologies supported. List them at the end or set them off in a sidebar. These details support the sales case. They are not the show and really not what you are selling. If possible, focus on what your firm does well and better than competing firms.

For an overview of a professional services campaign that used this method, see our Synechron Blockchain Now case study.

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