The New Year sweeps in with lots of hype: a rose-colored-glasses look back on the last year and heaps of often-unrealistic expectations for the year ahead. If you like to have a fresh starting point once in a while, January gives you a boost. But, if January 1^st feels like just another day, dragging with it all the same issues that plagued December 31^st, how do we conjure the wherewithal to get through the winter, let alone meet our marketing and business goals? 

Like most of us, I know that the New Year is both a state of mind and a calendar date. I’m not going to wake up on New Year’s Day with superhuman energy or to find that a marketing version of the shoemaker’s elves has done all my work. I can choose to see that life is chaotic and challenging, joyful and satisfying, and try not to deny any of it. That translates into planning for 2020 marketing activities, too.

Even if you only know the broadest or most general goals of your organization, you can easily identify a few promotional tools that will move you in a positive direction. Of course, that’s the [deceptively] easy part: Once you know the people you serve and understand where they get their information, meet them there with your brand, your know-how, and your compassion. The rest may seem hazy or even overwhelming; the rest is all about the how.

“Break it into pieces” may be the best advice I’ve ever heard about anything. If I make no other resolution for the new year, I vow to default to a “pieces” view when issues become too cloudy, complex, or challenging. That’s especially true for marketing.

You’ll be able to get more done and be better understood when you focus on single, well-articulated ideas. Break your bigger ideas into smaller parts. List smaller pieces of the larger initiative. Make flow charts and lists to your heart’s content, but try to narrow your energy to one piece at a time. If overhauling your company website is on the horizon for 2020, the very idea can shut you down before you start. After you segment the project into a list of to-dos or an itemized spreadsheet (we all have our preferences and organization SOPs), isolate one piece at a time. A website redesign, for example, may include steps like a content audit of the existing site (what works and what doesn’t), an audit of the host’s performance, and identifying an outside design partner to help realize your vision. That’s a lot to wade through. With the “break it into pieces” approach, confining your efforts to the content audit first (and alone) may greatly reduce the overwhelm and provide data that will help redefine other steps, potentially lightening the overall weight of the project.

Whether you’re looking at January as a month of brave new days, or seeing it as the same-old-same-old, I hope that when you break your goals into manageable bits, you’ll move mountains.

Deanne

That can be especially true for marketing, sales, and communications materials. One project that often slips to the bottom of the to-do pile during prime time is the hardworking case study.

Sales teams love case studies because they help prospective customers visualize the benefits of working together in a real-world example. Case studies serve as testimonials, services run-downs, and, if well-crafted, compelling advertisements that help elevate your reputation. They also provide plenty of opportunity for repurposing: launch them as blog posts; send them as emails; make them available as PDFs; print them and package them with leave-behinds and proposals; and, of course, serialize them across your social media accounts and newsfeeds. Case studies show off what your company does best.

If we’ve inspired you to create a couple new case studies for your team, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Develop a template that reflects your brand and key objectives. Following your own style guidelines will help unify the look and feel of the case studies, fortifying your brand and core messaging.

Focus on the primary customer benefit of working with your company. Don’t shy away from the emotional impact of the project. Help readers understand why saving time was essential to your customers because with more time they could focus on improving service to their customers, for instance.

Decide which is most important: the customer industry or the bundle of services your team delivered. Direct the case study into that lane so you and your sales team can get the most use out of it. If you want to employ it with both audiences, write it two ways and create two different studies. Don’t try to accomplish both with one; you’ll muddy the intention.

Break the story into a few major categories. Answer the questions:

• What was the problem, challenge, or assignment?

• Why were you brought onto the project?

• What was your unique approach to finding a solution?

• How did the customer benefit?

• How did the customer’s customer benefit?

• What details made a substantial difference?

• Why is this case study of interest to anyone else?

Ask every contributor the same questions. If you’re getting information from different resources from inside your company, provide each with the same short questionnaire. This way, you’ll find it easier to create similarity between content flow and depth of detail.

We can help. If the timing isn’t right for you to start work on your case studies, we’ve got you covered. In short order, we can get you geared up with shiny new case studies that your team will want to use. Send us an email or give us a call.

These questions may help you collect and organize the information necessary to write a compelling two-page service sheet that can be used to support sales conversations with prospective customers:

Matter for the front:

What is the brand or marketing name of this service or service package? Be consistent across all mentions. Make it easy for customers to identify it.

What is the primary (or overview) benefit to the customer?

What are the individual features to the service offerings? When describing each, lead with each feature’s benefit(s) to the customer. This is not a technical spec sheet. Talk briefly about why these features matter to the customer.

What are the challenges faced by the type of customer who would benefit from this service? Provide a few sentences about why this service package assists the customer in overcoming those challenges.

Provide something extra. Briefly describe an emotional benefit to the service package, a key insight unique to the customer’s industry, or a snippet from a customer testimonial.

Matter for the back:

Why is your company uniquely positioned to understand the challenges your customers face? Here is the place to review the benefits described on the front in a broader context or pull in your company’s history with this particular service or the customer’s industry.

Cross sell. List other services your company provides and the industries that benefit from them.

Provide an invitation to discuss how this service package may help the customer.

Be sure to include your branding identity/logo, company tagline, call to action, contact information, company descriptive, and trademark and copyright notices as appropriate.