4min chapter

UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy cover image

Episode 151: Powerful Case Studies with Joel Klettke

UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy

CHAPTER

How to Balance Direct Quotes With Text

In a typical snapshot, we aim for about 600 words. We use an approach that others can mimic or steal it called call and response. It's similar to what I just described, but our copywriters will say something like, for Joe, this was a really challenging struggle. And then immediately followed up by a quote where he expands on what that struggle looked like. So those are much longer. Oftentimes in those longer narrative formats, unless we're really blowing out the solution, things like bullet points or explaining how something was done, which the client can't do because that process is entitled to the company. They're actually telling the story and filling in the little gaps between quotes.

00:00
Speaker 2
And what did that mean helps you to drive attention from the actual facts towards the value, which is why everybody's interested in your product.
Speaker 1
Exactly. You know, people might come for the big metric. They might start reading this study because it said, oh, they saw an X percent increase or whatever. But there's this whole human component to stories. There's these specific wins, these things we don't know we're looking for, but we want when we see them. And so to give you a tangible example, we did an interview with a client where they said, well, you know, it's minimized the amount of, you know, admin time by some like 50%. We asked, what does that actually mean? What does that look like? They said, well, our secretary doesn't have to chase people around the office anymore to get XYZ or to do payroll. And that type of specific example, it's something that lives in the back of the minds of those ideal leads of that company is that's their reality. What it looks like today, like, yeah, everyone's going to say, oh, we got 50% more efficient. We want to be more efficient. But when you can speak specifically in a study and say things like, now the secretary doesn't have to chase project managers around anymore. It's a completely different layer of detail that makes it that much more compelling.
Speaker 2
Let's talk a bit about the post production. So you obviously transcribe those. And then how do you handle the actual copywriting process? How do you balance the amount of direct quotes with the amount of text that your copywriter writes themselves?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so it really depends on the format and the intent of the piece. So for example, with the snapshots, we know our goal, our stated goal for the piece is to communicate just the information a lead needs to take action as quickly as possible. And so we'll structure those where there's a strict line between we have kind of a paragraph explaining, a short paragraph explaining what the challenge of problem was and we bring the hero into it. And then we'll separate, after that, we'll have a quote from the client that helps tell that story. So we'll let in all of our formats, we let the customer expand on what was just said. So we might say in our writing, we might in our paragraph say, you know, Joe Schmo was really struggling to collect on outstanding payments. It was causing his agency to fall into half your line on their line of credit and creating huge problems for administration. We might say something like that. And then the client quote following up might, you know, expand on that. So it might say, you know, my life was a nightmare and we were wasting hours every week sending follow up emails, no matter what we did, we couldn't seem to get people to pay on time. And that might be it. So for a short study, it might just be something as simple as that. When we're dealing with a more narrative study, a situation where we want to communicate a real depth of information and we want to go really detailed into the process, then we'll kind of interweave the two. So we use an approach that others can mimic or steal it called call and response. So it's similar to what I just described, but our copywriters will introduce an idea. They'll say something like, for Joe, this was a really challenging struggle. And then immediately followed up by a quote where he expands on what that struggle looked like. And then the writer will chime back in and say, so he did this, da da da da. And so those are much longer. So for a typical snapshot, like I said, we aim for about 600 words. That's kind of a balance, like it's often very close to 50 50 between customer quote and actual expose a like narrative or sometimes maybe 60 40 with the narrative. It's super in most cases, heavily a customer narrative driven, which is why you need such a good interview to do those. So oftentimes in those longer narrative formats, unless we're really blowing out the solution, using things like bullet points or we're really explaining like how something was done, which the client can't really, you know, explain because that process is entitled to the company. Oftentimes it tilts much more heavily towards the customer quotes. They're actually telling the story and we're just kind of filling in the little gaps in between. So the best way to get a genuine picture of that, none of our samples on our site are gated. You can go to our sample section. We have samples labeled as snapshot. We have samples labeled as narrative. And you can see real examples of how we put these together.

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