Deliberate Freelancer #116: How to Create Case Studies to Land New Clients, with Emma Siemasko
Today’s guest is Emma Siemasko, the founder of Stories By Us, a content marketing business. Emma, who lives in San Jose, California, also offers freelance writing coach and is co-host of the Freelance Writing Coach podcast.
Emma has been a solopreneur for six years. She is an expert on writing case studies to promote our businesses. She created the DIY Case Study Kit and has created dozens of case studies and customer stories for tech companies and solopreneurs. Emma’s clients include Figma, Grammarly and Salesforce.
A case study is “the story of a customer’s transformation because they used your product or services.” Case studies go beyond testimonials and LinkedIn recommendations. Case studies allow you to get more specific about what it was like to work with you, plus you can share results.
Melanie thinks of case studies as being sprinkled around solopreneurs’ websites. But there are several ways you can use case studies. Case studies can be emailed as pdfs as part of your sales pitch or during onboarding. You can also pull out a quote from a case study and post it as a testimonial on your website.
When choosing which clients to write case studies about, you may want to develop a case study for each one of the services you offer or each one of the niches/industries you cover.
Your case study should tell a great story. This includes sharing your customer’s challenge, how you solved it and the results.
The best case studies require getting a client’s permission and interviewing them about the relationship and project. Have a good set of questions written down. But if you feel uncomfortable or awkward doing that interview, you can outsource the interview part. Once you write the case study, send it to your client for review.
Emma explains how to write a case study if you’re “only” writing an article or doing a straightforward project that doesn’t seem to lend itself to case studies at first—or you aren’t privy to metrics. Results don’t have to be metrics. Results can be how you made their job easier and what you were like to work with. Be creative in how you think about results. What was the value of working with you?
Emma also talks about the nitty-gritty details: length, format, design.
Biz Bite: Use minimal viable systems.
The Bookshelf: “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” by Lizzie Johnson
Resources:
Emma’s Go-To Case Study Interview Questions
Case study examples:
How NFI Used WorkStep Retain to Improve Frontline Retention
How Laura Got a 711% Return on Her Ad Spend
How Kira Hug Helped Business By Design Drive Almost $500,000 in One Launch
How Weebly Saved “a Million” Hours on Content Production and Achieved a 3X ROI
Emma’s website, Stories By Us
Freelance Writing Coach podcast
Emma’s DIY Case Study Kit to purchase—use the Code PODCAST to get 20% off.
Emma’s Case Study Email Templates to purchase