Would love thoughts from your diverse perspectives!
Do customers/prospects actually read and get value out of 1,000ish word case studies that take 4-5 minutes to read???
It’s the industry standard. Long written case studies that get published on the website.
But then they sit there. I’m a huge fan of slicing them up into bite sized assets that can be used for sales enablement, deal closing, marketing campaigns, success enablement, upselling, etc.
But if the slices are what’s important, is it worth the time to create the really long written case study? Should it be a quick summary to post on the website to support having social proof and good logos?
I think it depends a lot on your audience. For a small business or consumer audience, or a buying decision that gets made in the mid-level of a bigger organization, bite sized assets are great. On the other hand, I've worked on several products bought by technical executives, and they aren't convinced by the bite-sized. They really do value more in-depth and more technical stories where they can understand more context and see how it compares or not with their own situation.
Gordana Stok has done a lot of research on this. Her research has found that buyers want more details (rather than less), especially when the price tag is high and the solution is complex. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tip-3-how-create-case-studies-b2b-buyers-want-read-gordana-stok/
You could work with your web analytics team to get data on your case study pages and see what resonates with your audience. Maybe there’s a particular case study that gets more views than the rest, which you can then use to up level the rest/future stories.
I'm a fan of "all of the above". I think that longer white paper-style has a place for backing up research when I'm looking for a product and putting together a discussion with other decision makers. I think shorter formats - written, audio, & video are great attention-getters that can laser focus on a particular attribute or functionality in a way that showcases the use case.
