If you’re an SaaS company, case studies are one of the best (and maybe most under-utilized) ways to show off your product. Since subscription-based software often has such a wide range of capabilities, it’s important to show potential buyers real-life, specific success stories whenever possible. This is your chance to craft a persuasive narrative packed with facts, figures, and details that will encourage even more businesses to collaborate with you.
How to Write a Case Study for Marketing Your SaaS Platform
Calling all creative types! Case studies are distinctive forms of storytelling, not unlike short stories. Here’s a tried-and-true case study template that you can utilize when marketing your SaaS package.
Your Title Should Offer a “Reader’s Digest” Version of Events
Draw your readers in with an “at a glance” version of your case study right there in the title. The more specific, the better. After all, a case title like “Collaborating With Spotify” is much too vague and doesn’t tell us if this partnership was successful. But a title like “How Spotify Flipped the Switch and Landed 130 Million Subscribers Against All Odds” is thrilling. Right away, your readers are hooked.
Lay Out the Challenge and Why It Matters
If we simply stated that a client “found success,” and that was that, we wouldn’t have a very compelling story to tell. No, your readers are along for the ride—so place them right there in the passenger seat along with you. Set the stage: describe how your client reached out to you and what precisely they asked you for help on.
Take our work with YWCA Minneapolis , for example. They’ve been advancing equity here in Minnesota for 125 years—that’s a pretty big deal! When a business of such impact wants to create a more engaging website and refine their professional voice, how could one resist? Of course, the YWCA isn’t an SaaS platform, but structuring your case studies so that there are real stakes involved has proven effective across all industries and sectors.
Identify Objectives
What clear, concrete goals does your client have, and where exactly does your SaaS company fit into that solution? What can you do to solve their problem that other SaaS companies cannot? Extra points here for innovation—more often than not, calculated risks can lead to a great payoff.
Say, for example, that a customer came to you looking for the means to store massive amounts of confidential information safely and efficiently. Describe to your readers the details of your brainstorming session, and from there, what goals you and the customer identified and agreed upon.
Demonstrate Solutions
Conclude your story by describing just how your SaaS package solved the problem. We recommend using a combination of the following techniques when doing so.
- Publish data-driven insights. Real-life facts and figures add credibility to your case study, so incorporate those when it makes sense to do so. For example, by what percent did your customer’s office productivity increase after implementing your SaaS platform?
- Emphasize a creative approach. Your customer partnered with you because they felt you’d handle their problem in a way that others would not. Did your SaaS company come up with a new way to protect that confidential data? Did you offer a subscription plan tailored to your customer’s limited budget? Was your customer convinced that their goals were a lost cause until your company’s divine spark of inspiration pulled them through?
Keep an Eye on Tone Throughout Your Case Study
Data is all well and good, but it’s the combination of information and presentation that truly sways potential customers. We suggest writing with the following in mind.
- Persuasive language is your bread and butter. Assertive phrases, like “drive sales” and “deliver results,” emphasize action and the resulting payoff.
- Put a positive spin on your narrative. Addressing the difficulties and challenges you faced is fine—not doing so, after all, can seem contrived. But don’t wallow in those struggles, either. Focus on what changed on your customer’s end for the better, combining the qualitative and quantitative insights we mentioned earlier.
Snap Agency: The Copywriting Partner Your SaaS Company Has Been Waiting For
At Snap, we’re all about strengthening brand identity and helping to build bonds between SaaS companies and their customers. If you need advice on or assistance with crafting persuasive written content for case studies, blog posts, landing pages, social media, and so on, drop us a message. Our team of strategists, copywriters, and designers are the best at what they do, and we can’t wait to prove it.