When consolidating businesses and motivating transactions that have a value proposition involved, trust is an important attraction. Therefore, generating it should be a priority for those companies that are dedicated to offering a product or service to the market. How is that trust generated today within inbound marketing and how have case studies or success stories contributed to it?
Without a doubt, success stories, case studies or business cases have been used to reflect those experiences in which the acquisition of a product or service has had a positive effect both qualitatively and quantitatively in a real environment, with the aim of witnessing its success in the market and in the daily lives of its users and buyers.
Defining: What are success stories?
In this sense, one of the arguments most used by companies to gain the trust of their customers are success stories. Success stories, as their name can easily express, are real-life situations that show how a product or service has had great success, either because it satisfies a need or provides an important solution, in the life of a community. or a target audience.
The success stories will depend a lot on the depth with which they want to be treated, the messages that the company wants to convey and its history in the market. However, some common characteristics can be established in the case studies that have been used by companies, among them are:
- They raise a problem or need that, thanks to a particular task, was solved (how were the company’s services contracted? How did the problem evolve? How was it resolved?)
- Include short testimonials from satisfied customers
- They emphasize figures, statistics and data that legitimize the results obtained.
- They rely on both audiovisual tools (videos) and textual tools.
Success stories serve to convince that our services or products are the best solution to a problem, but told from the perspective of our clients. In a successful case, the client must be the star and as such it must be that person who tells in first person the obstacles or difficulties they encountered before implementing our solution and the benefits they obtained after it.
Forgive the redundancy: How to create a successful case study?
After knowing what this business strategy is based on, it is important to know what the basic notions are that will allow us to create effective success stories with a great impact. Specialists in inbound marketing and content marketing recommend using storytelling to create a success story that not only contains important information for users but also has a characteristic narrative.
In this sense, a case study must be structured as if it were a story, that is, an experience that you want to tell (in this case told from the experience of a client), to do this we recommend basing it on the following parameters:
- Approach: This is the presentation of the problems and needs that your clients had before using our product or service.
- Knot: In this part, we must tell about the search and discovery of the solution by your client, for example, after implementing a technological platform designed to meet their need.
- Outcome: You must always conclude with a description of the benefits or advantages obtained (quality of life, increased productivity, savings, scalability, etc.) using data that validates that information.
The importance of success stories in inbound marketing
When people are about to make a purchase, the first thing they do is research, either on the web or with friends, how the product or service has worked for other people. The buyer’s journey is a tool on which the inbound marketing methodology is based, to know at what exact moment a buyer is: whether in the consideration, recommendation and decision stage.
Success stories are very useful in the last two stages of the buyer because it is an incentive that motivates them to complete a purchase. In inbound marketing, success stories are considered content offers that customers are offered when they are in the recommendation stage of the purchasing process, where they mainly evaluate the existing options in the market to solve their needs. Thus, the case allows the user to identify with other clients who turned to the same company.
It also works in the decision stage, since the case studies are an experience that has already been proven, they legitimize the acquisition of that service or purchase. H2H (human-to-human) connections are essential when promoting a case study, since according to studies, 88% of consumers trust online reviews in the same way they trust the opinions of acquaintances.
On the other hand, Search Engine Land conducted a survey where 85% of respondents said that they read up to 10 reviews on the Internet before deciding on an option on the market, that is, they consult options that legitimize a service and/or product. This shows us how people reinforce a purchase stimulus by receiving a recommendation from another person because case studies are nothing more than an attractive way of expressing a recommendation.
For the general public, these cases end up being convincing because they trust more in the opinions of a company’s customers than that of a seller. In general, personal opinions create empathy and connect better with audiences. However, according to some studies in Latin America, 64% of consumers trust recommendations from professionals or opinion leaders, so at least these recommendations tend to stand out more if the source who issues them is impartial, objective and professional.
In this way, case studies represent important tools that allow us to provide valuable content, legitimize the quality of a service, promote a purchase, make a sale and obtain a client. In inbound marketing, they acquire great importance because they connect deeply with the philosophy of this methodology, which has as its main objective: to educate over selling by offering useful and valuable content.
