How to use case studies to get new leads

Use them in cold outreach

Use case studies to make cold outreach warmer, by including them in your LinkedIn DMs / emails. Frame your message as helpful information rather than a sales pitch.

Your message will come across as helpful only if you’ve done an assessment of the prospect’s site and have an understanding of their likely challenges. Do that, and send a relevant case study that directly addresses those challenges.

Example approach: “I noticed your WordPress site is on an unsupported version, similar to what [similar company] was on. We helped them reduce risk of vulnerability by getting them on the latest version and a redesign, detailed in this case study.”

Present them at WordCamps

Present your case studies at WordCamps. It gets the word out that you can solve certain problems better than others. After the presentation highlight the talk back in the case study on your website.

You may not think much of it, but presenting at WordCamps makes a huge difference. But for them to make a difference, your talks need to actually be useful for the WordPress community.

There are soooo many different ways to propose talks for a single project because there are so many different ways to present it.

Folks in the community want to know how you innovatively solved a problem using code, how you got outstanding outcomes for a client, how you project-managed or solved engineering challenges in a mammoth-sized migration, what it was like working with a bank, etc.

Think about a project you recently completed. There’s more to it than meets the eye. Think about how you could propose a WordCamp talk based on it.

Everybody knows that WordCamps attract more WordPress-based companies than potential clients. But if you genuinely help the community first, people will talk, and those who are looking for someone like you will always find you. They have their ways.

Use them in your ToFu marketing campaign

Promote your case studies on social media. If you have a content strategy in place, drive readers to your case studies from your ToFu blog posts. You can also “spin-off” your case studies into other content types, like, say, a blog post highlighting how you solved a specific technical challenge.

SEO-Optimize them as much as possible

It’s educational blog posts, how-to guides, thought leadership posts and the like that are heavily optimized to be discovered through SERPs (ToFu). Case studies aren’t. But you should still do some SEO to capture organic traffic where you can.

You can do this by sprinkling industry-specific keywords (e.g., “healthcare website accessibility compliance”), adding technical solution terms (e.g., “headless WordPress implementation”), incorporating problem-focused phrases (e.g., “WooCommerce site slow loading speed solutions”), etc.

Prospects often search for solutions to specific problems like the above and it would be nice for your case studies to appear when they do.

Most B2B SaaS people are now using Perplexity or ChatGPT for search, but optimizing for the Google bot isn’t defunct yet.

Create a case study library

Create a filterable library so prospects can easily find the story they want to relate to. Most agencies organize case studies by industry vertical (healthcare, finance, ecommerce, etc.) and the solutions they provide (CMS migration, UX, etc.). Two other great ways are to organize by primary challenge (performance, security, etc.) and company size (startup, mid-market, enterprise).