The business case study is a much vaunted business development weapon, but what is your experience? For me, a case study is not something that, once completed, should be filed away somewhere as an example of good practice and never used.

Writing a case study requires certain skills and can be time consuming and costly (particularly if you choose to pay someone to do it for you), so you have to be confident that it will be an effective use of your time – especially if you are a small business.

When written and presented well, a good case study can not only be used on your website, but also across your entire marketing mix. Here are a few ideas:

• Provide links to your case studies in your email campaigns
• Equip your sales force with a wide variety of examples that can be sent electronically to prospective clients to follow up on telemarketing activity
• They can be printed and used as handouts at trade events
• They make good news stories for e-newsletters and can even be used to support power point presentations
• Pluck quotes from them and build a library of testimonials that can support press releases, flyers or brochures, they can also be particularly useful to support tenders as examples of good practice.

Sounds like a bit of a silver bullet, doesn’t it? Not always. A case study can come across as quite boring for many people. It will largely depend on the kind of service you are offering. Nobody wants to read a case study about how your new trainee plumber managed to unblock a u-bend with minimum fuss, no matter how proud you are of them, you have to make it relevant to the reader.

Try to write it like a story, with a beginning, middle and an end. Introduce the main character(s) (i.e the subject of the case study), give a little background information (but not too much), highlight their needs or the problem they faced and show how your business came up with the solution.

I also think it is important for case studies to be visually pleasing. Having a nicely designed template is a good place to start, but photography can also be important, particularly if the impact you have made is a visual one. If you are a decorator or landscape gardener, for example, a quote or testimonial from a client is great, but people will always want to see your work as well.

So where I stand on the title question is – it depends on what type of service you offer. A positive example of your work that will illustrate what you can do better than any piece of marketing copy, but you need a strong enough story to tell in the first place.

In many instances a simple testimonial or quote from a client will be enough to demonstrate that you offer good customer service. For example, take the retail sector, all your prospective customers need to know is that other people have liked your products and service, there’s no need to write a full case study.

So, if you think having a library of case studies will be helpful for your business then you need someone who can write well and keep the reader interested. If you find yourself detailing the latest fitting you have installed on the inside of your last client’s new wardrobe – stop! I have read some terrible attempts at case studies, which would probably do more harm than good.

As long as you tick all those boxes then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using your case studies across every part of your marketing mix – but don’t forget to measure their effectiveness. Check the amount of clicks they are getting on your website, ask clients for feedback on whether they thought they were useful and ask your sales team what they think. However, if your case studies and press releases are getting some traction in the media, you can be sure that you are on the right track.

We would love to hear about your experiences with case studies. Do you use case studies? How effective have you found them to be? Are they difficult to get right? How important are they to your business?