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To celebrate B Corp month, I spoke to three B Corp communications experts to get their tips on how best to communicate values and impact in the sustainability and ESG space.

TL:DR

The changing face of ESG communications

We’ve come a long way since the days when sticking the word “green” in front of a product name was enough to convince people that buying it was good for the environment. Today the sustainability agenda has a hard won – if tenuous – seat in many boardrooms and governments the world over, as we face the realities of climate change and social injustice.

Few have observed this journey more closely than those tasked with communicating sustainability efforts and impact. Over the last 15 years, Rosalind Holley has worked for brands including UnLtd and JustGiving, and is now Director of Communications & Marketing at B Lab UK. When she started her career, the sustainability space was very different to what it is today.

“In the early days, people considered that you could either be a charity with a social mission or you could be a big bad business making a profit – it was challenging to get across the message that you could be a business and make a positive impact,” she says.

“Today it’s easier to be a business that considers people and the planet – there are a lot more of them, they’re better known. And increasingly people want to hear what brands are doing in this space, so there’s more of an open door for brands to talk about the work they’re doing.

“At the same time, the explosion of businesses trying to communicate impact means that it’s hard sometimes for people to understand what is true, what can be trusted, which does make it more difficult for brands in that space.”

Alessandra Sabellico, Global Corporate Communications & Reputation Director at Davines Group, has been in communications management for over 20 years. She has also seen enormous changes over that time, and believes that the role of sustainability communications is being redefined.

“The role of the sustainability communicator today is to help companies engage stakeholders by telling the whole story of sustainability,” she says. 

“This means talking about the difficulties, setbacks and failures on the path to becoming a better company. This is very different from the traditional mindset of corporate communications and marketing, which has been until now to spin the story to make the company look as favourable as possible.”

Sustainability legislation and compliance

Part of what is driving the need for greater transparency within sustainability and ESG comms is the increase in legislation.

“With a series of new regulations coming from Europe (and in the United States as well), the stakes of communicating sustainability are becoming higher and higher,” says Alessandra.

“Greenwashing, in addition to being a huge risk to a company’s reputation, comes with steep fines and threats of legal action, and effective sustainability communicators must learn to balance compliance with a compelling narrative.”

At Davines, this is driving greater teamwork between communications, marketing, sustainability and legal teams.

“This teamwork allows us to figure out what are the things that we can talk about, what are the ones that we’re not ready to talk about and then what do we need to do to change the substance of our sustainability program so that we can make the claims that engage our stakeholders while telling a truthful story of progress.”

Engaging with cynical, overwhelmed audiences

Of course, legislators are only one of the many stakeholders that ESG communications professionals need to consider. And each audience type needs something different.

“The starting point for any communications strategy is who are your audiences, and why are you trying to communicate this with them?” says Ros. 

“You might have a specific focus of trying to attract future employees, or you might be more focused on your customers or your communities or other stakeholders like investors, or policy makers.

“If you’re really clear on which of those audiences you’re going after, you can then think about whether you need to tell a story on your product or on your website or through social media. There’s not a one size fits all method. People will want different levels of depth.”

At Davines, engagement means communicating with everyone, starting with employees and ending with clients.

“That’s why internal communication and communication aimed at our community of hairdressers and estheticians is increasingly crucial for us,” says Alessandra. 

“This is because those who work in the Group, those who choose its products and those who buy them are not just earning a salary or buying an effective product but are part of a larger project that affects us all and is aimed at generating well-being and value for the planet and for people.”

The challenge for engagement though, is that people are becoming ever more cynical with the increase in sustainability messaging, making it harder to cut through the noise. And it may be that your ESG credentials aren’t the thing they care about the most anyway.

Kristen Fuller, Marketing and Communications Manager at Toast Brewing, says that in the first instance, you have to remember that you’re a business that is trying to sell a product or a service that people need.

“People want to know that we make great beer,” she says. “We’d love to believe that people think about sustainability first but we’re all human, people want a product that tastes great or that works or whatever the reason is that they’re buying something. They want it to deliver on whatever it’s supposed to deliver on.

“What we’ve learned is that you’ve got to convince people in the first instance that the beer tastes great and then they’re open to hearing the impact message.”

Make it relevant, tangible and easy to understand 

So what else can communications leads with a sustainability message do to engage their audiences without falling foul of regulations and drawing accusations of greenwashing. At Toast, the answer lies in combining factual data with storytelling, to make impact both tangible and relevant to their audience.

“The thing that our sales teams often focus on is the fact that every pint saves one slice of bread from being wasted,” says Kristen. “So when someone’s drinking their pint, they can think, ‘Great, I’ve saved a slice of bread’ – it’s a small but tangible win.”

In a similar vein, the team recently dug into the relative carbon footprints of drinking a pint of Toast beer on draft, from a bottle or from a can. They shared the results using a simple graphic on their social channels, which clearly showed how draft had the least negative environmental impact and bottles had the most. The post had exceptional engagement.

“That’s the kind of comms where people went, ‘Wow, great, when I’m buying my beer, I can choose a can over a bottle now and I know I’m making a good choice.” Again, it’s something tangible and that really got people engaged. It’s about making things easy for people to understand.”

B Lab UK’s Ros agrees that simple, straightforward communication that people can understand is key.

“It’s really easy to blind people with science – and it can be tempting to do that to prove the impact we’re having – but if it’s hard for people to understand, it’s not meaningful, then that can start to slide into greenwashing,” says Ros.

“Try to get specific about what you’re doing without resorting to too much jargon, try to make your language human, try to show what it really means in practice, and acknowledge that you’re on a path rather than finished. Because it’s not like you’re ever done with sustainability so don’t try and say that you’re done. Telling the story of the journey as well as the destination is really important.”

Show the how and build community

One of the easiest ways to help people understand your sustainability journey is to let them experience it for themselves. That means sharing it consistently, giving them behind-the-scenes glimpses that show rather than tell them about the work you’re doing.

“It’s the snippets, like Pizza Pilgrims sharing an Instagram reel of where their ingredients are locally sourced from, or Riverford giving over their newsletters to talking about the seasonal impact of their work,” says Ros. 

“They allow people to get under the hood of what they’re doing. And that consistent, honest ‘working out loud’ is something people respond really well to because they can see that it’s not about using a superlative once every three years and then never talking about it again. It’s about making it part of the ongoing drum beat of how we tell the story of our business.”

But sustainability comms doesn’t start and end with showcasing your own impact. There are many other ways to engage your audience in the wider conversation, to educate people and encourage them to make better choices.

The Toast team recently got involved with the No Mow May campaign, led by PlantlIfe, encouraging their audience on social media to share pictures of their unmowed lawns and linking it to product giveaways.

“At Toast we believe that food is nature and if we waste food, we waste nature, so getting involved in No Mow May felt authentic to the brand and the people behind it,” says Kristen. “It got a lot of really positive engagement and user generated content.

“It’s about building that community and encouraging people that we can make a difference if we work together. You’ve got to try to get people to engage with the message and spread it, but also not guilt trip them.”

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Sustainability communications is an exciting place to be right now, but there’s no doubt it has its challenges. And it’s likely that this space is only going to get more complex as we move ever closer to 2030 and beyond. 

We’ll almost certainly see more businesses entering the arena with sustainability messaging, legislation and regulation will shift and tighten, audiences will grow more knowledgeable and demands on us will increase.

In the face of this, it would be easy to shy away from communicating sustainability and impact at all, retreating into ‘greenhushing’ rather than risk being called out for falling short. But that’s not the way to make progress.

“If you’re the spokesperson or the person leading on a sustainability initiative or issue, you have to be willing to engage with it,” says Ros. “It’s a two-way street. If you’re putting communications out into the world, you can expect your stakeholders to have an opinion on them.

“But don’t immediately feel like, ‘Oh no, we’ve been criticised so that’s it, no more communicating about our sustainability efforts!’ Those opinions might actually be constructive, they may give you some interesting pointers as to where you want to go next. As communications professionals, we have to keep the conversation going.”

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Getting results from content marketing has never been more challenging. Especially if you’re an ESG-focused organisation, dealing with increasing regulation and cynicism in the face of so much green-washing and values-washing. 

Yet with the right strategy, content is still an incredibly powerful marketing tool, especially when it comes to building trust. So how do you ensure that the content you create makes an impact – and showcases yours?

It’s important to understand the challenges that exist within today’s marketing and business landscape, so that you can create a content strategy that takes these challenges into account. Only by doing so can you fully plan to create a brand that stands on genuine value as well as values, and outlasts whatever trend springs up next.

TL:DR

The content marketing challenge

Ever since the phrase content marketing was coined in 2001 there are two issues that have been growing exponentially: noise and cynicism.

In the early 2000s, only the biggest brands had websites. But when WordPress and Squarespace launched in 2003, websites became accessible to all. Then YouTube, Twitter, print-on-demand and all the other platforms and channels arrived and suddenly, the internet was a very noisy place. 

As content marketing has evolved, so has our cynicism. We’re far less ready to believe what we read or see or hear than we once were.

And AI is only making these problems worse. From low quality ChatGPT blog content to generic AI-generated responses on LinkedIn and a host of deep fakes across pretty much every digital channel going, it’s no wonder we don’t know who to trust.

If you want lots of content, AI can help. If you want to build a reputation, you still need humans.

The ESG / purpose marketing challenge

Alongside these broader content marketing challenges, there are a unique set of hurdles facing any organisation that has a set of values, principles or ESG-criteria at its heart.

The first is the language used to describe such brands, which is constantly evolving and never simple. As we entered the 21st century, terms like  ‘ethical’, ‘green’, and ‘eco-friendly’ were popular. Today we’re more likely to talk about a business being purpose-driven or values-led. CSR (corporate social responsibility) has been joined and in some cases replaced by ESG (environment, social, governance). None of these really captures the whole truth – and all have been misused.

Then there’s the fact that purpose is no longer a differentiator in the way it once was. As buyers demand more in the way of values from their suppliers, brands are jumping on the purpose bandwagon. Which means that once again, we’re seeing an increase in noise that makes it harder to stand out.

Likewise, people are becoming more cynical. Claim impact without being able to back that up and you’ll face accusations of green-washing or values-washing. Increasingly, you may also face regulatory compliance issues too.

In the face of these challenges, there are a number of factors to consider within your brand and content marketing strategy…

Positioning on value rather than values

First things first – are your ESG credentials really strong enough to be the foundation on which you build your outward facing brand? Are you a Patagonia, a Who Gives A Crap, or a Davines?

If not, you will need to consider how else to format your value proposition, focusing on the value you can add rather than simply the values you hold. Given the choice between a company with a great product and undefined values, or a company with a solid ESG policy but an average product, most buyers would opt for the former.

If you do have the credentials to build a brand around ESG criteria (and your audience cares about this sufficiently for it to be a differentiator), make sure you can back up your claims. In this, as in all things, you need to show rather than tell – and not in a tokenistic way. Pictures of your team planting trees might look great on LinkedIn but if you’re also using non-recyclable plastics in your product packaging, that’s marketing fluff at best and greenwashing at worst.

Making sure ESG is an operational effort first

Speaking of tokenistic, if ESG efforts are led by the marketing department, they are always going to feel like a layer of makeup – designed to embellish or to hide rather than tell the truth. ESG needs to be operationally driven, informing activity and decision-making throughout the organisation, with impact being tracked as anything else would be.

The job of the marketing department in regards to impact is the same as it is in all things – to provide customers and potential customers with the information they’re looking for. People want to know what brands stand for. They want to understand how they treat people and the planet.

So marketers within ESG-focused organisations need to package up that information and communicate it with the outside world as best as possible. To demonstrate impact across all marketing channels, to ensure that impact reports are engaging as well as accurate, to spread the message as widely as possible.

Being helpful, not just good

That said, it’s not just about communicating impact. Wherever you sit on the scale of values, whether it’s a central part of your value proposition or not, remember that your marketing needs to be more about helping your audience than proving how good you are.

When I ran RH& Co, a certified B Corporation, values were naturally a central part of who we were. And they definitely resonated with our clients, especially fellow B Corps and those in ESG-focused or third sector organisations. But what they really cared about is that we were an exceptional bunch of writers and strategists who could help them communicate their expertise effectively.

Yes, we had an impact report and yes, we sometimes shared our views about important topics like equality and the environment. But the majority of our marketing focused on content strategy, getting the best out of subject matter experts or creating content for each stage of the customer journey. In other words, how our creative team helps clients to build their brand reputation. 

Naturally, our values were what drove the business – but being helpful and valuable is what drove our content.

Investing in the longterm

To truly have an impact in this world, we need to balance short term results with long term impact. Carrying out activities today that have little positive effect on tomorrow just isn’t enough. It’s the ‘feed a person / teach a person to fish’ principle.

We need to take the same approach to building ESG-focused brands. Short term activations may be necessary but if you want to be seen as a values-led organisation then, as well as actually being a genuinely values-led organisation, you need to look at brand building as a longterm exercise.

A lot of the content you create won’t generate exciting results this week or this month or maybe even this quarter. But over time it will all build together to create something much bigger than itself. The somewhat nebulous, often fragile and utterly essential asset every ESG-focused organisation needs: a trusted reputation.

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This article is based on a talk given by Rin at brightonSEO in April 2024. You can watch the recording below.

Sex therapy. Embedded finance. And buying land. At first, these subjects don’t appear to have anything in common. But actually they do – they’re all subjects the RH&Co team have helped our clients rank for on Google. 

Is that because our writers are experts in the subject? No – though they know a lot more about them now than they did before! Instead, we leveraged our clients’ subject matter experts and combined their knowledge and insights with our own expertise in communicating complex information in a way that is engaging, valuable and generates results.

Over the last two decades – since the advent of content marketing in the early noughties – expertise has, if anything, become more important. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but this article is about SEO and that means we need to look at EEAT.

TLDR:

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What is EEAT and why does it matter for SEO?

It was around 10 years ago that Google introduced EAT, very quickly adding another E to form EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Here’s how they define these attributes:

Strictly speaking EEAT isn’t a ranking factor. However, it is used to guide Google’s Page Quality Raters – the people who assess content and judge how useful it is. These individuals judge individual pages, websites as a whole, and content creators, and they’re looking at literally everything from whether there are SSL certificates to whether the content is actually any good. 

This information helps Google to understand whether its algorithms are doing their job. So feedback from Page Quality Raters is likely to have gone into the August 2022 Helpful Content update, which was all about penalising pages that are designed for clicks rather than to inform readers. And the March 2024 Improved Quality Ranking update, which was all about reducing unoriginal content.

Ultimately, Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s what EEAT is about and that’s why it’s important for SEOs. So how do subject matter experts fit in?

What is expertise and how does it relate to EEAT?

We’ve written a lot about what expertise is, why its important and how buyers perceive it. If you really want to dive into the subject, we’d also recommend reading two fantastic books (and giving them to your subject matter experts while you’re at it):

For SEO purposes, it’s worth looking at what expertise is as Google would, based on the EEAT definitions in the previous section. In this case, an expert is someone who has real life experience, knows more than the average person, and can demonstrate why we should listen to them and why we should trust them.

Expertise as a positioning strategy

It’s worth stressing that expertise is not a quick fix – it’s a positioning strategy. It takes planning and effort and commitment to get it right and to get results. You can’t simply stick a subject matter expert’s byline on a piece of content and hope that works. Remember, this isn’t about fooling an algorithm, it’s about providing genuine value to your audience and building a reputation over the long term.

Internal vs external experts 

Another thing to remember is that expertise exists in many places. Hopefully you will have subject matter experts within your business – your consultants, your CTO, your product leads, even your head chef, if you run a restaurant. Internal experts allow you to own that knowledge, experience, authority and trust as a brand.

But there are external experts that can be worth tapping into as well. These could be your partners, industry influencers, even your own users. Drawing on their knowledge and experience for your content makes you an expert by association.

How to work with subject matter experts on SEO content

So if you’re a marketer tasked with building a reputation for your brand, where do you start with EEAT? How do you actually work with your subject matter experts to create content that works for both your readers and for Google? Broadly speaking, there are three approaches.

Get your experts to create content for you

Advantages: 

The advantage of this approach is that it takes less of your time – in theory, at least (see disadvantages). As a result, it’s scalable: lots of experts = lots of content. And it’s pretty low cost because you’re not having to bring in any professionals to create that content for you.

Disadvantages:

Unfortunately, the reality is that coordinating experts whose main role (and skill) is not content creation is a lot like herding cats. Your experts – whether internal or external – are busy people with their own agendas, so content is likely to slip down the ‘to do’ list.

They’re also not marketers. They aren’t trained to look at what an audience will engage with, they don’t understand tone of voice, they’re not used to seamlessly weaving in appropriate keywords. As a result, you could end up with copy that needs so much rewriting you may as well have done it yourself.

How to do it:

If you are going to get experts creating content for you, the first thing you’ll need to do is to sell the benefits of them getting involved, or even incentivise them, especially if they’re external. 

You’ll also need to create some sort of editorial guidelines – tone of voice, content length and so on. And you’ll need decent briefs that explain exactly what you want each piece of content to contain, to achieve etc.

And you’ll still need that internal content champion – whether it’s you or someone else – who can do the “cat herding” and can also look after edits and amends to ensure that the content is consistent, that it’s on brief, and that it achieves its objectives.

Create content and get experts to sign it off

Advantages:

At the other end of the scale, this method involves writing the content yourself and simply getting your experts to approve it, which has some very attractive benefits.

First, you have full control of content. You can make sure it’s on brief, on brand, that it ticks the right keyword boxes and so on. You’re also not reliant on anyone, except in the final approval stages, which can be tricky still but not nearly as tricky as getting a busy subject matter expert to write something for you.

Disadvantages:

The downside is that unless you’re also a subject matter expert, any content you create is likely to contain little genuine and unique expertise – things like real life anecdotes or analogies that only someone deeply rooted in the subject would come up with. That means the content will probably be easily replicable. And if you want to increase the volume of content, you’ll need more writing resource.

How to do it:

Despite its limitations, this method of creating EEAT content for SEO purposes can be very effective. It’s how we helped our client Blueheart, a health tech scale up, increase their site visits by 300% within 6 months.

If you do go down this route, you’ll need to develop really good research skills. You’ll need to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff, especially when it comes to credible sources and authoritative citations – no linking to a Wikipedia page as the source of your knowledge. 

And ideally, draw on case studies so at least you’ve got some unique brand stories in there, even if you haven’t got personalised insights directly from your experts.

Work collaboratively with your experts

Advantages:

This is how we most often work with our clients – from global consultancies like TPC Leadership to fintech scaleups like Weavr. It allows us to get the best blend of our client’s expertise in whatever it is that they do, and our expertise as content creators.

Speaking directly to subject matter experts not only allows you to get factual insights but the juicy nuggets that make the best content uniquely appealing and valuable – experiences, anecdotes and analogies that bring those facts to life.

Disadvantages:

On the downside, it does take more time. You will need more writing resource, you’ll still need to convince your experts to prioritise time to give you their insights, and it may well be that the approval process is challenging, especially with internal experts. 

How to do it: 

As with getting them to do it themselves, you’ll need to sell the benefits and potentially incentivise your experts. You’ll also still need to create some sort of ‘prebrief’ so that they’re prepared and bring the right information to the interview process.

Speaking of which, you’ll need to develop your interview skills because, just as not all experts are great content creators, they’re not all great communicators either. Some will give too much detail, some not enough. Some go down rabbit holes and need constant pulling back to the subject at hand.

This is often why our clients call us in – it’s not just because we write well, it’s because we know how to wrangle subject matter experts and get the best out of them.

Beyond EEAT – maximising the ROI of expertise

So we’ve looked at three different ways to involve experts in creating content for SEO and you can see that what we said at the beginning is true – expertise is a positioning strategy. It’s not an easy-fix to all of your SEO problems. The good news is that there are so many added benefits to leveraging subject matter experts beyond SEO, especially if you’re using internal ones.

By helping them to clarify their thinking, you prepare them to do all sorts of things – take part in webinars, speak to the press, give talks at conferences. And you can repurpose that content on social media, in emails, in ABM campaigns.

Whether it’s sex therapy, embedded finance, buying land or any other subject that’s relevant to your brand and your audience, by leveraging subject matter experts you can create not only EEAT-boosting super content but an awful lot more besides.

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If you say you’re good at what you do, people might be a little sceptical. If someone who has used your business says you’re good at what you do (i.e. gives you a testimonial), that’s more convincing. And if you set that endorsement within a wider context that lays out what exactly was achieved (i.e. a case study), you’re onto a real winner.

We all know that storytelling is a powerful way to engage people. The human race has been using stories – to entertain, to teach, to persuade – since the dawn of time. Good stories use the ‘show, don’t tell’ method of communication to bypass our conscious mind and tap into something much more primitive.

That’s why case studies are so effective. Or rather, why they can be so effective – if they’re done well. This is a guide for business owners and marketers who want to create genuinely effective case studies that get results.

TL:DR

How to pick the right subject for your case study

Naturally when it comes to choosing the right subject for a case study, you want an example where you can show that you delivered excellent results. You’ll also need to make sure that the customer or client in question is happy to put their name to it and, ideally, get actively involved (more on that later).

Beyond this, the main thing to think about is whether the example you’re considering is a good reflection of your ideal customer, client or project. The point of a case study is to attract more of the same sort of work, so if a job wasn’t all that profitable, for example, then don’t feature it, even if the results were good.

The best case studies are the ones that highlight a particular benefit you want to promote, which are in a sector you’re planning to pursue, or have some other feature that makes them a beacon for the kinds of work that you most want to do.

Transformation and benefits – the absolute essentials

The most important element of a case study is the transformation. You want to start out by showing the reader the situation your customer or client was in when they first engaged with your business.

Ideally, this will be a problem that they recognise themselves. Something that makes them think, “Yes, this is exactly what I’m struggling with!” Something that will compel them to keep reading because they want to know what the solution is.

Then, you want to finish with the positive difference that working with you or using your product had on their lives. That contrast – the transformation – is the foundation that every case study should be built on.

Just be sure that you’re not limiting your transformation to the practicalities. We need to go beyond features here, and focus on benefits.

For example, if you designed a new piece of software that achieves a key admin task in half the time of the manual process, that’s great. But make sure that you also talk about how customer experience has improved thanks to the faster service, and employees are happier now that they’re not spending half their day doing tedious admin tasks.

Taking it to the next level

Now that you’ve got the foundations in place, you want to start building up layers of evidence that support your case study.

Hard facts

Any empirical facts that you can include will add weight to your assertions. In the example above, don’t just talk about customer experience improving – tell the reader that the client’s average Trustpilot score has increased from 4.2 to 4.8. Or that their staff turnover is down 15% on the previous year.

Direct quotes

Direct quotes are another useful way to back up your assertions, especially if your case study doesn’t naturally lend itself to tangible numbers. 

The brand work I do for my clients is a good example. The results of each project flow through every part of the marketing plan and are hard to quantify. But my clients are never-the-less happy:

For example, a senior director at Pegasus Group recently said, “Rin has a way of getting under the bonnet of what really matters – not just internally, but to the people we’re trying to reach. She asks the right questions, challenges our consultants to think beyond their own expertise, and translates complex conversations into clear, compelling messaging that clients actually respond to.”

If I say I’m going to add value, there’s no reason for you to believe me. If someone else says it, it’s far more convincing.

Other formats

You can also build on your case study by using a range of formats. If your customer or client is willing to give you quotes to include, why not ask them to record a video so you have a visual testimonial to share?

Or if you have lots of great facts and figures, turn them into infographics. These are easy to share, quick to process and perfect for a time-poor audience that wants to engage quickly with your content.

Even written case studies can be packaged up in different ways. You can have a long version on your website and create shorter PDFs for your sales team to send out. Or create a carousel of key points for use on LinkedIn.

How to interview a client for a case study

If you want to use first person quotes for your case study, you’ll need to think about how to get the information you want from them. Simply asking them to write a few lines or paragraphs about their experience with you is going to get mixed results at best.

At the very least, make sure to email over a list of questions that encourages them to explore the aspects you want to focus on. For example, ask them to describe the problem that they were facing when they came to you, so you have the base for your transformation story. 

If you particularly want to highlight an aspect of your product or service, make sure one of the questions leads to that. Perhaps you know that your machinery operates much more quietly than most. Be sure to ask, “How has using X impacted on noise levels at your site?”

The best scenario, however, is to actually ask your questions live. That way you can use follow up questions to explore interesting lines that emerge as you talk. Often the best and most useful nuggets of information come from pursuing what was originally a throwaway comment.

If it doesn’t feel natural to conduct an interview like this in-house – and it’s true that it can be a bit awkward to ask people to say nice things about you to your face – you can use someone else to do it for you, whether that be a freelancer, consultant or agency.

How to make your case studies more engaging

You can create the most powerful and well written case study in the world but if it isn’t easy to read, most people are going to give up after a couple of lines. Structuring an engaging case study is very much like structuring an engaging blog post.

Subheads

Use subhead to stop the ‘scary wall of text’ effect, which is a sure fire way to put off a busy reader. Subheads can be functional, clearly showcasing what each section contains e.g. The Challenge, The Solution, The Result. Or they can be more conceptual, drawing out elements of the story.

Images

Another way to break up solid text is by using images. Some case studies will naturally lend themselves to imagery – for example, if you run an event business, you can use photographs taken at the event you’re highlighting. But more generic brand images can also work to create interest on the page, or you can create CTA graphics like the ones I use in blog posts like this.

If your case study contains data, you can represent this visually too. It doesn’t have to be a full infographic; a graph or pie chart can be enough to lift a page that would otherwise look dull or impenetrable.

Pull quotes

This refers to a single line or short paragraph of text that is highlighted in a different font size and / or colour to help it stand out from the rest of the copy. Like graphics, these provide ‘entry points’ into the page, stopping your reader from scrolling and hooking their interest so that they read more.

How to get more eyes on your case studies

Of course, in order for your readers to engage with your case studies, they first need to know that they exist. That’s why it’s important that you make them as easy to find as possible.

Optimise them for search

A byproduct of formatting your case study well with images and subheads is that you will add great SEO value. For images, make sure you’ve included the right keywords in both the image files and the alt text. Other areas to focus on include meta descriptions and the case study URL itself.

Make them prominent on your website

If you have a decent selection of case studies, you should have a dedicated spot on your website where your visitors can go and look through them. This should be easy to find via the menu on your website.

But don’t stop there. Use a panel on your homepage to showcase highlights and include a strong call to action to lead people through to the case study page. You can include relevant highlights on product, services and industry / sector pages too.

Share them on social media

There are lots of different ways to share your case studies on social media. Don’t just push them out once and then forget about it. Draw out different elements of the story, share testimonial quotes and hard facts, ask questions to find out what struggles your audience is facing. And remember to tag the company and individual(s) involved so that you increase your reach.

Use them in your emails

If you’ve got a newsletter, you can use it as a platform to share new case studies as you publish them. But there are more powerful ways to use case studies in emails too.

If you use lead magnets, for example, make sure to use case studies within your nurture sequences. You can also use them within direct sales emails as a way to help overcome objections and move leads through the buying journey.

Effective case studies – a conclusion

To be effective, a case study needs to do five things.

  1. Be easy to find, be that on social, via search or for visitors coming to your website.
  2. Be easy to read. Forget an offputting wall of text. Use images, subheads and pull quotes to create entry points for your reader.
  3. Be built around a foundation of transformation that highlights the end benefits of your products and services. 
  4. Speak to your ideal audience, drawing in clients who will benefit your business (and vice versa) and putting off anyone who wouldn’t be a good fit.
  5. Stand out from the crowd and be memorable. Use infographics or video to make an impression, and facts and testimonial quotes to back up your assertions.


If you can get your case study firing on all five cylinders, it can be an incredibly powerful tool in your marketing and sales toolkit.

If you’re looking for support to create a case study strategy or need support from a fractional content lead to ensure the project gets off the ground, get in touch to see how I can help.

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