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The other day I was on a panel for a podcast and the moderator said, “It's a given that marketing need to create case studies as part of the marketing mix.”
And I asked “why?”
The answer I was given was similar to “because that's what marketing do.”
But I said, are marketing really best placed to do this? Here me out.
Let's put ourselves in the shoes of our buyers. If we see a corporate created case study what do we think?
- This will be more corporate propaganda.
- We know the client will say how great you are.
- If I read it, will I really get any insight? Probably not.
Based on this, does anybody read corporate created case studies?
Stick with me.
How about if we do this differently and I bet you will see and be able to measure a different response.
Now we know that buyers don't like corporate propaganda and that employees get 561% more engagement than brands. Right?
So how about this as a way to get more people to read your case studies?
First of all we empower our sales people on social (see blog below).
Now we know that marketing own the skills for creating content, which is why marketing need to be front and centre to empowering the sales people on social.
What marketing do is every month they have a theme which they suggest to sales for content ideas.
They offer the skills in terms of the writing structure, the key words, etc.
For a month, the sales people are asked to reach out and have a meeting with at least one customer.
Marketing prepares for them 5 questions that the sales people ask.
Of course, sales can ask what they want, it's just that marketing want to make sure that the content has a structure, hence the questions.
Marketing also ask the sales people to take a selfie with the customer for the blog.
When sales people post these new authentically written case studies, still keyword optimised on their social profiles, just think of the response you will get.
As we know employees get 561% more engagement than brands on social media.
The key thing is that marketing are front and centre to this content revolution.
Let's look at some context about social media today
Linkedin is the world's biggest network site.
So let's take a step back for a moment. How about if I could pick you up tomorrow and I drive you to a place which is full of your prospects? All you have to do is grab a coffee or a tea and go up and talk to them. You can stay as long as you like.
Now, you wouldn't walk up to these prospects of yours and pitch to them. You would have a conversation. Maybe ask then how far they drove to get there? Had they been caught up in the traffic? You would have a conversation. You wouldn't pitch to them, in fact they will probably ask you at some point, “what do you do?" but more on that in a bit.
Let's look at the data, cold calling vs our social selling benchmark
Here at DLA Ignite, we are always wanting to push forward the boundaries of sales, so we decided to put cold calling head to head with the DLA Ignite methodology for social selling and create a benchmark on 1st January 2023 (and business case) for our version of social selling.
So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them in our methodology for social selling and here are the results.
It's worth shouting out the team, Alex, Jordan and Jensen and they work for a company called Supero.
Don't believe me? Please check the team out on social and ask them about the results!