Case Studies can help professional service providers build trust and credibility with clients and prospects. When you are working with intangibles such as services it hard to prove what you can do and why you are the best person to provide the services that your prospective clients need. Case studies can help you shine and prove your worth to potential customers and current clients.

What are Case Studies and Why are they created?

Case Studies are success stories using your product or services. When you create a Case Study you are telling your readers how a client a problem that needed solving. How you solved the client’s problem and turned the client into a happy and satisfied customer.

Once you decide to create your case study. You need to decide which customer’s story would make a good case study. You should choose a customer who has been a client of your business for some time. Ask the client for permission to interview them and create a case study. Try and get quotes that you can use.

When you write you case study try and show how you solved one client’s problem. If you were able to solve other problems, write additional cases studies. You also want to create case studies that set you apart from your competition. This is a great opportunity to showcase your talents and skills.

The case studies that you create should be easy to read and understand, like reading a story. Try to keep your case studies close to one page. You can include figures, facts, diagrams but make sure that they flow easily within the story that you are telling.

Case Studies are broken down into three sections: Problem, Solution and Results.

You being the case study by breaking down a problem that a client was facing. You provide the details of the problem. You give enough background information to tell the problem and the problems significance.

The Problem

Mary and Thomas Dailey a couple in their middle 50"s, faced with the problem of paying for their children’s education and funding their retirement. When they came to see me, their children were 14 and 16 year’s old. They were looking to retire before their youngest child would finish college. They did not want to use up their retirement fund to finance their children’s education and they did not desire to keep working past retirement age.

Once you have stated the problem, you provide the details of how you came up with a solution to your client’s problem. At this point, you tell the steps you took to find a solution to your customer’s problem.

The Solution

I sat down with the Daily’s and we did a breakdown of their finances and future goals. We looked at their children’s grades and interest in and outside of school. The Daily’s had saved enough money for their children to attend public universities. At the time both of their children were looking at attending private prestigious universities.

Their oldest child Maria was an “A” student, on the soccer team and fluent in French. Their youngest child Matthew was also an “A” student, played basketball and volunteered for a wildlife preserve association. We had Maria and Matthew decide what three colleges they really wanted to attend and looked into the financial programs available for families that do not qualify for need-based financial aid.

We were able to determine that the children should be able to receive academic and sports scholarships. We also determined that they could defer saving for retirement for a couple of years to beef up their children’s college funds. When the youngest child entered college, they could then return to saving for retirement. The Daily’s would be able to send their children to college without sacrificing their retirement savings.

Once the solution has been provided, you tell the readers what the results were. Here you get to tell the effectiveness of your solution and the benefits that your client received having used your solution.

The Results

The Daily’s put off saving for their retirement for three years and invested into their children’s education fund. Through careful research and planning the children were able to receive scholarships. The family was able to finance what the scholarships did not cover.

After saving for the children’s education they resumed saving for their retirement. Ten years later Mary and Thomas are happily retired. Enjoying a life of leisure and their children have finished college, without having large student loans to repay.

Case Studies are a valuable resource. It allows you to show your expertise in action. A case study can be more powerful then your brochure or sales literature. Case studies allow you show prospects what you can do for them as you have done successfully for others. If you are adding, case studies to you website. Regularly add new case studies so that readers will keep coming back to your website to check on updates. The more your prospective clients visit your website. The more they will begin to feel as if they know you. Once they get to know you, they begin to trust you and your judgement. We all know that people do business with people they feel they know, not strangers.

It doesn’t matter whether you provide a service or product. Case studies can go a long way toward building trust and credibility with prospects and current clients.

Jennifer Woodard is a freelance Copywriter/Marketing Communications Consultant. If you would like more information, she can be reached at msjenniferwoodard@yahoo.com You can also join her monthly marketing group newsletter at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/JustWriteMarketingNewsletter