Why Is It So Hard to Write Case Studies?

Written By Nolan Greene

You work with an amazing product. You have a long list of clients that are experiencing process improvements, better customer experience, and enviable ROI. Yet, you are running into dead ends getting any of these clients to agree to participate in a customer case study.

You’re not alone here. Many product and content marketers struggle to meet demand for impactful case study content and it’s not for a lack of trying.

So why do many marketers struggle with case study creation while others seem to have it all figured out? In this blog, we’ll explore some of the most common obstacles to generating quality case studies – and discuss ways to level up your content engine.

If the Stories Are There, Why Isn’t the Content?

Case studies are always in high demand, providing validation that your product or service does what it says for your target customers. They can be used throughout sales and marketing and are particularly critical in the middle to bottom of the funnel. 

So why do companies struggle to steadily produce them?

In my experience as a product and content marketer, my colleagues and I commonly ran into the following obstacles:

  • Sales gatekeeping. The most common case study barrier in my experience is for a successful customer to express willingness to be featured in a case study and then have an account executive (AE) or customer success manager (CSM) pump the brakes. Perhaps the client raised a concern about the product. Perhaps their account team is worried about asking the client for too much and overextending them so close to their renewal data. Usually, this protectiveness comes from a good place. However, left unmitigated, it can kill case study production momentum. 

  • Disappearing clients. Your clients are just as busy as you are. Sometimes, all of their good intentions cannot clear enough time on their calendars. Often, they are the victims of their own (and your product’s) success, with ever growing demands on their time or new career opportunities. Suddenly, your case study has moved down or fallen all the way off their list of to-dos. 

  • They said yes, but with heavy restrictions. Your client’s biggest proponent of your solution is all in to do a case study. However, they checked in with their compliance department who came back to you with a litany of restrictions. Now, you can’t name the client, reference any hard KPIs, or specifically reference the use case. You question whether it is worth it to create a watered-down case study (it can be).

  • The client says yes, but doesn’t provide good material. Luckily, I’ve only experienced this once, but sometimes you catch a client on a bad day and the case study interview turns into a negative feedback session. In my case, no amount of redirection could save the interview (from a content creation perspective).

  • Lack of supporting infrastructure. For many young companies, there is a lack of content marketing and customer advocacy infrastructure to ensure consistent case study creation. With so many other needed things consuming sales and marketing’s time, case study writing quickly falls to the wayside. 

Case Study Obstacles Can Be Overcome

Despite these common obstacles, many companies are creating high impact case studies without burning themselves or their customers out. The following best practices can add structure and repeatability for a more painless content creation process:

  • Build advocacy into the customer journey. Advise new clients of different advocacy opportunities, including case studies, during onboarding. Position advocacy as a way to elevate their professional profiles. Having strong and reasonable incentives for case studies, testimonials, and references (and making them known) can plant a seed of willingness in your customers’ minds. Having a fully baked customer advocacy program should also serve as a means of providing customers with an appropriate venue to share more critical feedback. 

    Seasoned marketers often make a “case study readiness” conversation part of success planning. For example: “If we help you achieve X by Y date, would you be open to sharing the story?”. This way, the idea feels earned rather than sprung on the customer.

  • Be process-driven. From client identification to content publishing, have every piece of the process mapped out. This will help keep all stakeholders aligned and reduce uncertainties that can drive participants away. As part of your process, consider leveraging a template that can be prepopulated with as many of the case study’s details as possible. This can reduce the perception of a time burden for the customer and their account team.  

    Advanced programs formalize a workflow (e.g. nomination → qualification → approvals → interview → draft → review → launch) and socialize it with sales, CSM, and legal so everyone knows what to expect.

  • Make the customer the star. Resist the temptation to make your solution the main character. Your customer should be the hero of the story – with your product or service functioning as a supporting character. In other words, show how the customer powered through longstanding business problems. This allows readers to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes. What’s more, your customer may be enticed by the opportunity to raise their profile.

  • Provide anonymity options. While you always want to push to have named clients as part of your case studies, don’t let a desire for anonymity keep you from telling a good story. This is a common request for clients in highly regulated industries. Work with them to share as much information as you can (industry, location, approximate size) so that readers can get a good mental picture of the use case. Depending on the client, you may want to discuss if circumstances could change to allow them to be named.

  • Leverage customer events. User conferences, customer advisory board (CAB) meetings, and similar events can be great places to collect user testimonials. (Also, revisiting our note about customer complaints, these can be good places to facilitate having those heard). Many marketers treat events as “story sprints” because they can capture multiple case studies in a few days.

    One way to do this is to send a short interview guide ahead of the event for pre-screening and then conduct short interviews at a set-aside time. For user conferences, the right breakout session content can easily be repurposed as a case study. Perhaps the best part of this is that the content has likely cleared any needed approvals on the client’s end. 

  • Hire outside help. Even if you have the right building blocks in place, time can still be the most fleeting resource of all. If you need help getting your case study program started or conquering a production backlog, consider the potential impact of a consultant or agency that can help you level up. 

Build a Strong Business Case to Avoid Internal Obstacles

Many marketers find that they can’t make sufficient headway in building a case study program without leadership’s buy-in. While case studies are essential in closing deals (prospects often ask for them), they are not immune to the budget pressures that plague marketing teams across industries and segments. 

Thus, it is important to determine KPIs for measuring case study effectiveness. There are many potential metrics that can speak to case study success depending on your organization’s usage and specific program objectives. According to Uplift Content, some areas of measurement to consider are: 

  • Sales team usage and downloads

  • Web traffic 

  • Time on webpage

  • Clicks from email, social, and organic search

  • SEO position

  • Gated content form fills

  • Ratings of usefulness from sales

  • Case study mentions in win/loss research

Staying proactive about measurement against stated case study goals will position your program for support from leadership. 

Conclusion

Creating strong case studies can be difficult not because customers lack good stories, but because human, organizational, and process frictions get in the way. Marketers who consistently ship high-impact stories weave advocacy into the customer journey, make participation as easy and flexible as possible, and run case studies through a clear, measurable program. Treat customer storytelling as a repeatable motion. With incentives, workflows, and KPIs, case studies stop being rare miracles and start becoming one of your most reliable levers for credibility in the marketplace.

Looking for extra help in brining your customer stories to life. Greenefield Consulting has 15 years of experience in telling customer stories across multiple B2B sectors. Contact us for a free consultation.

Nolan Greene
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