As a SaaS customer, it’s likely you get frequent requests from your vendors to participate in various promotional opportunities such as acting as a customer reference, co-speaking and, yes, case studies.
For your vendors, your participation in these opportunities helps highlight how their products and services add value to prospective customers. But how does your participation in a case study benefit your business?
Let’s take a closer look at the top three reasons you should consider participating in a vendor case study:
Free media coverage
Media coverage is essential to a successful marketing strategy in every stage of an organization’s growth. Media coverage helps startups establish a brand presence in the competitive landscape and helps larger enterprises push forward essential insights from leadership.
While there are a variety of coverage opportunities like company news and contributed content, case studies and customer stories are often well-received by media. Editors will typically use these resources as an avenue to provide practical examples to their audience. Case study contributions can lead to a healthy amount of media coverage since they are such a valuable resource, which results in free PR for your organization through your participation.
Establish a healthy brand image
Participating in vendor case studies can also frame your business as an innovative problem-solver that saw an internal issue and proactively fixed it.
Let’s take Smartling’s participation in a Drift case study as an example. Smartling is a language translation company that decided to rebuild their website from scratch. While evaluating old processes, Smartling chose to explore opportunities to streamline their buying process and make the entire system frictionless. To make it happen, Smartling worked with Drift and tripled inbound MQLs in the first 60 days.
Throughout the case study, Smartling is portrayed as an organization that cares about its buyers and wants to ensure a great customer experience. Creating this positive buzz in the landscape not only helped Drift effectively outline their services but also allowed Smartling to describe one of their primary value propositions.
Build long term media relationships
Many editors in the media landscape look to build a repository of sources they can reach out to when they need expert insight or other information. Participating in a vendor case study that is going to be shared with media is a great way to be included in this list of sources. As I previously mentioned, media coverage is essential to the success of a marketing strategy, and earning a position as a trusted resource can help create a long-term cadence of coverage.
Building long-term relationships with media helps you amplify your organization and shine a light on individual spokespeople and executives. For example, imagine if The New York Times publishes a vendor case study featuring your organization’s CIO as the customer spokesperson sharing information about the solution your organization adopted. In this conversation, the CIO will likely be asked to share information about your own business and its services as well as their insights on the landscape and innovative technologies being used. While this individual opportunity may not seem like much, this could lead to a long-term relationship with an editor and future stories discussing similar topics or even your own business and operations.
Whether you’re a SaaS vendor or a SaaS customer, case studies are a fantastic opportunity to earn media coverage, portray a positive brand image and build essential relationships. Sometimes getting started and nailing down the story is the hardest part. To help you kick-start the process, check out our Building Customer References ebook.