The Nexus Approach: Case Studies, Success Stories, & Portfolio Pages
Case studies are invaluable B2B marketing assets. By showing your brand’s work or products in action for real customers, they often go much further to help close deals than even the most effective sales pitches.
However, consistently creating (or starting) your brand’s library of case studies, success stories, and portfolio entries requires time that you might not have.
The Nexus team can help research, write, design, and update your case studies — giving you more time to instead spend engaging all the leads they reach.
What does it look like to partner with Nexus for case study creation? We’ll review our process and a few examples.
Quick Background
Although marketers might use the terms a bit interchangeably, case studies, success stories, and portfolio pages serve slightly different purposes:
- Case Studies – Often templated, straightforward explanations of a customer’s background and needs, your work together, and the impact, usually with an emphasis on final KPIs
- Success Stories – More narrative-driven and longer-form versions of case studies that dive deeper into needs, partnership, and impact in a full story
- Portfolio Pages – Short, visual-driven pages or entries on your website that might include concise background and impact details, often used by brands that offer design services
Why are effective case study materials so valuable? There are a few reasons:
- They provide deeper social proof than review snippets or ratings.
- They offer concrete details about your products or services and give leads a clearer idea of what to expect from you.
- They can engage leads at multiple buying stages, particularly those interested but not ready to contact you or commit to a sales conversation.
- They can serve as sales enablement assets to share during active conversations to demonstrate work you’ve done for similar clients in the past.
Our Process for Creating Case Study Deliverables
When you partner with Nexus to create new or updated case study materials, what can you expect from the process? We follow these general steps:
- Client: Prepare initial thoughts, identify subject(s) of the case study, gather any readily available details and statistics
- Client and Nexus account team: Meet to discuss your vision for the deliverable, its subject matter, and any individuals we’ll need to contact to gather additional information/quotes
- Nexus: If interviewing your customers or internal stakeholders, draft short questionnaire (5 questions or less) to cover what we’ll need to draft the case study
- Nexus: Connect with necessary stakeholders via email and gather relevant information via the questionnaire
- Nexus: Draft the case study
- Client: Review the case study copy, provide feedback, and return to Nexus for revisions and design
- Nexus: Design the web page or PDF version of the case study (if applicable)
- Client: Review the finished form of the case study, provide any last feedback, and return to Nexus for finalization
- Nexus: Finalize and deliver the case study, publish on the client’s website (if applicable)
Process Variations
Depending on your exact needs and the scope of our work together, we may adjust the case study production process slightly.
- Depending on the type of case study deliverable, we’ll ask you for different upfront resources or to connect us to the right stakeholder (like for visual assets for portfolio entries).
- We may cut the questionnaire process if it’s not necessary to the scope of the case study project.
- Finished products can be delivered as Google Docs, published web pages (if we have site access), or branded PDF files.
- Published pages and PDFs will require extra time on our end to produce but bring the benefit of immediate deployment.
Examples of Case Study Deliverables
Check out these example deliverables across the three categories of case studies:
Templated Case Studies
- PDF case study template for easy reuse
- We created an easy template for the client to quickly spin up new case studies with our help or on their own. The 2-page PDF serves as a fast sales enablement resource and enriches their site’s library of social proof content.
- PDF case study template for easy reuse
- We created an easy template for quickly generating new case study one-pagers. The client uses them as sales enablement resources and repurposes them across the site to enrich content and provide social proof.
Success Stories
- Success story published as a blog post
- We researched, drafted, and published this success story as a blog post. This approach offers an fast way to get case study collateral live while also building out the client’s library of blog content.
- Success story published as a blog post
- We researched, drafted, and published this success story as a blog post. For this post, we coordinated between the client and their customer to learn more and source photographs.
Portfolio Pages
- Interactive portfolio web page with modular entries
- We helped to populate the client’s interactive portfolio page with robust examples and continue to actively maintain the collection as needed.
- Explore the live portfolio here
Partnering with Nexus for Case Studies
Want to integrate more case studies, success stories, or portfolio pages into your brand’s content marketing and lead nurture strategies? We can help.
If you’re already a Nexus client, contact your Account Manager to discuss the ways we can add case study development to your engagement activities.
The easiest way to make case studies a sustained lead nurture and sales enablement strategy for your brand is to launch a Full-Funnel Demand Program.
These custom packages allow you to curate a tailored sprint of campaign deliverables each quarter, including case studies. We’ll produce them, deliver them to you each month, and work with you to keep improving and updating the strategy along the way. These programs also make it easy to receive extra deliverables that reinforce the value of your case studies.
Specifically, we recommend pairing custom case study development with:
- Webinar production and marketing. Bring your case studies and success stories to live through hands-off digital events. Bring the content and a client, and we’ll handle the rest.
- Shortform video. If you ask clients for video testimonials or host webinars, maximize their value but turning them into packages of highly shareable branded clips.
- Downloadable lead capture resources. High-quality case studies themselves make for great lead capture resources, but don’t stop there. Exclusive tips, whitepapers, and more can all be turned into active lead generation assets.
Learn more about Full-Funnel Demand Programs and reach out with any questions. We can get started laying out the perfect strategy for your brand.
