AI Advantage Assessment

After reading 50+ case studies on AI in Marketing in the last month (and living in direct response online marketing for a long time Informa TechTarget), I think Marketers, Sales and Customer Success need to double or triple their efforts on case study content.

It may seem like a niche-y topic, but I think it will be important for building customer-buyer relationships

AI is enabling more companies to compete for SEO traffic more effectively than they did 2 years ago. They can cover the most popular topics with a diversity of white papers and blog posts to earn lead generating traffic.

But every company has that ability. So that effort is crucial, but it doesn’t have the yield you’d hope for (because everyone can match it to some level).
AI Summaries are also stealing traffic for these types of queries. And being repetitious to an AI Summary doesn’t earn engagement from prospects. Super unfair, and likely to get worse.

That leaves marketers with a different target universe of valuable content. There are several items on that list, but the most important are case studies.
Case studies went a bit out of style because they are regarded as “late stage” and don’t earn volume as well for search or early stage lead gen. For prospects, there are Goldilocks reasons they DON’T click on a particular case study (e.g featured company is too big, too small, different industry, etc).

But ask any prospect engaged in a sales cycle what they really want, and it is specific details about how companies like them used your tech to overcome specific problems. Every time. So the argument for more and more detailed case studies is:

– Prospects really value them
– AI is making the “unique content” bar really high
– Through case studies, solution providers can highlight their industry knowledge and customer value.

Coming up (when I get a chance)

-What is wrong with the case studies you are writing (and specifically, what smells like AI)?
-What are the characteristics of a really great case study (i.e. earns signal AND moves a prospect along)
-Organizational ideas that make it easier to produce more of them