Episode Transcript
Will Fraser: Welcome, Emily. So thank you so much for joining us on the show here today.
Emily Amos: Thanks Will, I'm really excited to be here.
Will Fraser: Yeah, I think our guests are going to really enjoy this show. But now, before we kind of jump into the meat of our topic today, maybe you can just give us a little bit of a career background and some context as to what got you into content marketing for B2B SaaS.
Emily Amos: Sure. As you mentioned, I'm the CEO and founder of a small content marketing agency and we focus on B2B SaaS. We write case studies, ebooks, blog posts, those sorts of things.
As I'm sure most people's journeys, mine is winding and long, but the Cole's notes would be I spent my twenties having fun gallivanting around the world. I studied linguistics at university, so I went off and taught English as a second language in a few different places including New Zealand and France.
I came back home to Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada and continued teaching ESL, but quickly realized that as I got closer to hitting the big three-oh, teaching just wasn't going to be a long-term career for me. I was getting really frustrated with feeling like I had no control over my career, my schedule, my income, etc.
So I thought, okay, I guess I need to be self-employed - even though I had sworn to my parents that I would never be self-employed because they were self-employed and I saw how it takes over your life. They would always talk about work at the dinner table. So I was kind of doing a complete 360 by saying, okay, I guess I need to be self-employed. And I know my parents probably got a huge kick out of it because I always said I would never do it.
Emily Amos: So anyway, I thought, okay, what can I do? I knew that I was a decent writer, so I said, why not? Let's be a freelance writer. I think when you're young it's easy to just try things. I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't have kids - it was kind of a low-risk thing to do at the time.
So I became a freelance writer. It was hard, it was a huge slog to kind of get my business up and running and to find customers. Eventually that happened. Ten years later I realized, you know what? I love running a business, but I don't really love writing. So I decided to change the model and become an agency. I would run the business, do the sales and marketing, do the operations, but have a team of freelance writers and editors do the day-to-day writing and editing work.
That's what led to creating Uplift Content. We're now six years in and we're really excited with where we are. I'm personally excited with what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis.
Why B2B SaaS? I wish I had a better answer for you, but I had a colleague, an acquaintance, connect me with a B2B SaaS company when I was still on my own as a freelancer and I landed them as a customer. So I had one B2B SaaS company as a customer and I thought, well, if I have one I can find one more, and if I can find one more I can find two, etc. Also, as a marketer I knew that I needed to be more niche so that I could more easily market myself, have a more specific message. So that's where it came from.
Will Fraser: I love the reality there that if you find that first customer and you just keep building on it. I have a friend who's got a very fun story, but at some point you just ask, what will you buy from me? And once you find that, you just kind of keep pushing along. That's really exciting. And like you said, the winding path I think is the normal path these days. It's rare that we get to talk to someone who's had a straight line path in this field.
Emily Amos: I mean, what kid is going to say "oh yeah, I'm going to own a content marketing company when I'm older"?
Will Fraser: [Laughs] Honestly, the number of kids that I talk to that want to be content creators - I don't know if they'd quite call it the same thing, but maybe by the time they're there, they'll already have been doing it.
Emily Amos: True, true, true.
Will Fraser: I think what we really want to dig into here today, which is really exciting, is that you just did a really robust research study on case studies, which is kind of a fun way to look at it. Maybe you can give us just a quick overview of this study, how you approached it, what your objectives were, and then we can dive into some of the data.
Emily Amos: Yeah, sure. So we're actually going into our third year of doing this study. We started it in 2022, and we're in the works of getting our survey ready for the 2024 report. It's been really interesting. The very first one was tough because we didn't know what we were doing, but things do get easier the more you practice. I feel like as an entrepreneur, you learn everything the hard way.
We decided to do this original research for a few different reasons. Firstly, we had a bunch of questions about case studies that we didn't necessarily have answers to, and we knew that our customers had similar questions. So we thought, okay, let's find out the answers to these questions.
Secondly, especially now with AI and mass-produced content, we all know that original research is one of the ways to differentiate yourself and help your content stand out. That was important for us. We wanted to be seen as experts on case studies, so having original research and thought leadership content around that appealed to us. And 90% of our leads come through SEO, so we really wanted to use the report to attract backlinks to our website to help build our domain authority. And funnily enough, lead generation was at the very bottom of our list.
Will Fraser: Oh, interesting. You know, it's interesting - one of the things I've heard when people are trying to put together these reports is just how challenging it can be to actually find respondents, or at least find quality respondents. Did you use an outside agency to source that or did you do it yourself? And if you did it yourself, how did that work?
Emily Amos: Great question. So the first year was painful. Painful. I promoted it on LinkedIn to my network. I sent individual messages to connections that I had on LinkedIn - customer marketers or customer advocates who might be responsible for case studies and therefore able to respond to the survey. But it was a tough slog. And in the end, we were aiming for 100 respondents. That's what we had been told is you kind of need 100 to make it statistically valid. So we were at about 70, and we just weren't getting the last 30. So I did go to a panel company and pay for that remaining 30, but the quality was not where we would have wanted it to be.
Luckily, last year was a lot easier. I really tapped into getting people that I knew well to share it to their networks. So that kind of influencer marketing idea really helped. And certainly, I was building on some momentum from the previous year. So it was much easier last year, and I'm hoping it'll be even easier this year.
Will Fraser: Fair enough, hopefully it just keeps building on itself. One of the numbers that we found really interesting when looking at this research is that you found 75% of companies are including metrics in their case studies. I've personally seen numbers for numbers' sake, I think, and I've seen numbers that really kind of draw me in. What's your view there and what differentiates a good metric from a great metric? How do you look at metrics as a whole when it comes to the case study format?
Emily Amos: I agree, there's this huge pressure to get those three standout metrics at the top of your case study. We've all seen them, and when they are good, they're really good. Numbers that don't matter are things like how many offices you have or how many customers you have. That really doesn't matter and people can see through that.
What I would say is a great metric is one that will resonate with your reader. So you really have to think about who your audience is and what kind of number matters to them. For example, if you're talking about 100 hours saved, that might be something that a CFO would care about, but maybe not a software engineer, because the CFO cares about ROI and cost savings. But for the software engineer, what might resonate more would be something like a 25% reduction in support tickets, because the support tickets for them are a hassle and take them away from the stuff they really want to be working on. And maybe it's 100 hours savings as well. So maybe it's essentially the same number, but we need to talk about it in a different way - in a way that resonates for the audience that your case study is for.
One other thing about metrics is that you need to provide enough context around the number for it to be meaningful. Sometimes if you just have a number, it doesn't really mean anything because you don't know the before state or the after state. So, for example, going back to the 100 hours saved - okay, that might be considered a good metric. But a great metric would be that the team is 25% more efficient because of that 100-hour savings, and that means they can reduce their headcount by two people and that saves them two salaries. That might be a great metric because it's more specific, there's context around it, and it's more concrete. You can picture it in a more tangible way.
Emily Amos: One last piece that I found interesting from the results of our survey last year is that we found marketers are really doubling down on how important they think metrics are for case studies. They found that metrics are the number one factor for how they decide whether they're going to tell this story as a case study. But 70% of them say that finding impactful metrics or getting impactful metrics is the number one biggest challenge when writing a case study.
So on the one hand, they're saying it's incredibly important, and on the other hand, they're saying it's also their biggest challenge. And so I think what comes from that is, okay, so where do you get your metrics from? Who do you ask? When do you ask? And when we asked that in our survey, 88% of the respondents say that they ask for metrics during the case study interview.
I found that really interesting because I actually totally disagree with doing it during the interview. I think, yes, you ask during the interview, but you need to ask ahead of time. You need to prepare them and let them know that you will be asking them about it during the interview. If I ask you on the spot, Will, what's your ROI for your podcast? There's no way you can tell me that number. But perhaps if I give you a couple of days to dig around in your numbers, maybe you could give me something during the interview.
I think that's really important to remember. We want to set our customers up for success. We want them to be the hero of the story. We don't want them to fail and crash and burn during the interview. That doesn't make anybody feel good. So give them time to find those numbers for you.
And then the other thing would be, think about how your business is set up in the first place for software. How can you build metric collection into the software itself so that as a company you have access to some of those metrics? And then secondly, during the customer onboarding process, is there an opportunity for the customer success manager to sit down with the new customer and set some benchmarks, some goals and KPIs to be aiming for so that you can do a before and after down the road?
Will Fraser: I really like that idea. It's kind of like, let's start with the case study in mind, or at least let's have it in mind when the client starts with us. And it is always a challenge. I know I've experienced that before where you ask people for numbers and just getting a specific number or a number that they're confident in sharing is always interesting. I know we've seen it before where we have clients who are okay with a percentage version, but not an absolute version of a number. So there also seems to be a bit of negotiating the presentation layer with the client as well.
Emily Amos: And honestly, it goes so much further beyond just a case study. It's going to help you with retention, with cross-sell and up-sell. The case study is just a tiny little piece of it. Having those numbers is how you're going to keep them as a customer.
Will Fraser: Absolutely. It's interesting - we're talking about the metrics, we're talking about the details of launching a new customer. These case studies can get dense, they can get technical, or they can be really floofy - we'll call it really fluffy. How do you strike that balance of making sure that customer voice is shining through, but at the same point delivering a case study that actually answers the key questions that someone might have?
Emily Amos: I went to Customer X-Con in mid-October and that was something that we, the case study folks, chatted a lot about, and it was interesting to hear some different perspectives on that.
First of all, of course we want to integrate the customer's own words wherever we can. So this means weaving customer quotes throughout the story so that the customer is telling the story as much as possible in their own words.
Some people, some companies are experimenting with first-person case studies. I know Influitive is using first-person case studies and I know a few other companies are experimenting with it. So that's another way of doing it where you're saying "I did this, I did that" as the customer themselves.
I think ultimately you really need to think about the story from the customer's perspective. This is not a marketing piece for you, the software company - this is the customer's story and the customer is the hero. So you really need to have that mindset.
To go back to one of your earlier points about how you really answer all of those questions - something that came up during the conference was maybe you need to have a series of stories. One is the adoption story, one is the integration story, and so on. So you don't have a giant story, you have two or three smaller stories that can speak really specifically to certain questions, objectives, challenges at certain points in that buyer's journey.
Will Fraser: You know, I think that's a really wise point there around the case studies. I think groups can often say "we need case studies" and that's the entire definition that they understand about - go get case studies, whatever, your success team goes out, finds clients, we'll talk. But that methodical approach to saying "this is going to speak to this part of the journey, it's going to speak to this pain point, this is going to speak to this need that we actually have to communicate" - I think is always a really great idea. But for some reason, at least in my experience, in case studies it kind of gets overrun with "who's willing to give us a number, who can we get to do a case study" and we'll just tell that broad story instead of splitting it up like that.
Emily Amos: I mean, to be fair, a lot of it comes down to the practicalities of budget and time. So I'll just say that as well.
Will Fraser: Yeah, fair enough. You know, I think one of the things that was really kind of terrifying to me was that you found that about 12% of SaaS marketers are very satisfied with their case studies. That's a pretty small number that's actually very - I mean, very satisfied is a big push, but still that's a pretty small number. Do you have any insights into why that number is so small, why so few people are really satisfied with their case studies?
Emily Amos: So unfortunately we didn't ask a follow-up question in the survey, but this year for this coming survey, we have a follow-up, open-ended question to ask them why they chose what they chose. So if they chose very satisfied, okay, great, why are you very satisfied? So in a few months, I will have a great answer for you. In the meantime, I only have my best guess at why that could be.
One thing that comes to mind for me is we all know that in the tech industry people jump from job to job fairly frequently. And it's a pretty common human thing that when you inherit someone else's work, you're like "eh, I can do better."
Will Fraser: Yes, yes.
Emily Amos: So that's one piece of it. Another piece - things change, best practices change. You know, what we wrote a year ago may not be how we would want to present that information a year later or two years later, for example. So that's something else to think about.
And then just going back to some things we talked about before - people want measurable results, but we know it's hard to get them. So if they aren't able to get them, they're probably not going to be as satisfied with their case study.
And something else that we found was that 30% of the marketers found that losing the spirit of the story during the approval process was one of the biggest challenges for them. So you can imagine if you're happy with the story, but then some of the good stuff gets stripped out during the approval process - again, they're not thrilled with the output. I also think we're all perfectionists. We all expect greatness. And so if it's anything less than great, it's not very satisfying.
Will Fraser: Do you have any... I've seen that kind of taking the spirit out or that tone out of case studies more than a few times. And maybe we'll just tie these two together here - we also see in your report that over 60% of customers are citing legal issues as a barrier. So is there a way that you would suggest teams navigate that situation so you can keep the spirit in there, you can get legal approval? Are there any tips and tricks you've learned in there, or is this just bang head against wall until solution?
Emily Amos: Sometimes, yes. [Laughs] What I'm going to say is not anything new to folks in this area. Companies or people are scared of losing their competitive edge. They're scared of how the case study is going to be used. They're scared of what's going to be written about them. So anything we can do to alleviate those fears is helpful.
For example, always set expectations. Tell them exactly what the process looks like, how you're going to do it, what's expected of them, and what they can expect the output to be. Show them examples of other case studies that you've done or other promos of the case studies. Because we also know that it's not just one case study - we're going to be promoting it in lots of different ways, like social for example. So they need to also know what that's going to look like on social.
Emily Amos: Of course there's the option of anonymizing sensitive data if that makes them more comfortable, or speaking about the results in a more general way. Now, we always want to aim for concrete and specific, but sometimes we need to slide down that continuum a little bit.
They need to know that nothing's going to be published without their permission and that they will have every opportunity to review it and make negotiated changes. As you mentioned earlier, they could use percentages instead of concrete numbers. These are all negotiation tactics, right? Because if it's a really good story, you're going to want to tell it. It's just a matter of how can we get to the finish line. At the end of the day, you could anonymize the whole story.
Will Fraser: What's your take on that? Because I've seen this done by a few people in my industry where they release anonymous case studies and it doesn't land well with me. But maybe that's just because I'm a cynic at heart when it comes to some of this stuff. What's your experience around that?
Emily Amos: I think there are some industries like cybersecurity where you're going to be hard-pressed to find a named, logoed story. No one wants to tell the world about data breaches that caused them to look for new software, for example.
I don't know, honestly. I mean, if you've got a big enough, important enough customer, but they just don't want their name on there, you're going to anonymize it. And hopefully you can use a descriptor of them that makes people kind of know who they are anyway. They're going to have to approve it, but you know how many multi-million dollar XYZ companies are there? I think it's fairly easy to kind of, through the description, help people figure out who it is that you're talking about. It's not ideal, but...
Will Fraser: I hear you there and I do appreciate in some industries where this is going to be much more the norm, maybe it is less of an issue than in other industries where it seems much more normal. You mentioned the idea of mass content creation, AI and whatnot. You also have lots of great insights from this report, plus all the work you're doing. So I'm really curious - what innovations, what kind of changes in the future do you see for the world of case studies? You've already mentioned first-person, but I'd love to just kind of get your sense of where's the world of case studies evolving to.
Emily Amos: I wish I had the magic ball with clear answers, but I don't. Some things that are on my radar for sure would be the first-person approach - I would love to find a company that's willing to experiment with that with us. And I'd love to see other companies just try it as well. It's not common, but I think it's an interesting concept to try out.
I think that things are going to shift towards more video. Right now, from our survey for 2023, we found that 58% of case studies have both text and video. So just over half of the stories have both the written story and the video. I think that over time that's going to get closer to 100% where we have almost all of the stories with both text and video. There's lots of video options coming out now that are more self-serve. They're very cost effective. You know, gone are the days when you have to spend five to ten thousand dollars on a video case study. There are other options out there, so that's something to keep an eye on.
I think that people are going to start experimenting with a few other formats. So infographics showed up in our survey as something that people want to try to do more of for their case studies, as well as compilations. So an ebook that has compiled several case studies that follow a similar theme or a use case or something like that.
And then I think there's going to be a move towards telling different kinds of case studies. So we touched on this earlier. There's the traditional challenge-solution-results. There's also the implementation story - how the customer implemented the solution, or an adoption story - how the customer learned the new solution and put it to work for them. There could be a use case story - how the customer is using the solution in a specific way, or a switcher story - why the customer moved from a competitor to you. And finally, best practices or advice from a customer. We're seeing this from some companies in the form of like a how-to guide, but told from the customer's perspective.
Will Fraser: That's a lot going on in the industry. And I think the video is a really interesting one. People have been pushing for video case studies for a really long time and I appreciate there's the new kind of technology coming out there. What's your view around the idea that we're all getting a little more familiar or comfortable with - we'll call it creator-style content, we'll call it like less studio production video content and more real-life captured. Do you think that influences our willingness to do these kind of case studies or are you still seeing those 50% of case studies very highly polished in your experience?
Emily Amos: Right now they're still pretty polished, they're still expensive. I think that people are using those video software programs for short testimonial-type clips. But I think it will shift there eventually. Social media is driving this - people are filming themselves all the time, so why not? I think it will move there for sure.
Will Fraser: That makes sense. Well, that's a lot going on in the case study space like I said. I guess one of the things that I would kind of switch gears on here a little bit is - because you mentioned this quickly, but I think this is kind of the meta layer to our story here today - is around the benefit you've got from doing this research. And you were saying the SEO has been big.
I'm really curious - I've seen so much great content produced in my life that's just got the worst distribution. That's just like "we wrote great stuff, we put together a report," you know, "we built it, they will come." What's been your experience and your strategy for developing those backlinks, for developing that organic SEO value from it?
Emily Amos: We have been cutting up our report and repackaging it and promoting it the entire year. Sometimes I think, "oh God, people are going to hate me if I do one more post about this damn report." But I have to keep reminding myself, people are not seeing every post of mine, not even close. And you know, how many people are going to read the whole report? I don't know, I'd love for lots of people to, but I can also just take one question and the response and the recommendations, and that is a piece of content in and of itself, and it's a more snackable bite for people. So it is the foundation for our whole content strategy for the year.
Will Fraser: That's amazing to think that you've kind of created one report and then you can really run an entire year's content strategy off that. That's wild. I mean, it's also, I would hope, somewhat cost effective as you're kind of continually reworking the same piece. But that's just really exciting to hear that you were able to do that.
Emily Amos: I have a really small team, so I need to be as efficient as possible. And so it definitely works for us from a cost perspective, from a time perspective. And how many pieces of original content is realistic for any company really over the course of a year? One or two, maybe.
I am hoping next year to add a second study and that would be more so probably around lead magnets like white papers and ebooks, because we do have two kind of core areas. We have our audience of customer marketers for case studies, and then we have our content marketing audience for blog posts and lead magnets. So I've been neglecting the other side for a while. So if I can swing it, I'm going to try and do another research report next year on probably ebooks and white papers.
Will Fraser: For sure, that makes sense. And I think it's kind of cool to see that you'll be able to focus on one piece like you were saying at the very beginning - niche in, focus - and you're just kind of logically expanding what you're working on there.
I've got two last questions for you here before I let you go. The first one's, I think, maybe kind of a funny one that I've run into a few different times. But you're doing a lot of work on case studies and also on lead magnets. When you look at the report data that you've got, how closely does it align with yourself? Do you find yourself having these same challenges or do you have some wizard powers or how does that work?
Emily Amos: [Laughs] That's funny. Certainly we feel the pain of some of them. But I think the thing to remember is that we as an agency, we are not our audience. So we aren't customer marketers at a software company. We are case study writers at a content agency. So it's a little bit different. We are not directly faced with the challenge of getting legal approval, for example. That is our target audience's challenge. So some of the questions are not relevant to us. They are directly relevant to our audience. Certainly, we still face the same challenges of getting metrics, for example, because we are working on behalf of our customers to get those metrics. So no magical powers, I'm afraid. Just hard work.
Will Fraser: Fair enough. Well, with that then, I would ask - if there was only one piece of advice that a listener could take away from this show today, they've been tasked with developing case studies for the organization - what would that key piece of advice that you would give someone listening today be?
Emily Amos: I think it's important to create repeatable processes for your case study production to make sure that you can scale and save time and energy. It's a big undertaking to create case studies and the more processes you can put around them, the better.
So think about things like guidelines for what makes a good story. When you're reaching out to all your CSMs to say, "hey, do you have any happy customers?" you need to give a little bit more direction on the specifics of what kind of story it is that you're looking for. What are the criteria? So write that down so that it's clear for everybody.
Maybe create some email templates when you're making the ask to customers to participate. It's so nice to be able to copy and paste and plop it in and tweak it a little bit and send it off. Think through carefully what information you need to get from the CSM or the account manager in order to tell a comprehensive story.
What is your standard list of interview questions that you can then customize for each individual story? You're going to want a case study template. So you know, from a design and layout perspective, what chunks of information do you need? Are you going to have the three metrics up top? Are you going to have an at-a-glance section? Are you going to have a pull quote? Make sure you have that locked down so everyone's really clear on what are the different components that you need. And then of course, just be really clear about what the review and approval process looks like.
Will Fraser: Makes sense. Now, if someone, let's say, didn't want to do all that and wanted to get in touch with you, how would someone find you? What's the best way to connect with you?
Emily Amos: So go to our website, it's upliftcontent.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn - Emily Amos.
Will Fraser: Wonderful. Well, Emily, I've really enjoyed our conversation here today. I really hope our listeners learned as much as I did. I just want to thank you very, very much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope to have you back.
Emily Amos: It was wonderful to be here. Thank you for asking me.
[Outro]
Will Fraser: Thank you for tuning in. Join us next time as we bring on more great experts like Emily. If you like what you heard and would like to support the Advocacy Channel, please review, rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd like to learn more about customer marketing, head over to the Sasquatch blog or follow us on LinkedIn. The links are in the show notes. If you're looking to create powerful customer marketing programs that will help you better activate, engage and retain your customers throughout their entire journey, head over to sasquatch.com through the link in this episode's description and learn more about our referral, loyalty and rewards platform. Well, that wraps up another episode of the Advocacy Channel. We'll see you real soon.
