Three Ways to Create Agency Case Studies on a Shoestring Budget

Although my title at Mutations Limited, a 20-person boutique software development agency, was Managing Director of Strategy and Services, I did a little bit of everything. In 2022, we decided to focus on developing case studies and thought leadership articles that would live on our website and support SEO and sales.  But we didn’t have dedicated Sales, Marketing, or Communications people and we had never put much time into that aspect of the business.  In my do-lots-of-things role, I chose to drive the content strategy and development. 

The first few case studies were a snap. We had at least half a dozen stories of clients who LOVED our work – including some major brands you’ve definitely heard of. I interviewed the devs, re-read notes and client reports, and asked the clients for testimonials. I contracted a professional marketer to draft up a case study and template for one case, with the goal of using that model for additional ones.

Although these early cases were straightforward to write, I noticed that the client and team struggled to remember the details worth sharing – even for projects completed just a few months earlier. 

What are two critical elements to those details?  Let’s agree – 

1. Capturing how it FEELS to work together on the project. Our client-facing process was transparent, and clients had a uniquely high level of trust towards us. But those feelings were not top of mind when we discussed the project after the fact. 

2. The innovative way we approached the project and the problem. Our team would frequently pivot with clients’ changing goals, acting as though we were employed at the client business. This was a key part of our competitive advantage, since most agencies don’t operate this way. And yet our own team easily forgot the nuance of our iterative process once the solution launched. 

So our Exec Director and I thought about how we might create a branding content development process; a flywheel of sorts that would allow for continuous raw content development as projects were happening, rather than afterwards. We wanted to capture the heart and soul of a project, and its value to our client, while it was fresh. 

In the iterative, continuous improvement model I love so much – and with little to no real marketing budget to work with – I tried small experiments one by one to see what would work.  

Out of five strategies we tried, one worked remarkably well:

My takeaways from the strategy that worked:  

1. Document nuance, wins and process close in time to the actual work happening. 

2. Ritualize capturing this content by scheduling regular project Retrospectives that are explicitly designed for meta-level process analysis.  Leave enough time to allow for thoughtful brainstorming. 

We tried several other strategies, first. The first two below had legs and could have worked better with some tweaks. The other two failed, but still taught me interesting lessons: