What makes a great title and executive summary for a B2B case study?
It is a balance – good case study copy on your site is packed with SEO optimisation to make it discoverable, but without compromising the fact that a human is reading it, so it must be compelling. A copywriting tightrope…
Good B2B marketers write case studies for readers, not robots.
Your headline needs to land:
The who – who is the customer
The why – what was the outcome or impact
The how – by doing what
With you – how you helped
This a lot to get in. We advocate concise language as the title does not need detail, but bear in mind that most CMSs will take this both as the H1 and the page title so it is the most powerful thing on the page both for the reader and for SEO. For many, the title also forms part of the url syntax, again a powerful SEO factor.
Follow your own tone of voice, but we always recommend upbeat, action-led language that follows a sequence like:
[who] achieves [the why ] by [how] with [you].
Good examples from B2B companies whose B2B marketers should be applauded include:
“Edge to fans: data and insights power the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift”
https://www.dimensiondata.com/en-us/about-us/case-studies/tour-de-france
“ASL gives Logicor Energy full visibility of metering network”
https://aslh.co.uk/case-studies/asl-gives-logicor-energy-full-visibility-of-metering-network/
“Award-winning B2B marketing agency builds a sustainable business strategy with Sage Earth”
https://www.sage.com/en-gb/success-stories/velo/
What about the executive summary?
Your executive summary needs to work harder still. Remember, most readers will scan read this, not sit down and peruse it at leisure. Use spaces and paragraphs, titles that not only entice but sign-post what part of the story you are in (remembering that in many CMSs these will be H2 tags).
Your typographical treatment is important too – using bold, italics and bullets are surefire ways of making the information easy to scan read.
Should your executive summary follow a structure?
Over the years, we’ve perfected a structure for B2B case studies we like to recommend:
- Set the scene – it provides context for a reader who does not know the customer that the case study features. Think about size, industry, revenues – anything that can paint a picture for someone who does not know them.
- Your first paragraph needs to go out hard, summarising the story and ending with the top-line impact. It cannot be a copy and paste of the headline but can be an expanded version.
- Explain what was done, but then get into the key achievements using bullet points to make them easy to read and use bold for emphasis.
- End on a punchy, inspirational CTA to read more in the full case study.
- Alongside these words, strong imagery, call-out boxes, facts/figures and testimonials not only give you elements to design with, but they also break it up adding extra authenticity.
- Is there a perfect length? No. SEO prefers more text, the reader wants less and of course there is only so much in your full case study that your exec summary is introducing.
To make it work hard for SEO, there are only a few additional considerations:
Does your copy include the right keywords? Don’t compromise for your reader as stuffing your text will stand out, but this does not mean missing them either. You’ll see the phrase B2B marketing appear in this article quite a bit.
In addition to the url and the title, don’t forget the meta description. Many copy and paste existing text but why not get chat GPT to rewrite it for you for variance? Just remember to check the quality and accuracy of the output. Using AI can save time, but when customers have signed off only specific words, you must respect this.
Titles and executive summaries for B2B marketing case studies are a balance – make them discoverable but readable. Doing it well is a whole skill in itself.
To learn more about our case study and advocacy writing services for B2B marketers please click here.
