How To Market A Case Study To Attract $425,000 In New Leads

About two months ago I published, “How A Filipino Company Earned $726,000 In New Leads In 25 Days Using Cold Emails.” The article was the story of how Daniel Wallock used cold emails to drive results for one of his clients. That case study has driven $425,000 in new leads to Wallock’s business.

In this piece, we’ll be looking at why that case study was so effective at driving leads and how you can replicate it in your own content marketing.

In the first week of publishing that case study, Wallock saw just two leads with a value of $10,000 each. While this isn’t a huge amount, what is impressive is during the subsequent weeks the lead capture form on his website started flooding with inquiries.

Reply.io saw the piece in Forbes and reached out to Wallock. He later published the case study on their blog. After Reply.io’s case study came out that’s when things started to take off.

Daniel received over 75 inquiries relating to the case study and 36 leads worth around $425,000. He is still getting one or two qualified leads a week coming and he plans to start running ads to the articles so he can continually see new leads.

Forbes drove a few leads but Wallock says Reply.io drove the majority of the leads. He guesses this is because Reply.io has a very niche audience and at the end of the Reply.io article there is a direct call to action to hire him.

From there things snowballed and soon after:

• Several Fortune 500 executives reached out to Wallock, one of them interested in working privately with him.
• Wallock got booked on the B2B Growth Podcast.
• The case study was featured and promoted on GrowthHackers.org.
• Alex Berman, a prominent marketer who Wallock had looked up to, even tweeted about his case study.
  

Not only did Wallock get leads but he says a lot of the companies that contacted him were his exact target market: “b2b businesses that are doing between $3M to $15M per year in revenue and interested in growing quickly but don’t necessarily know how.”

What made this case study so effective?

1. Wallock clearly showcased exactly how he solved his target customers problem. He showed in both the Forbes article and the Reply.io piece the exact emails he was sending and even the Reply.io data which confirmed what he had written.
2. The fact that he drove $726,000 in leads for zero ad spend is another thing that made this case study so attractive to potential clients. It was a massive result.
3. Wallock had a defined target market and then went out and marketed this case study to that audience. Since his target market was defined he was able to quickly turn around and know where were the most effective places to share the case study, which then helped him get picked up by industry blogs.

Wallock says, “The most important thing besides making sure your content is incredible is that your are targeting the right audience.”

How did he promote his case study?

Dennis Yu and BlitzMetrics talk about, “Goals, Content, and Targeting.” When it comes to marketing content it’s all about aligning your content with the correct targeting to achieve your goals. Once you have defined your goals, content (the case study) and who it’s targeting then you can begin thinking about promotion. Below are a few marketing activities Wallock used to market the Reply.io and Forbes case studies.

Social media promotion

1. Promote your case study on Reddit. Post a write about how you did what you did on r/entrepreneur and r/startups and a link to your case study article.
2. Tweet hashtags and at profiles in your niche. Begin engaging more on Twitter and Facebook. Manually send your article and a sentence on why it would fit someone's audience and ask them to share it. They usually will share it if the article can truly add value to their audience.
3. For marketers you can also share your case study on Growth Hackers, indiehackers.com and Inbound.org.

Paid Facebook & Twitter ads

Running Facebook and Twitter Ads can be done for incredibly cheap. For just a few dollars a day you can drive targeted visitors to your content. Take advantage of boosting posts. Create several variations of ads promoting your content until you find one that has a high CTR (click-through rate) and performs the best.

Facebook & Linkedin groups

Wallock had several leads come straight from his personal Facebook profile. If your content is really great and can help people, others will want to share it and engage with it and will be excited about it being shared in their community. If you share in groups people will be happy to engage with it.

Forums & Q/A sites

Once again, if you’re content is great and can truly help people then users at Q/A sites and online forums will want to check out your content. Add valuable answers and information to  relevant niche communities on Quora.com, Reddit, Slack.com (Slack Groups), Hacker News and then also you can literally Google the type of forums you think your target audience would hang out and build up a profile there. Once you have a strong reputation then post a bit about your case study. Be careful not to be spammy. You should take time to write long posts that are really going to help people.

Reverse engineer your organic marketing efforts

For content promotion he says that there are hundreds of ways to promote content for free but effective low cost content promotion comes down to making a content promotion checklist of all the activities you or your team should be doing.

What advice does Wallock have for creating effective case studies?

“As a marketer, if you want to drive customers with content you need to be tracking your marketing contracts and publishing case studies. It is a no brainer. If you are actually good at what you do and can show people transparency what you’re doing, they will be excited to work with you. For a customer there is nothing more compelling than seeing someone demonstrate exactly how to solve the problem you're having,” says Wallock.