When a Good Marketing Idea Gets Out of Hand

I appear to have created a bit of a monster.

For a while, I’ve been pushing a couple of business units to make better use of case studies. Their websites were very good at telling people what they could do, but not always as good at proving they had actually done it.

That matters.

Anyone can write a service page saying they understand a sector, solve difficult problems and deliver excellent results. Most businesses do. After you have read a few of them, they all start to merge into the same warm bowl of marketing porridge.

A proper case study cuts through that. It shows the problem, the work and the result. It gives someone a reason to believe the claims being made elsewhere on the site.

Eventually, the recommendation landed.

Brilliant.

Except it didn’t just land. It got a head of steam behind it.

Now the marketing teams want case studies everywhere. A case study on every page. A case study button in the main navigation. New sections in the core templates. More cards, more icons and a fairly substantial redesign to accommodate the full lot.

We’ve gone from “customers need more evidence” to “perhaps the website should be built around case studies” in what feels like about twenty minutes.

This is the bit that does my head in.

The advice wasn’t to turn the website into a case-study delivery system. It was to use case studies as evidence at the points where someone needs evidence to make a decision.

Those are not the same thing.

Everything becomes the conversion tool

This isn’t really a case study problem. I see the same thing happen with SEO and marketing initiatives all the time.

Something gets identified as important. At first, it is difficult to get anyone to give a shite about it. You explain the gap, show why it matters and try to connect it to the wider journey.

Then people get it.

Once they do, the thing stops being one part of the answer and becomes the answer.

If video is the current focus, every page apparently needs a video. If thought leadership is getting attention, every journey must lead to an article. If somebody has had a good month with webinars, we are all doing webinars until further notice.

And now it is case studies.

Whatever has the attention of the business becomes the current conversion tool, even when it was never meant to be a conversion tool in the first place.

There is an understandable reason for this. A specific thing is easier to get hold of than a whole customer journey.

“Add a case study here” is tangible. It can go into a brief, be designed, built and ticked off. Understanding what evidence a customer needs, when they need it and what might stop them making a decision is much messier. You can’t put all of that into a colourful card and call it done.

So the initiative becomes the strategy.

Before long, everyone has an opinion about where it should sit, what it should look like and how loudly it should announce itself. The original problem is still somewhere in the room, but it has been talked over by a navigation button.

Case studies are evidence

A case study has a fairly clear job.

It should help a potential customer understand whether you have dealt with a problem like theirs, whether you know what you are doing and whether the outcome was any good.

That is evidence.

Evidence can help a conversion, obviously. But that doesn’t make it the conversion path.

Someone arriving on a service page may still be trying to understand what the service is. Someone else may be comparing suppliers. Another person may have already spoken to the sales team and is now trying to make sure they are not about to make a terrible career decision.

The same case study won’t have the same value to all three people at the same moment.

For the person comparing suppliers, it might be exactly what they need. For the person who doesn’t yet understand the offer, pushing them into 1,500 words about another company is probably jumping the gun.

The question should not be:

Where can we put more case studies?

It should be:

Where does someone need proof, and what proof will help them continue?

That might mean linking to a relevant case study from a service page. It might mean using one during a sales conversation or including it in a proposal. In some journeys it may deserve real prominence.

It doesn’t mean bolting one onto every page like a conservatory added by someone who was originally asked to let in a bit more light.

They are dense because they contain something

The other part of this is the design.

The case studies feel dense. That has become a concern.

There is quite a lot of text. Some sections take more than a few seconds to read. They look more like documents than landing pages, which causes the usual itch to break everything into cards, add icons and pull every number out in 72-point type.

I’m not against designing case studies properly. A wall of badly set text isn’t more credible simply because it’s hard work to read. Headings, spacing, typography, images and useful summaries can all make a detailed story easier to follow.

But density is not automatically a design problem.

Case studies are dense because they need to contain detail. The detail is the bit that makes them believable.

What was the actual problem? What made it difficult? What did we do? Why did we do it that way? What changed? What didn’t go to plan?

If we strip that out and replace it with six cards, four icons and a large percentage, we may have made the page easier to scan. We’ve not necessarily made it more useful.

At some point, “easy to consume” becomes “there is bugger all here”.

Someone reading a case study is often doing a form of due diligence. They are not looking for another vague claim about partnership, innovation or delivering meaningful outcomes. Their bullshit radar is already switched on. They want enough substance to decide whether the work is real.

Sometimes that means reading paragraphs.

The case study should almost feel like plain text—not because design doesn’t matter, but because the design should get out of the way of the evidence. It should help someone read the story, not turn the story into a display cabinet for the component library.

The restraint to leave a good idea alone

Perhaps the wider problem is that businesses find it difficult to let a useful thing remain a supporting part of the journey.

Once an initiative has attention, leaving it in proportion can feel like a lack of ambition. If case studies are valuable, surely more case studies in more prominent places must be more valuable.

But websites don’t work like that.

Every page has a job. Every piece of content should earn its place. Something can be important without being everywhere, and it can contribute to a conversion without having a button in the main navigation.

That is the bit we lose when a recommendation becomes the shiny new thing. We stop asking what problem it was meant to solve and start asking how far we can roll it out.

Case studies were meant to provide evidence in the decision journey. They still are.

They don’t need to become the journey as well.

Sometimes good marketing is not coming up with another idea. It is having enough restraint to stop a good one getting completely out of hand.