It's seven ingredients, three problems, and one job, and you can write it in the time you usually spend arguing about the headline.
A case study has exactly one job: it moves a reader from audience to prospect. It isn't there to showcase your work or document the engagement. Every choice on the page should serve that single action, for that one reader. Before you write a word, decide what you want that reader to do next, whether it's booking a call, replying to an email, or filling out a form.
Once you know the job, editing gets easy. Anything that doesn't serve that one action gets cut, no matter how proud you are of it. The seventeen-step process breakdown, the internal jargon, the paragraph about your agency's founding story, none of that moves a stranger closer to raising their hand. It just makes the page longer and the reader more likely to leave.
Hold that filter through everything below. If a sentence doesn't help someone decide to contact you, it doesn't belong on the page.
Before you write, make one quick decision: what's the strongest thing you've got? If it's hard numbers, you're writing a Proof Machine. If it's a reframe that changed how the client saw their problem, you're writing a Big Idea. If it's a deliverable you're genuinely proud of, that's a Craft Showcase. If it's a repeatable process you run the same way every time, that's a Method Demonstration. If it's a long arc with a real before-and-after, that's a Transformation Story.
Pick one primary archetype, then bolt on a Proof secondary wherever you can. Even a Craft Showcase converts harder with one hard number attached to it.
This decision takes about thirty seconds and it determines everything that follows, from your headline to what you cut. For the full breakdown of when to use each archetype, read the agency case studies guide.
Every converting case study runs the same seven parts. Start with the numeric result set as your headline, since "improved performance" hooks no one but "800% revenue growth" does. Add the client logo right under it for instant credibility.
Next, list up to three starting problems the client had, no more. Then, for each of those three problems, name the specific part of your process that solved it. This is the step agencies skip, and it's the one that matters most: the reader needs to see how each problem maps to one process element, not a wall of activities with no clear cause and effect.
Close with a client quote, one call to action, and credit to the client's team. Those seven parts give you one clear line from problem to result, and that's the whole structure.
Before you publish, run your draft through this checklist. First, is it an epic? If your case study reads like a nuanced ten-paragraph narrative, cut it down. That story belongs in the sales call, not the page.
Second, is it an activity list? If you're describing what you did instead of what changed, you're the hero of your own case study instead of the client. Rewrite it around the result.
Third, is there a disconnect? If a reader can't trace your numbers back to something specific you did, the number reads as a claim instead of proof. Connect every result to an action.
Fourth, is it going to rot? If it needs a designer and client sign-off to update, it will sit there getting stale while the problems it describes stop being true. Build it so it's cheap enough to refresh.
Case studies age badly. The client's problems from eighteen months ago may not exist anymore, the numbers get stale, and a page that took a designer and three rounds of client approval to produce is a page nobody ever goes back and updates. Speed is the feature here, not a shortcut you're taking. The faster you can produce one, the more likely you are to actually have a current one on hand.
Read the full worked method, with real headline patterns and timing, in the 7-minute case study. Or skip writing it from scratch entirely and let Case Study Lab build it from a handful of inputs, export-ready, in the time it takes to read this section twice.
Use seven ingredients in order: a numeric result set as the headline, the client logo, up to three starting problems, the specific process element that solved each one, a client quote, one call to action, and credit to the client team. The client and the result are the hero of the page, and your process is just the mechanism that connects the problem to the outcome, not the star of the story.
Put the numeric result up top as the headline, list no more than three starting problems, and map each one to the specific part of your process that solved it. Follow that with a client quote, a single call to action, and credit to the client. That structure works across every archetype because it always gives the reader a clear line from problem to proof.
It should take minutes, not weeks. If it needs a designer and client sign-off it'll never get refreshed, so build it fast enough to be disposable.
Case Study Lab writes the structure for you and exports it ready to send.
← Back to Case Study Lab