State of the Nation for B2B Case Studies: 2018

This guest post has been written by Jim Kelly, founder of Industolutions, a curated collection of B2B success stories. Industolutions, was our Product Launch Expo winner at CMWorld 2017, and is also a specialty sponsor of Content Marketing World 2018.

Much has been written (and rewritten!) about B2B case studies over the years. By now, marketing professionals understand why they are useful and how to write them, while vendors understand how the case study can highlight their products and services. However, an in-depth analysis of the B2B case study universe as a whole is missing.

Such knowledge would enable marketers to extract great value from data and metrics around the B2B case study — how case studies are leveraged by their competitors, how many are out there, how the big players in the market use them etc. This information would allow marketing teams to benchmark against industry standards and improve their own positioning.

This data is available via Industolutions.com, the world’s largest collection of B2B case studies. This is our State of the Nation — a way to assemble and disseminate key market insights about B2B case studies and identify trends that emerge over time. Here is a summary of our findings:

•  We analyzed 300,000 case studies from over 17,000 vendors
• The most common name for these documents is indeed “Case Study” with “Success Story” in second place. “Project Profile” / “Customer Profile” is the third most popular title.
• The most popular format is PDF with twice as many case studies than HTML versions. Our research found that potential customers (& salespeople) still like to have a document that can be downloaded and emailed which accounts for the popularity of the PDF case study. However, case studies in html are the fastest growing format as they are easy to share on social media platforms. A small number of vendors actually provide both PDF and html versions to get the best of both worlds. Video case studies are a very small portion of the overall landscape with a lot of potential for growth.
• Who are the heavy hitters in the B2B case study universe? Well, Oracle claims the top spot with almost 2,700 case studies! They are followed by Siemens with over 2,400 and Microsoft are in third spot with over 2,200 case studies.
• The average number of case studies per company is 17
• Over 90% of case studies are freely accessible without any need to register or fill in a form. Our research found that potential customers are reluctant to sign-up for access to case studies since so many can be freely obtained from competitors.

To dig into the numbers in detail see the attached infographic: State of the Nation for B2B Case Studies: 2018

B2B case studies are a remarkable resource for potential users to identify solution blueprints and equally for marketers to use as a tool to generate qualified leads.

Looking for a better way to leverage your existing case studies? Or, maybe you are searching for a solution to a business challenge. Take advantage of the Industolutions database and find the solution that meets your needs.