How do you write a great construction case study? (And what makes them so important?)

A case study is a fantastic way to shout about how great your product or service is, show how its unique features benefit your customers and prove that it works in the way you say it does.

As a tool for building credibility and trust, a case study is second-to-none.
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But how do you write a great construction case study? Here are some easy steps to get you started…

Set the scene

Start by laying out what the job is so that the reader know what they’re dealing with and can start to relate it to their own projects.

This can be done with facts and figures such as with the Specwall case study:

“Viadux is a brand new residential development in Manchester which combines the city’s industrial past with a modern sense of luxury. It is a £300m, 40-storey tower designed by Simpson Haugh Architects which features high quality one, two-bedroom apartments with extraordinary views across the city centre skyline.”

Or you could start with a wider view if your product is aimed at changing the bigger picture, like in this HammerTech case study:

“The world of construction is constantly evolving, and nowhere is that truer than when it comes to safety on the job site. Innovative processes and technologies are being embraced on mission critical sites and redefining what construction safety success looks like in the modern world.

“On these sites, safety is seen not as a hindrance but as an opportunity to achieve the highest safety standards and bring the rate of construction incidents down to almost zero. In turn, commercial contractors can learn from the best practices used in mission critical construction to improve their own safety operations. This allows them to take those best practices and share them with the rest of the company, while also considering how to adapt some of the innovations for jobs that may not have the same resources as mission critical sites.”

Solve peoples’ problems for them

Nothing sells a product more than showing someone how you can solve their problem. Bonus points if you can solve a problem they didn’t even know they had.

The main body of your case study should follow this format:

Identify a problem > Explain how your product solves it

This Specwall case study demonstrates the principle in action:

“Specwall was chosen for its programme saving qualities to allow an earlier installation of the external cladding. This was necessary due to the façade fronting directly onto a busy road and pedestrian walkway.

Additionally, Specwall was selected for to its high fire ratings, a feature which is particularly important to the developer in London in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy.”

When doing this, make sure to have one eye on your wider marketing goals. If you have a new product out there or are pushing a particular key selling point with current campaigns, use the case study to support it.

Pick one or two key benefits that align with your overarching goals and you’re on to a winner.

Show what success looks like with your product

Once you have done the theoretical part, you have to show it in action. This should be impactful, to the point and make it blindingly obvious that your product could also help the reader solve their problems, too.

This can be done in a number of ways. Some examples of which are by highlighting a key fact or statistic that has been proven on site, such as this from the HammerTech case study:

“In 75% of cases where an incident occurs on a construction site, it is because hazards weren’t identified sufficiently far in advance to allow for actions that would avoid or mitigate risk.

“This is a big opportunity for any commercial contractor to follow the example of mission critical sites and embrace a software-based solution to improve construction safety.

• The Bureau of Labour incident rate for the construction of buildings is 5 incidents requiring treatment each year per 100 workers.
• For mission critical sites, that figure is one per 100 workers each year.
• Heightened safety standards and the embrace of safety innovations as a matter of course make mission critical sites up to 150% safer than other construction projects.”

Or another good way to do it is to get a quote from the client which spells it out, like this one from Specwall:

“Specwall is a really fast system that provides an alternative to blockwork, SFS and even internal partitions. It provides areas of Viadux including the karaoke bar, cinema room, plant room and other areas with 3+ hour fire rated walls, and we completed the Phase 1 install of the Mezzanine level in just 17 days.”

Rick Vose, Site Manager at Complete Wall Solutions

Or this example from HammerTech:

“HammerTech allows assistance with the planning and coordination of activities, but it also provides support on the administrative side, which indirectly allows more time to be spent on the pre-planning efforts.”
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Clay Nelson, CSP, CHST

Imagery is highly recommended where you can get it. A good picture tells a story just as well as a quote, and it also provides further credibility that your product does in fact exist, and does what you say it does!

Get as much “real life” in as you can to back up the success story.

A case study isn’t just a case study…

Once you’ve done your case study, it’s time to make it work hard. You can use it as the basis for a whole load of other marketing material and get even more value out of your work.

For example, you’ve got an instant social post ready to go. You don’t even have to find more imagery or spend too long thinking about what to write!

You could also use it in a targeted email campaign. If your product saved a client money or cut time from the construction programme on site, that sounds like something that main contractors in your database might like to know about.

If it increased the amount of floor space in a development or simplified a complex design problem then you should let architects know.

And so on – you get the gist.

The point is that a case study is good in its own right and even better as a jumping off point for everything else.

Demonstrating how your product works in real life is one of the most valuable and useful marketing activities you can undertake, so it’s worth getting it right.

What’s the easiest way to do a case study?

The easiest way write a construction case study and shout about your work effectively is to hire an expert construction content writer.

As you can probably guess, I have a recommendation for which freelance construction content writer you should hire…

Want help with case studies? Send me a message today over on my contact page and we can get started.