Case Study Production Checklist

Workflow a content or product marketing team runs to produce a customer case study from kickoff through publish — covering customer approval, interview, drafting, design, legal review, and distribution.

7 sections 23 steps Collects data
1

Customer Selection and Approval

  1. Confirm the customer matches the ICP

    • Pull account fit against the current ICP — segment, ARR band, industry, deployment size. Confirm with the AE that the relationship is healthy and renewal isn't at risk; case studies on churning accounts are a recurring embarrassment.

  2. Get written marketing consent from the customer

    • Send the standard logo-and-quote release for legal sign-off on the customer side. Verbal okay from a champion is not consent — procurement, comms, or legal often blocks publication later. Track the executed release in the customer folder.

    Collects list
  3. Confirm metrics the customer will let us cite

    • Some customers approve the logo but won't disclose hard numbers. Lock in which metrics are publishable (percentages vs. raw figures, ranges vs. exact, anonymized industry benchmarks). Substantiation file lives with the asset for FTC/Lanham Act exposure.

2

Interview and Source Material

  1. Draft the interview discussion guide

    • Structure around the situation-problem-solution-result arc. Include open-ended quote-bait questions ("what would you tell another buyer evaluating us?") not just data questions. Share the guide with the customer 48 hours pre-interview.

  2. Schedule and record the customer interview

    • Get explicit recording consent at the start of the call (single-party-consent states are not universal — default to two-party). 30-45 minutes; AE attends but doesn't lead. Use Gong, Grain, or Zoom with cloud recording for transcript.

  3. Pull baseline and outcome metrics from the CRM

    • Coordinate with the CSM and RevOps to pull pre-deployment baselines (volume, conversion, time-to-X) and current values. Note the measurement window — "3x improvement" over six weeks is different from over a year. Save the export to the substantiation file.

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  4. Collect customer logo and brand assets

    • Request vector logo (SVG or EPS) plus usage guidelines from the customer's brand team. Store in the DAM (Bynder, Brandfolder, Frontify) with usage rights and expiration noted. PNGs grabbed from the customer website are not acceptable.

3

Drafting and Editing

  1. Write the first draft from the transcript

    • Lead with the headline result, not the company history. Pull pull-quotes verbatim from the transcript — don't paraphrase a quote and put it in quotation marks. Target 800-1,200 words for a standard PDF case study; longer reads underperform on engagement.

  2. Run fact-check against the substantiation file

    • Every claim with a number gets a citation in the source file. Comparative claims ("better than competitor X") need substantiation under Lanham Act exposure — usually you'll soften these to non-comparative language unless legal has signed off.

  3. Editor reviews for voice and structure

    • Editor checks against the messaging house and tone-of-voice guide. Common cleanup: jargon density, internal product names that won't mean anything to a prospect, CTAs that don't match the buyer stage of a case-study reader (BOFU, not TOFU).

  4. Copy edit against house style

    • AP or Chicago per house style guide. Verify customer company name, executive title, and product names are consistent throughout. Title casing on headers, oxford-comma rule, and number formatting (percent vs. %) are the usual misses.

4

Design and Layout

  1. Brief the designer in Figma

    • Provide the approved copy, customer logo, brand-pairing notes, hero quote, and 2-3 stat callouts. Specify deliverables: PDF (letter + A4), web page, social cards (1200×630, 1080×1080, 1080×1920).

  2. Build pull-quote and stat callouts

    • Stat callouts pull double-duty as social cards downstream. Keep numbers large and contextualized — "42% lift in conversion" with the time window underneath, not floating.

  3. Apply WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility checks

    • Color contrast 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text. Alt text on all images and stat graphics. Heading levels in logical order (no jumping H1 to H4). PDF tagged for screen readers if it lives behind a download form.

5

Approval and Legal Review

  1. Route the draft to legal for claim review

    • Legal scrubs comparative claims, performance promises, and any reg-flagged language (financial-services, healthcare, security claims). For regulated-industry customers, allow extra time — FINRA 2210 or HIPAA-adjacent statements may need filing.

  2. Send the proof to the customer for sign-off

    • Send via the AE or CSM, not cold from marketing. Include a clear deadline and a one-line ask ("approve as written, or send tracked changes by Friday"). Slack DM approvals don't count — get email or a signed proof.

    Collects list Collects file Collects paragraph
  3. Incorporate customer revisions and recirculate

    • Apply tracked changes, send a clean v2 back for confirmation, and capture the second written sign-off before publishing. Don't ship from the v1 approval if any non-trivial changes came in — that's how brands end up taking case studies down.

6

Publish and Distribute

  1. Stage on the website CMS

    • Build in WordPress, HubSpot, Webflow, or Contentful per house. Article schema markup, OG tags for social previews (image, title, description), canonical URL set. Validate in Google Rich Results test before pushing live.

  2. Set UTM convention on all distribution links

    • Use the shared UTM builder. source = channel (linkedin, email, sales), medium = paid/organic/email, campaign = case-study slug. Inconsistent UTMs are why GA4 attribution looks wrong in the next QBR.

  3. Enable sales enablement in the CRM

    • Upload to Highspot, Seismic, or the Salesforce content library with industry/persona/stage tags. Post a one-paragraph summary in #sales with the link, talk-track, and three bullet objection-handlers.

  4. Schedule promotion across channels

    • Email to the segment that matches industry/persona; LinkedIn organic + boosted to a lookalike of the customer's account list; tag the customer where appropriate (with their permission). Coordinate with the customer's comms team on their amplification timing.

7

Post-Publish Measurement

  1. Verify GA4 conversion events fire correctly

    • Test the gated-download form (if any) end-to-end and confirm the conversion event fires once per submit, not on field-blur or page-load. Mis-mapped events distort the asset's reported ROI for the next quarter.

  2. Run 30-day performance review

    • Pull pageviews, time on page, scroll depth, downloads, MQL influence, and sales usage rate from the CRM content reports. Note which channels drove the highest-quality traffic for next case study's distribution plan.

    Collects paragraph

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Category Marketing
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