What Makes a Great Agency Case Study with Joel Klettke
Key Takeaways
- Most case studies are boring, narcissistic and hard to believe because the company never involves the customer, or only cherry picks its best wins.
- The challenge section should cover the stakes: what would have happened if the problem wasn't solved, and why it was personally painful for the person involved.
- In the solution section, write the why, not just the what. Agencies especially need to show why they chose this approach over others.
- An analytics graph is the worst results section. Explain what the result made possible for the business and what they can do now that they couldn't before.
- Case Study Buddy separates interviewing from writing and uses a before, during, after formula instead of a fixed script. The hardest part is still follow-up and approvals.
- Your About page is usually the second most visited page on an agency site. Start it by asking customers why they chose you, not by staring at a blank cursor.
Joel Klettke is a conversion copywriter and the founder of Case Study Buddy, which he started in 2016 after almost five years at an SEO agency and a few years freelancing in conversion copy. Gray MacKenzie hosted with both perspectives in hand: ZenPilot was looking at hiring Case Study Buddy, and Joel’s team had just interviewed him as the customer in a HubSpot case study. They covered what a great case study looks like section by section, how Joel’s team is built, written versus video, and which agency pages matter most.
The hard part turned out to be admin
The business started as a favor: a board member at WP Engine, a conversion client, asked Joel to write a case study for a company he advised. Joel saw a hard-to-produce asset that nobody inside most companies owns and that could be productized, and he made the customer interview non-negotiable from the first one. Doing the first few himself showed where the real difficulty was.
“With case studies, the hardest part of doing them… it’s the administrative side in a lot of cases, being on top of persistently following up and checking in and getting that approval.”
What a great case study looks like, section by section
Joel started with why most case studies fail.
“Most case studies are boring. They’re narcissistic. They’re tough to believe because the people putting them together either never involve the client, or they only cherry pick their very best cases.”
Then he walked through challenge, solution and results.
“In the challenge section, you don’t just want to talk about what was broken. You want to talk about the stakes. What would happen if this hadn’t gotten solved? Why was this personally frustrating or painful for the individual?”
“The solution section is about the why. Not just what you did. Why did you take that approach? Especially for agencies… why did you push the client towards those services and not others?”
“A great story, in my opinion, doesn’t just talk about the result. It talks about the impact. And especially for agencies, the worst results section you can have is like an analytics graph where it’s like, look, up to the right. Nobody cares or understands what you’re showing them.”
A 20% lift in traffic only matters, Joel said, for what it made possible: what the client can do now that they couldn’t before. Gray had just been asked exactly those second- and third-order questions in his own 30-minute HubSpot interview.
Interviewers interview, writers write
Gray asked how Joel trains the team to get those answers. Joel pushed back on the word script: there’s a formula, BDA (before, during, after), and a set of go-to questions, and the roles were split early.
“We have interviewers who just interview. We have writers who just write… When we look for interviewers, one of the things that we want is that ability to get into the muck of an industry and understand what makes the question meaningful, where to push in, where to pull back.”
Account managers and project managers touch the project before the interviewer does, so Joel hires AMs who understand storytelling and can spot a gap in a brief. The standard for everyone: a human-focused story with the customer at the center, zeroed in on one aspect.
Written wins on depth, and one story feeds every channel
Case Study Buddy launched written-only and added a video team later; most of the work is still written.
“A video testimonial is wonderful when you want just the customer’s perspective… When you want to communicate what you did as an agency as part of that story… a written asset allows for a depth that you would need a five minute video for. And… nobody’s watching a video longer than two and a half minutes in most cases.”
“People are starting to recognize these can be full funnel assets. We can use an audiogram for lead acquisition. We can use a video in our cold outreach. We can use a one sheet on social media…”
The About page is really an about-you page
Gray asked if there’s an order to fix site copy in. Joel said it’s less a hierarchy and more a conveyor belt: find the broken section and work there. For agencies, pull up your analytics, he said, and the second most visited page is almost always About Us.
“That’s where your client figures out not just, okay, you’re an agency. They figure out they like you… The About Us page is really more an about you page for the client. It’s why we are the best fit to serve you.”
Right behind it comes the results page.
“Other agencies can steal your headlines, they can steal your design, they can steal your service. In a world that’s saturated and everyone’s saying we’re an extension of your team, a story that shows that is going to beat the pants off an agency that says that, every single time.”
He pointed to KlientBoost, which lets prospects filter case studies by things like company size and budget. And for anyone stuck on their own About page:
“The place to start is not the blinking cursor… Go talk to customers and ask them: what made you choose us? What did you find exceptional about working with us?… Your customers distill down your value offering automatically on their own. Naturally, go cherry pick that.”
Joel’s one tool recommendation was Descript.