10 Best Case Studies For Small Businesses To Secure 2023
The success of every business lies in its strategy to deal with challenges during its journey. Besides using the best branding services for small businesses, one piece of content that is effective but often underused is the case study.
A well-written case study helps a customer as they define a problem, decide on a solution, implement it, and gain benefits. It can teach you which strategy or approach to take for selling your merchandise and drawing the target audience. This way, you can definitely take your small business to new heights.
In this blog, we will take a look at some of the best case study examples that can help you in upscaling your small business.
Case Study 1: Starbucks – Reward Your Customers
Customer experience must be a top priority for business professionals to upscale their small businesses. A survey reports more than 86% of purchasers are willing to spend more for a good customer experience.
In the “Reward Loyalty Program” of Starbucks, customers collect stars to gain exciting rewards. This program generates 40% of the company’s total sales.
By adopting the gratification method, Starbucks included a “Reward Loyalty Program” in their already-built application. This move unusually increased digital traffic and sales. It brought mobile payment, content partnership, and customer loyalty into one powerful app.
Customers began registering for My Reward through its application. They were given star “points” in exchange for the purchase made or interaction in the app. The more stars a customer gets, the better rewards they get.
Case Study 2: Decibullz – Fast And Intuitive Site Experience
Clay Lyell has been a marketing manager at Decibullz, who worked with DIGITLHAUS. It was a Chicago Website Redesign Company for small businesses that helped design his website. When he transitioned to BigCommerce first, he knew he would have to hire a designer in order to help customize one of his themes, just because he had never done custom coding in BigCommerce before.
On Bigcommerce’s agency portal, he found DIGITLHAUS and went to a couple of examples of websites they had done which were prominent to us. When WooCommerce did not seem the right E-commerce development solution for small businesses, he realized that he got brilliant guidance from DIGITLHAUS.
He has two entirely distinct product categories, which makes him stand out in his category. He has hearing protection products that include earplugs and some hearing protection filters. He also has his headphone products on the audio side. However, in the past, explaining two different sides of his business to customers has always been a pain point in customer service.
It was very beneficial to be able to go back and forth with the team of DIGITLHAUS, and say, “Here is the vibe we are opting for. Can you all make this happen?”
They did an excellent job and were able to implement almost everything we wanted for our website.
Case Study 3: Global Expeditions Group – Content Marketing Strategy
This is a great example of how to split a detailed case study to make it easily readable.
Gravitate began by introducing its client Global Expeditions Group (GXG) in order to give users a little bit of background into what they do. Then they dived right into how they assisted GXG in a powerful content marketing strategy.
At the beginning of this case study, what captures your eye is the results. Instead of compelling readers to find out the effect of their efforts at the end, they called out a few major statistics and improvements they assisted GXG to accomplish. It was a great way to persuade readers to make them keep wanting to learn how they did it.
Gravitate did an excellent job splitting their long case study. Since it concentrates on a whole content marketing strategy, it put multiple parts of its case study into individual sections, from its best Chicago Branding Company for small businesses to its copywriting and website design.
Case Study 4: Rackspace – Video Collaboration
In the past 15 years, Rackspace exploded from a high-growth business to a world leader in hybrid cloud computing. The challenge was to bridge and collaborate across offices. For this, they needed an environment of communication that could replicate honest, in-person interactions.
Rackspace contacted Life Size for HD video collaboration. The company invested in a complete solution of infrastructure and endpoints. Now, the hybrid cloud company uses video communication every day and it was significant in one of the greatest launches in company history.
The CMO of Rackspace, Suaad Sait, uses Life Size in his home to join teams across the world. Besides Life Size, Design Alligators also assist international clients and offer Video Animation Services and other countries as well.
Case Study 5: Kintec Footwear and Orthotics – Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Kintec Footwear and Orthotics in Canada are not new to online selling. However, it was only in the previous year due to changing behavior of buyers around the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to expand its e-commerce store to generate more sales, Kintec decided to make it a seamless omnichannel experience for its customers.
Before BigCommerce, Kintec’s website used Magento, but it did not get the job done well. In order to take its website to another level, solve current problems, and make a smooth omnichannel experience, Kintec knew that now was the time to change the technology.
Kintec selected BigCommerce because it wanted a website that could ultimately scale with its growth. After making the decision, the brand turned to Weizen Young, a website redesign company for small businesses, to help it create a website to do exactly what it wanted.
Kinetic’s marketing manager, Tyler Ireland, describes how they worked with Weizen Young on this project, “ They supported us with SEO and industry best practices to keep us on top.” He further said, “BigCommerce is quite intuitive platform”. Later, the best branding services for small businesses helped Kintec drive sales, gain profits, and repeat customers. It is now able to make more effective changes in order to keep the site optimized.
Case Study 6: Car and Van Mats – Revs Up E-Commerce Sales
Car and Van Mats, a family-run business, was based in Sheffield, England. In its early stages, it sold a wide range of mats for vans, cars, trucks, and motorhomes on a single marketplace channel. Their business was steady, and the chosen strategy had served the company well for some years, but the team of Car and Van Mats eventually noticed the business potential and had huge dreams to advance it beyond a simple eBay store.
In order to get its advancement plans rolling, Car and Van Mats created an independent WordPress website on WooCommerce, but immediately realized that besides slow loading times, it was not capable of supporting the large catalog of Car and Van Mats. With most purchase abandonments at checkout, their WooCommerce website did not match the quality of service it wished to offer customers on its online store. With the sale increasing, they knew they would not be able to go anywhere without a strong Ecommerce Development Solution in Chicago for small businesses. The company also knew it was time to step up to create something more scalable.
Car and Van Mats decided on DeeperThanBlue, a leading digital firm to involve and help manage its large catalog as well as high-growth website. The company took pride in customer satisfaction in its business and desired the same for its e-commerce website. So, DeeperThanBlue assisted Car and Van Mats in evaluating top Ecommerce development solutions for small businesses, including Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. In the search for a reliable, secure, affordable, and easy-to-use platform, Car and Van Mats land on BigCommerce where site pages load in just less than two seconds, and business owners get much value for a less cost.
Case Study 7: Apple – Build A Brand
The logo of “Apple” is a well-known design that reflects the brand’s value, mission, and vision. Its brand positioning statement set the company apart from its competitors. Over several years, the Apple logo has undergone many design changes.
When Steve Jobs changed the logo, the most crucial rebranding company came, which affected its overall personality. This logo is now the most identified logo in the world.
Customers can feel a sense of reliability and innovation by just looking at the Apple logo. It is the main reason for big sales of all Apple products across the world.
According to this company, the best Chicago Branding Services for small business help build firm relationships with prospects and attract them to become loyal customers. A recent study shows that around 89% of users stay committed to a business having a good brand image. Therefore, every business owner needs to make a powerful brand image in order to sell their merchandise efficiently.
Case Study 8: RENAULT & NISSAN – Prioritize Partnerships
Partnerships and collaboration have a direct impact on improving the operating efficiency and credibility of a business in the marketplace.
Renault and Nissan have a firm partnership in automobiles. Their collaboration made an impressive achievement of forming 10% of new car sales throughout the world.
The company decided on making an alliance rather than a merger. This was so because an alliance has multiple benefits to give as compared to a merger.
With the alliance, these two companies could access more geographical locations where foreign investments are limited. They got the best chances to enter one another’s territory, where they had already settled companies due to the alliance.
Though they faced many challenges, including fluctuation in price share, still they managed to solve problems and eventually succeeded.
So, this case study teaches us that small businesses should partner with others to raise their chances of high product sales, and profits for everyone and to take advantage of each other’s powerful areas.
Case Study 9: Zapier – The Right Marketing Strategy
One excellent way to grow traffic on your business website is “SEO”, which if done right, can bring you more leads, sales, and eventually customers. Search engine optimization can generate large website traffic to reach your marketing goals.
Zapier used the right SEO strategy for driving organic traffic to its site. With the help of a Professional Website Redesign Company in Chicago for small businesses, it created 25,000 one-of-a-kind landing pages for unique keywords.
Zapier had a structure and layout for each and every page, including well-optimized human-created content. It focused on a playbook, outsourced SEO content for the onboarding process, and launched innovative apps so it can get partners to write content for it.
In addition to that, it outsourced link building to its partners as well. These partners wrote meaningful guest post content about Zapier on their website and provided it with a backlink. It helped Zapier to gain new users as well as generate its website traffic.
So, in order to improve website traffic and attract more prospects, every small business must include a number of landing pages with relevant content and backlinks through guest posts on other sites.
Case Study 10: Gap – Handled Its Logo Backfire
First: A Crowdsourced Redesign Attempt
Gap is a well-established clothing and accessories retailer that changed its logo three times from 1990 to 2010. In response to backfire, Gap first tried to justify the fresh logo as a calculated strategy to crowdsource ideas for a new one. Gap wrote on its Facebook profile, “Thanks for everyone’s input on the fresh logo! We know this logo created a lot of buzz, and we are excited to view passionate debates unfolding! So we want you to share your unique designs. We love our own version, but we would like to see other ideas.”
The new logo could have even passed as a brilliant PR stunt to improve brand strength through internet publicity and word of mouth. Compared to the unrealistic crowdsourcing claim, this idea seems more reliable especially given that the designers “Laird and Partners” are trusted in the business and have dealt with multiple huge brands, including Juicy Couture and Calvin Klein. They really knew what they were doing.
Second: A Necessary U-Turn
It seems that Gap admitted that the crowdsource excuse was implausible. After six days, Gap re-established its original 1990 logo. In response to the step, it stated that a lot had been learned in the process. “We are clear that we didn’t go about this in the appropriate way. We missed the chance to interact with the online community. For crowdsourcing, this was not the right project at the right time. There may be a time to develop our logo, but if and when that time comes, we will handle it in a distinct way” (Marka Hansen, President of Gap at the time).
This acknowledgment of mistakes over both the need for rebranding and how to go about it has emphasized the Gap’s lack of understanding of how brand identity needs to be built and maintained. It is clear that customers are at the heart of any strategic step, especially when financial results depend almost only on their purchases. If you dismay your customers, you dismay your profits.
For Gap, the speed at which the 360-degree U-turn occurred, luckily meant that a lot of people had not even observed the change before it disappeared again. This saved Gap the humiliation of a further sales decline.
This case study shows that a Company’s Logo plays a vital logo in connecting customers with brands as well as in improving brand equity.
Highlight Your Past Success To Attract Future Business
Case study examples do an excellent job of outlining the challenges, creating solutions, and providing the best results. They help you see how other businesses overcome their critical situation in order to take themselves to new heights.
It is important to understand the customer’s needs in growing a small business. Hence, you should design a powerful marketing strategy, including social media to attract customers, get huge ROI, and set yourself apart from competitors in the market. However, if your leads have been declining in the decision phase, then a marketing case study may be only what you need.
Case studies are also an effective tool in content marketing. Here, Design Alligators is a Professional Website Redesign Company for small businesses that can help you build a well-optimized site with the best SEO Services and design strategy. So why not reach out to it today?