Most marketers will agree that customer stories are a powerful way to communicate the value of a company, product or service. Nobody speaks more loudly than customers. But if that’s the case, why do so many customer case studies fall short?

The following checklist is designed to help make your customer stories a success:

1. Choose Your Stories Carefully
Just because a customer is willing to do a case study doesn’t make them a good candidate. Your marketing budget may not allow creating case studies for every market. So select your customers strategically. Handpick the best to support your marketing goals. Address your largest, most competitive or emerging markets first. Whichever you choose, you want customers who are doing something interesting that will lead others to your company or solution.

2. Be Category-Specific
To be successful, direct a case study at a specific market. The case study addresses the pain in that market. It uses the market’s language. Healthcare and construction markets have different vocabularies. It’s better to do fewer case studies and target each one properly than to pretend one size fits all. It’s even worse to create a generalized case study, hoping that all those who read it will bring their context to it. They won’t.

3. Target the Prospect
Too often, marketing materials—including case studies—seem to be written to the CEO or the marketing director. The problem is, they don’t buy anything. Write to your current and potential buyers. Think like a customer and downplay the corporate ego.

4. Know Where You’re Going
In a memorable scene from the movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Neal Page (Steve Martin)—after enduring yet one more of Dell Griffith’s (John Candy) meandering tales—explodes: “When you tell a story—try this out—have a point!”

Great advice for any storyteller. Know your point, stay with it, and include only the content that helps get you there. Anything else will only frustrate and confuse your readers, and they’ll likely bail out before they get to the end.

5. Think Like an Outsider
Think and write like a journalist, not an “insider.” Avoid marketing-speak, buzzwords and hyperbole. Tackle the customer’s story head on.

Approach your story like a three-act play: set the stage (provide context); reveal the conflict (the customer’s pain); show the resolution (your solution); then close with the results.

6. Show, Don’t Tell
All good stories rely on “show me, don’t tell me.” Showing versus telling is not a subtle difference. Using phrases like “XYZ company represents the best price-performance ratio available on the market” is telling and not showing.
Such phrases fall flat, and readers mostly don’t believe them. If you must use such statements, have the customer say them. At least that gives the statement some credibility. Still, a better way is to show exactly how you helped the customer.

7. Demonstrate ROI
Return on investment can be the hardest benefit to pull out of even a cooperative customer. Still, anyone reading the story will want to know exactly what problem (or opportunity) you addressed, and how your customer defines success.
So get a financial ROI if possible. It speaks loudly to customers. Or ask the customer how long it took for the solution to pay for itself. Has it improved internal processes? Can employees make more calls, build more widgets, or book more orders? How many more? When the customer doesn’t want to reveal the overall numbers, what about selecting one department?

Regardless of how it’s defined, return on investment should always be the point of your story.