Making a case to hire you

Last week we talked about portfolios and how they help prospects see if they can picture themselves in your work.

Case studies have some overlap, but they do something different.

Where a portfolio says “We can make something that looks like this,” a case study says “We’ve seen this problem before, and we know how to solve it.”

It’s harder to put together than a portfolio piece, but a good case study is one of the most valuable assets you can have.

Trouble is, most case studies read like someone dumped their project management board into a blog post:

“First we did discovery, then wireframes, then design, then development, then launch. Here’s a link.”

All true, but a good case study isn’t a log of what happened. It’s a story. And every story needs an angle.

Maybe the story is about helping a client untangle a confusing offer. Maybe it’s about making an outdated brand feel trustworthy again. Maybe it’s about turning a bloated, hard-to-update site into something their team can actually use without breaking it.

The angle gives the story a point. Without one, you’re just documenting what happened. With one, you’re making a case for why someone should hire you.

Pick the angle first.

Before you write a single word, decide what your case study is really trying to prove. You should be able to say it in one sentence.

Maybe it’s how you clarified a confusing message. Maybe it’s how you handled a messy migration. Maybe it’s how you increased signups by reworking a single user flow.

Once you know the angle, you know which parts of the project to focus on and which parts won’t make the cut. “How [company] increased signups by 300% in 30 days” is going to beat “How we built a website for [company]” every time.

Make your client the main character.

Your next prospect isn’t reading your case study trying to imagine what it’d be like to be you. They’re reading it trying to imagine what it’d be like to be your client.

They want to see a business that started with a problem they recognize, wrestled with the same doubts they have, and ended up victorious.

What your agency did matters. But your agency is the guide, not the hero.

Show your thinking.

Anyone can look at a finished site and decide if they like how it looks. What they can’t see is all the decisions that got it there.

Like how you built a comparison chart because sales calls kept getting bogged down on the same “which option is right for me?” question. Or how you broke one overloaded service page into three because it was trying to rank for too many different searches at once. Or how you built a dedicated ‘Partners’ page because referrals were driving the majority of their business, but the site didn’t offer anything helpful for partnerships.

The finished product is the part anyone could’ve shown them. What’s underneath it (the problems you spotted, the trade-offs you weighed, and the decisions you made) is what shows your prospects you can actually solve problems, not just paint pretty pixels.