The real cost of ignoring case studies
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting case studies. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Problem, approach, result, in that order
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Numbers make it credible. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
What to do next
Name the client if they will let you. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The short version
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about case studies before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Name the client if they will let you — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.