 Hello, everyone. I'm Shashank, also known as Shash, and these are my team members, Suhita and Vaishnavi. Unfortunately, they could not make it. Really apologize for that. So I'll be presenting all by myself. And that is why if you see me troubled, if you see me crumbling and trembling, trust me, that's because I am taking on some of the other sections that they have to do. So we'll be talking today about how to write a killer marketing case study. And really, these are some generic principles that we wanted to discuss. One of the major reasons why we wanted to do this presentation was because we realized that for us, we hear a lot about Adobe, Sitecore. These tools and these technologies people are using world over. There are a lot of cases where the projects fail, but they still shine through because their case studies, their stories are well written. People lap up those stories and then continue to believe these are good tools. Drupal never has been really lacking behind. But unfortunately, we realized that the stories that we try and build in don't really match up to those kind of stories that Adobe and Sitecore and WordPress comes up with. That's one of the reasons why we thought we could potentially come up with some quick pointers. We have some data to back our theories as well, data to back our knowledge as well. But really, this could even become an open conversation and we would like to hear from everyone here in the community to understand what are their thoughts and maybe we can improve upon it as a whole. As a whole, when I say start pitching in how Drupal behaves rather than how my project works and how a particular module works. That's the intention and with that, I'd like to get started. I'm pretty sure this is something that all of us would be able to relate with, familiar with when iPod launched. Steve Jobs did a great job of really marketing this. He didn't talk about what kind of features iPod would be able to provide, but he essentially talked about what it would be able to do for you. And that's the kind of connect that Steve Jobs was able to make. Repeatedly and consistently as Apple has grown from strength to strength, we have realized that the messaging has always been consistent. Steve Jobs has continuously been saying, we do not tell you what we are going to do for you. That's part of what our conversation is, but what we'd really be focusing on is where we'd be able to connect with you and where we all can stand together, which means that Apple's identity is what that will shine through and everyone else will then be able to connect with that identity. And that's where Apple has excelled. Same goes with the story building that we do. We need to make sure that it connects with our customers. It connects with our audiences. And hence, we really don't talk, go into the granular details of what we can do, but we have to really come up on the surface and talk about what we have been doing very well, where all we can solve your problems and where all we can connect with you. I'm sure we all are Drupalers. We have been working in Drupal for a long period of time, but for all the new members who are probably joining DrupalCon for the very first time, welcome. And for everyone else, a little bit of a slider on what the Drupal factor is really about and what really works in our favor. We have about 40,000 modules that's in circulation. And each and there is a module for everything. You look up something, you'll be able to realize that there is something that's available for you that you could start picking it up and utilizing it. We have about one million plus community. Coders, developers, they are teamers. They are business analysts and program managers who are really contributing to the success of the Drupal Day in and Day out patches flow in. We make sure that there are contributions at every level. And that's where our community has really thrived. There are about 1185 plus service providers. So if you are in need of a particular kind of a service, you can just call up anyone. In fact, there are a lot of them here as well. Please walk over to their booths, have a conversation. They'd be happy to help you with any of your concerns, any of your problems that you might be facing. But what does all of this mean? Because there is a thriving community. There is help at hand at every place. If there is granularity that we want to achieve in terms of information, there are people who can do that for you. And as a whole, it becomes then very easy for us to showcase what Drupal can do for us, for our customers as well. One of the ways that we can do it is largely a case study. We write a very good story and that helps us connect with our customers. That's where we'll go in and we'll look into the anatomy of a case study. Why does a case study really matter? Now, when we look at a particular case study, we need to make sure that this really triggers our curiosity. So when we are connecting with our customers, the first hook or the first connect is always around the fact that is it curious enough? Is it giving us enough information right up front where a customer would like to then continue forward with the story and talk through what exactly this is going to give to us? When we have spoken about the curiosity, when the client is already or the customer is already reading through it, what really matters in this scenario is that we are able to differentiate by way of defining our own quality. There are certain benchmarks that need to be set up clearly and we need to ensure that quality again shines through in our story. How do we do that? We do that by making sure that we are talking about what we have done. We also talk about how we have been useful to the clients. There are pain points that we need to look at and then how were we able to solve for these pain points. The quality comes in when you have been able to do that over and over time and again and that's where again the expertise comes in. When we have showcased our quality multiple times, we are considered experts in our domain and then the trust building can happen on a larger scale. Now what all of this finally leads to is that the client or the customer who is reading through our case study is really convinced and they could be convinced one way or the other way. If they continue to believe that the technology that we are talking about, the solution that we are talking about is useful to them, they'll be convinced and they'll be way more interested in having a conversation with you. On the other hand, if they are very clear that the tech that we were proposing to them, the solution that we were proposing to them, it's not good for them, it's not meant for them, then they'll again be convinced on the other side. They don't want to talk to you but at least they have a clearer path. They know where they would want to go even if it's not going in our direction. So in effect what happens is that we are able to, if we are writing a case study keeping in these points, we are then to the point and then we are able to make sure that we are able to connect with the customers much more cleanly. Now the audiences that we have here largely would have people who are looking for a Drupal laser solution to some of their problems and then we also have a lot of vendors in the community who are looking at showcasing what Drupal is all about and hence our conversation today is largely focused on two areas of these case studies. We could have N number of ways where we could be doing this but largely we'd be focusing on these two areas. Either it's around successful business partnerships, how do we ensure that there are long term partnerships with our business stakeholders and then we continue with this partnership by providing them solutions at every end. On the other hand there is also proof of concept which from our perspective is the vendors who would like to showcase what they have done new in this area, what is it that they can offer and hence our proof of concept becomes an important part there. We need to, while we are looking at the case study and what we are trying to understand what are the major ingredients that are required, we need to make sure that there is a balance that is struck. What this means is that we ensure that there are some pitfalls that we keep avoiding and you would see on your right hand side there are items that we have listed down. We feel these are some of the ones that will probably get us into kind of a loop hole that we should avoid. On the other hand on the left hand side you would see some of the green items which we feel are the ones that require more attention. I am pretty sure when we do a case study, when we start talking about a particular project, we keep in mind that the customer problem statement is taken care of but delve a little bit deeper. Make sure that we are trying to understand not just what their problem is and also to a point where we understand why these problems have arisen. If we are talking about specifically a document management system, there are times a couple of clients had come to us and then said, we would want to do a document management system. Can you help us? Now of course that's a problem that they have come up with but when we probed a little bit further, when we started talking to them, when we talked to a further set of stakeholders, we realized that the document management system wasn't the only problem that we were facing. They were also facing a problem of communication between their different groups. So while they were trying to solve it with the just with a document management system where they would post all of their PDFs and allow everyone to be able to access those, the real problem was they were not really able to communicate which meant that as a solution, we even helped them understanding that they could potentially start using an asynchronous communication channel so that they can have a communication with each other. While supplementing all of this with a documentation, that could be done at the DMS level. So the point that I'm trying to make here is we have to make sure that we delve a little bit deeper and understand what the client might really be looking for and having deeper conversations really help. Same is the case with working diagrams. Presenting your information visually is important. The visual language is a universal language. Everyone understands pictures. Everyone has their own interpretations and when they do conversations, then they come up with ideas, come up with problems, come up with different solutions that they could portray through. That's where visualizing something and then be able to showcase it to your customers becomes very important. Talking about a couple of pitfalls, while yes, technical case study would require you to have the right kind of technology jargon in place. We need to make sure that the right kind of words are spoken so that the audience understands it. But keep it to a minimal when we are talking about a case study when it's largely around business partnerships. Keep in mind that the case studies are not the place where you are doing your self-promotion while it's good to showcase what you have done. But keep in mind that we are always continuously talking about the problem and how the solution evolved, rather than how we have been doing it or how we intend to do it. Keep away from self-promotion. It usually helps the customers to connect a little bit better. One of the other things that we have relied in executing some of these case studies is that once size fits, all approach does not work. If we are making our case studies generic, if we are not really again solving for a particular problem but more interested in throwing stats, then that becomes a boring case study for everyone. If there is a personal connect that the customer can draw from your story, that will always be much more helpful. Which means that bringing in insights, bringing in our own experiences, talking about where we even failed in our case study is a very good idea because the customers can then relate to your journey and then would like to pick you up at a place where they feel that they would be more interested in having a collaboration with you. We looked at the anatomy of the case study. We tried understanding what are the different ingredients. Let's delve a little bit deeper into really building a case study. Now for our conversation, we have really divided this into three different steps and each of these steps have these sub-steps to ensure that we are covering it very well and I'll go through all of these steps in detail. Step one really is collecting the data. We need to really ensure that we are collecting the data at the right level. And I touched upon this earlier as well. When we are doing a conversation with the client, when we are doing a conversation with the customer, when we are trying to understand what their pain point is, what their problems are, we need to make sure that we are tackling it from all perspectives. We are able to connect to them. We are able to have a conversation with all the stakeholders involved and the stakeholders could be from either side. If there are technical challenges, make sure that you are talking to your team back and then understanding what those technical problems are so that you can communicate it back to the customers again. In case there are multiple stakeholders from the client side, make sure that you have heard their stories as well. There have been multiple cases, multiple instances in our experience where we had heard from our primary stakeholders about a problem that they wanted to solve for. But when we actually delved deeper and had a conversation with some of the editors, they came up with an entirely different set of problems that they were struggling with. And again, which meant that when we were trying to solve for them, we were trying to solve for them as a whole. So we were not just looking at how the site is going to look like, but we also started looking at how the editors are going to interact with the system. Are they going to face any specific problems or not? And if they are facing editorial challenges with their existing system, how can we improve upon it and solve for those problems as well? So go a little bit deeper. In order to make sure that you are doing this right, you could potentially prepare a questionnaire and share it with your clients so that they come prepared when they are having a deeper conversation with you. That helps them think a little bit more. That helps them understand what they are going to tell you when they are going to talk about their problems. And then I talked about it. We need to make sure that we are interviewing all the stakeholders. There are times where we have access to the end users as well. And I know that this does not happen very frequently. But as and when, if you get a chance to connect with your end users because the site might be existing or there are people who are ready to volunteer and have a go at it, please have the conversations with them. They always come up with ideas that both the stakeholders from either sites have not really thought through. So have more conversations include as many users, as many conversations that you can do before you can actually deep dive into writing the case study itself. Once we have gone through the initial stages, we have collected all the data, which means that we have understood the pain point, we have understood the problem, and then we are moving ahead and actually writing the case study. Make sure that we have identified the focus. Right at the beginning of this presentation, I had talked about that our focus area right now is to talk about business partnerships and PUCs are really simple PUCs that we could potentially do. Similarly, make sure that the focus is very, very clear. Are we looking to do just the PUCs and highlight that? Are we really trying to solve for a business partnership, business problem, or it's a mix of both? Make sure that when we are talking about our case study, when we are creating a framework for our case study, then the focus has been defined very clearly. Many a times we have seen that the case study has just become a bandwagon to list down all these stats without any coherent focus on why we are trying to tell the story, without really figuring out what we would like to portray so that people are more and less to have a conversation with us. So make sure that we are identifying the right focus and then writing the story accordingly. This also helps us in keeping our content very crisp and ensures that there is a very, very deep connection. The tone becomes similarly very important. We need to make sure that the consistency in tone remains. It could be a lighter tone. There are a lot of questions that we have been asked. Should we keep the tone light or should we keep the tone very formal? We realize that it's okay to have a lighter tone in some of the cases, but make sure that there is consistency of tone in your presentation, in your case study. So if you want to keep it light, make sure that it remains light and does not really delve too deep into the day-to-day routines, but make sure that you have consistency. Then finally, make sure that you have completed your draft with the focus and the right tone in place. Now, moving on and then publishing the case study, one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that we make sure that it is submitted for approval. Now, of course, we will be looking to do an approval from the stakeholders, but make sure that our case studies are looked at by a third pair of eye. We always have a perspective that we go ahead with. Our stakeholders usually are aligned when we have done a deeper conversation with them and they'll have a similar kind of a perspective towards the kind of case study that needs to come out. But always go ahead. Of course, there's a proofreads session that would happen, but make sure that you have showcased it to a fresh third pair of eye so that they have a look at it. Some of the nitty-gritty, some of the kings that are always ironed out are usually at the place where someone from a very different perspective comes in and says, hey, we look at it. I think there is a problem with the tone. I clearly see that the sentence is not gelling well with the rest of all your content. All these stats are not making sense. These are not really part of your story at all. Having it looked at by a third pair of eye is always a very good idea when you are getting it approved. Of course, we are going to get an approval from the stakeholders. You're going to get an agreement. Make sure that there is no sensitive information that you are leaking out that could be potentially problematic for your client. Stats are good, but anything that gives away in cases there are any assigned and you don't want to name the customers. Make sure that when you are putting up the stats, they are not indirectly leading to the customers. Always make sure that you have sanitized the information before you have proceeded. Then, of course, publish. While the preferred channel for all of us publishing is usually our website, and we might want to publish it as a blog post, then there are some usual channels like Medium that you would want to go through, but what we have realized is that to make sure that we are focusing on multiple channels, focusing on multiple areas, and of course, making sure that we are grabbing more eyeballs, look at the unconventional places where you could actually publish your posts as well. Look at TechCrunch, look at D-Zone, where they would be interested in highlighting your case studies, and you'll have a larger connect with the audiences. You'll be able to ensure that more people are looking at your case studies, and hence the reach out is larger. So try looking at unconventional ways. In one of the cases, interestingly, we actually tried publishing it to a magazine as well. One of the case studies that we did, we tried publishing it to the magazine, too, which meant that we had a larger audiences. We had another medium where we could talk about our story, and that led us to a lot of people coming back to us and talking about it, and our projects, and of course, that turned out to be a huge lead for us, too. I'd like to quickly talk about a couple of examples as well, while we have been talking about, in general, what kind of case study we need to write in, and how we should be writing it in. A few, not really tips and tricks, but really ideas around how we can reposition some of our content better so that it relates to our clients. I'll basically be taking an example of a couple of industries that we have worked with, and how we have culminated our experiences in terms of how we have solved problems for them, and then written case studies around it. The first industry that we would like to look at is the media and publication. Syriza has extensively worked in this area for the last 10 years. We have our clients across the globe, from the media giant in Singapore to a media house in the US, and every other, every such media house in between. We have been able to cater to them, thankfully, in the last 10 to 12 years of working in this industry, and it's been fruitful, it's been fun, but there are a lot of quick insights that we have gathered along the way to make sure that we are able to solve for them, and of course, then be able to write the case studies accordingly. For example, on the right hand side, you would see some of the specific keywords that we usually come up with. We usually say enabled API integration. Now, these are good words. We need to make sure that we are highlighting that we have been able to do API integrations, but how do we make sure that we are able to connect with our customers when they are reading through? Specifically, when the customers may not be tech-savvy and they may not be able to understand the impact that an API integration would come up with, that's where you want to make sure that you are writing your story in a way where it is understandable. Instead of saying enabled API integration, call it enriching feeds with real-time breaking news and updates from multiple channels. Now, what this does is that the customer now understands that whether there is an underlying technology around an embed code or an API integration, it's very clear to them that this is the benefit that it brings to the table. Same is the case with flexible layout management and low-code development. Again, very good words to use. We want to make sure that we have called out, that we have given the best possible solution to our client, but this usually does not connect very well. What does this mean to the client is important to be highlighted. So instead of saying something like this, we could always say that we could potentially create landing pages that helps the customer to have a larger control over the website, and also it means that there's absolutely minimal developer interference in terms of doing small things that they could potentially do. Again, adds to a lot of value in terms of what we can deliver for the client instead of saying what we did very well. The last one, I'm pretty sure that everyone would be able to relate to it much more easily, instead of saying that we would be leveraged SEO friendly modules and were able to improve the SEO. Try writing it in a way where we have been able to increase the content visibility, effectively making sure that the website ranking has improved over the search engines as well. Again, clearly showing that there is a value in what you are doing, even if it's a small instance of enabling SEO modules and integrating them properly, making sure that they are done well, show them what kind of value that you are coming up with, and that's going to resonate with your customers and clients more accurately. Another industry that we could potentially look at is the travel industry. Again, the region has been able to work with our clients across the globe in this industry, and then again, there are some experiences that we have brought in. There are a lot of instances that we realize when we look at a lot of case studies across. There is always a communication or a conversation around automated data extraction or automated data scraping, which typically means that you look at the keywords that you are that your customers are fading in to your systems, utilize those keywords, and then start personalizing the content for your customers on the website. Now, calling it automated data extraction or scraping again might drive through the point, but the challenge would again be that we would not be able to relate as to what this really brings in for the clients themselves. Effectively, when we clearly know that this is going to lead to a personalized, recommended approach to the customers, let's talk about that. Let's make sure that we are calling it out as very clearly streamlining personalized customer communication. We ensure that the content that you would be getting is going to be personalized, and it is customized to the needs of what you are looking for. Calling it out very clearly what it means really helps the customers in engaging with your case study better. We talked about the API-driven solution earlier as well. This example finds resonance in this industry as well. Instead of again talking about how API integrations are good or how we can make it API-driven, talk about how this is going to have an impact to them, boosting the user engagement and conversions in a real-time scenario gets them going. They understand that we understand their system better, and we are able to provide them the right kind of solution in the right kind of scenario. I'd like to end the presentation with a quick impact on how this approach has helped us, and then we can of course have questions after this, but quickly looking at what we have been really being able to achieve, the numbers that you see right now are for a time period of last six months. Since the time we had actually been able to rewrite some of our old case studies and then publish them to the right channels, we have seen that there has been increase in the organic traffic, a two-fold increase really, where we have seen that there were a lot more people who were curious to learn about our work, to curious to learn about what we can bring to the table and how we can help them. We saw a clear increase there, and then right at the end you saw that there has been a 50% increase in the farm submissions. At the end of the case study, we provide a form where it says, if you are interested in this, if you are interested in learning more about this, please fill it in. We realized in the last six months when we have rewritten some of these case studies, the increment is about 50%. You see clearly some of these ideas work, when you are able to connect with your customers better, if you are writing the kind of stories that are engaging, that are making sure that you are interact with them, then there is a more likelihood that they are going to come to you and look for problem-solving at your end. That's about it, and I'd like to really close here and open it up to see if there are any questions. I know again, I would apologize, there were supposed to be three people who would be speaking around. I have done all those speaking, but happy to take on any questions and happy to have more conversations. The targeted word count has usually been, so we have not really looked at the word count, but what we have looked at is making sure that the number of pages that we are talking through is optimal for anything that's going to go deeper and talk about, let's say, the architecture of the project. We usually keep it to about a couple of pages, but if anything less than that or anything not less complicated, then we have tried keeping it to one page only. Actually, good question. It's actually a combination of both, which means that while we have our case studies on our sites and anyone and everyone can go through and read through it, there are a lot of instances where we have gotten clients who have just looked at some search for some keywords, landed on a case study, they understood what we could do, and then they reached out to us, but then there is the other side of it where we have actually been reaching out to our existing and old customers. We realize their needs. All of us have CRM's in place where we are trying to figure out what customers would want next. What we then do is then reach out to them with an e-mailer, making sure that we are also linking to the case studies, talking about what we have done so far. So maybe this is a recent thing that we have done that we are working with, and we want to reach out to a customer who has been with us for a long period of time. We went out, sent out an e-mailer to them, gave them a link about the case study. This is something new that we have done so far. Would you be interested in doing this with us as well? So we have reached out to them and had a conversation. The other third channel that we have also looked at is making sure that we are not just talking about case study in whole, but we also pass on this information in bite-sized pieces over the social media as well. So posting something around LinkedIn that we have been able to help our customers do XYZ, and it helped them in, let's say, acquiring customers by 50% or 25%. We have been able to pass on that and then lead the customers to read a little bit more about it on our site, on Medium, so that they can read through the case study and then decide for themselves if they would want to work with us. So all of these channels have really worked for us too. I hope I was able to answer your question as well. Yes, please. Absolutely. There's no one channel that would really work better. There are instances, and I was making this point earlier as well. While it's a very good idea that you should post all your case studies at your website, this helps both ways, right? The website gets a little bit of traction. You make sure that people are coming on over to your site and then reading through it. Similarly, if they are reading through the case studies, they are getting to know more about you. But the reach is as much as your website's reach is. So you need to go out and then start putting it up at different places as well. Using LinkedIn as a medium or a channel is a very good idea. Medium.com itself is a very good channel that you could utilize. Make sure that the right kind of people are talking about your case studies. So rather than having it written by a generic person, maybe someone who has actually worked on the project, worked on that particular piece, should be talking about it, should be writing that case study or at least attributed to that person so that people can have a direct connect with them. So having an account or a name under the person on medium.com, publishing your case studies along with them also helps them, also helps garnering larger audiences and then having a connect with them. And then again, I was saying this earlier, you look at some unconventional ways as well. There is tick runs that you can publish it. There is D-zone that you can publish it. Some of the tools that you usually work with, one of the best ways, and I'm sorry, I forgot about this, is publishing it on Drupal.org. If you've gotten good meat, you want to talk about it, you want to make sure that everyone is reading through it, publish it on Drupal.org. You'll have a larger audiences and a lot of credibility as well gets added to your case study when it's on Drupal.org. Oh yes, absolutely. A very good point and something that we have been trying to do in our recent case studies. Making sure that we have talked about some of our failures, some of our problems in shortcomings, like you said, in the case study, helps the customers connect very well with the overall journey. Not every time your customers would want to do everything with you, they would be interested in doing some pieces of it. When they know what are your failures, they also know what are your strengths that you are also acknowledging. That is where then they'll be able to connect better. They'll be able to come up to you and say, maybe you can't do this, that's perfectly okay, or you may want to do this again. But because we know this, we know your strengths as well. Can we do this with you? So it helps them connect better across the complete journey and then let them decide, pick and choose where they would want to connect with you in that journey and let them help, let you help them solve their problems too. All right, any more questions? I'm sorry, I didn't get the keyword. Again, we need to make sure and we talked about this earlier. We need to make sure that the tone is consistent. So if you want to use videos, make sure that you're using videos and then your presentation is centered around it, that makes it more interactive. But if you want to showcase a lot of stats, if you want to really talk about greater details, then usually text format works and then you would want to avoid just a video there, which is not really jelling with your story. So if it goes well with your story, go ahead and do it. But again, make sure that the tone is consistent so that people are continuously relating to it rather than finding an abrupt video at the middle and then which is probably tangentially talking about yesterday. So if it is part of the meet, go ahead and do that. There is one other thing that potentially that has been, we've been trying to do as well as having, like you mentioned a little bit of an interactivity where there's a quick questionnaire that could be added. So when we are talking about what our experiences is, let's gather more experiences as well. So a quick questionnaire or one or two, not long, of course, could be inserted in so that the customers can also vote for it in a way, saying, yes, this is something that worked for me. This is something that didn't work for me. That brings in a little bit of a more personalization in the conversation. Any more questions? No? Great. Happy to have a connect later on as well. We have a booth, please come over and have more conversations. We'd be happy to answer any more questions. But thank you, everyone. Thank you for being here and being patient listeners. Thanks a lot.