In these days of market scepticism when people and businesses look for an excuse not to buy, featuring work on your website is really a must; to convince your browser that you can deliver the results they’re looking for and to the highest standard. But there are many ways to feature your work; here’s how to decide on the right way.
Options for showcasing your work
Case studies
If you’re in a business-to-business sector, or you’re a service provider, and your work isn’t especially visual, perhaps you’re in transport, or you’re a business consultant, analyst or HR professional, for example, a written case study is probably going to work well for you.
You must get your featured customers’ approval to write about the work you did with them, and also gain their approval of your finished content, prior to publishing.
Approach writing a case study as you would a news story, with the headline of ‘in nutshell’ the value you gave to your customer. Potential customers need to be able to look at your headline, and immediately understand the power of doing business with you.
In your headline try to focus on what the problem was you solved, and how much value this gave to your customer, rather than what you did.
Here are some examples of our Cultrix Digital case study headlines:
- Custom web-build integrates over 160 personal travel agent sites to make sales fly
- Custom-designed website and intelligent shopping cart increase sales month-on-month
Within the case study you can talk more about the detail of what you did and the problem you solved and/or the value you delivered to your customer.
Ideally you also need to feature a quote from your delighted customer, and/or a quote from someone who headed the project, to really bring your case study to life. And potentially any image or logo from the company you worked with, which will help the browser to visualise who you worked with.
Customer reviews
If you sell a high volume of products and your customers leave you reviews and rate your services, it’s appropriate to showcase your work via these reviews.
Having your reviews featured on your website is a high-impact way to show your browsers you provide what they’re looking for, and your existing customers rate your service.
It’s unlikely there’s no permission to obtain separately since when customers leave a review, consent is often part of the review process. Check if yours isn’t as you will need some other form of consent to feature reviews if you are not making this explicit in your review-taking process.
You can feature your customers’ reviews in the footer of each website page, under a ‘What our customers say’ heading, or similar, perhaps on a rotating basis or on a separate page, with potentially a featured review on your homepage, depending on the layout of your site.
Work page portfolio
If your work is visual, or the work you do for your customers is best expressed in an image, or a short series of images, then a work page portfolio, a page dedicated to showcasing your work, may be the most suitable format for showing off your talents.
Perhaps you are a designer, a creative content writer, or an architect or decorator, in which case you will be able to provide impactful images of your work. The advantage with this visual approach is that you need minimal text, perhaps only a paragraph or two, to explain what you achieved for your customer.
Always include a positive quote from each featured customer, either expressing how they feel about the result, or the process of working with you, or both.
Here’s a good example where images work well in a work portfolio.
Ask yourself what you would want to see
Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer of your products and services, and consider what you would want to see in order to be convinced about working with you. So much of good online content considers not just the browser experience, but your target market’s wants and needs.
Ideally, what do your prospects want to see and know about your work? Then get your website can accommodate it.
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