How To Format a Case Study Report? A Step By Step Guide
The basic outline of a case study includes an Introduction, Body paragraphs, and conclusion. But do not confuse the outline with the format. As stated above, an outline is an executive summary, but a format provides a vivid structure to your case study. It’s not just about introducing, explaining, and concluding the topic, but other elements go into the case study, such as literature review, methodology, solutions, etc. Therefore, you must know how to format a case study report!
Here is a brief guide about how to format a case study report-
1. Introduction
As we discussed, the introduction is the beginning of any case study or analysis, research, or essay writing. It provides the reader an overview of what the case study is about, what it aims to find out, and how. This is where you include the thesis statement as well.
2. Literature Review
The literature review provides all the background information. This portion is all research-based findings of your topic. This is where you provide your arguments based on existing researches, other data, and outside research, in addition to the findings of the topic. You need to cite the author and the content that you have procured the information from. The literature review is where the APA format for a case study comes into use. You add relevant facts and figures in the literature review, which work as the basis for your case study, and provide evidence.
3. Discussions and Findings
In this part of the case study format, you focus on a specific case or survey or data that you have picked to support your case study and present your main findings, specific strategies, and conclusions. This portion can either go with a literature review. But sometimes, if the content in this part is too long, you may have to give a separate heading for or separate section for this portion.
4. Solutions and Recommendations
After you have presented the literary background and discussions, testable evidence, and enough data, the next step is you provide the potential and alternative solutions. Give a brief explanation of your proposed solutions. Make sure you give realistic solutions and recommendations from different perspectives and then suggest the best solution out of it. Testable evidence is required here a well to back your solutions. Also, give space for clear and open communication with your reader.
5. Executive Summary & References
As we have discussed, the executive summary is the summary of key points and main findings from your evaluations of the case study format. After conclusion, a separate page goes for bibliography and cited references. This is where you enlist all the sources of information used in your case study, be it a research paper, blog post, academic writing, research writing, survey, official data, etc.
What are Examples of Case Studies?
This part will help you to easily comprehend what we have discussed so far, as we are now going to share some case study examples with you. So before beginning with your case study, take a look at these examples to make the process easy for you.
To see the Essay Format: The Ultimate Guide With Examples, click here
Case Study Introduction Example
An introduction is a part that a readers judges and decides whether to go ahead and read the rest of the case study. A compelling case study has an introduction that keeps the reader hooked to your piece of work. Here is an example to understand and learn how to write a good introduction. To understand what a good introduction looks like, you can go through the introduction section of the Eastman Kodak Case Study, the company known for its changing dynamics of technological transitions. For a good introduction, you can also lookup for and refer to the case study of Audi Trains Mexican Autoworkers in Germany.
Other Examples-
As we established earlier that there are different types of case studies. A case study can be about any topic or industry, or category. Below are some of the best case studies by different companies that helped their previous customers and helped them attract future customers.
1. Bitly: Vissla
Suppose you are working on a business-oriented case study. In that case, you can refer to the case study titled “Bitly: Vissla,” which is an online e-commerce company, which works with huge data across multiple marketing platforms to make marketing platforms. With this case study, Bitly provided a successful way to consolidate data and link channels together with the motive to display all the information on a single dashboard. This is one of the best business case study examples that you will come across in the business world.
2. LeadGnome’s: Host Analytics
Regarding marketing case study examples, we suggest you refer to LeadGnome’s: Host Analytics case study. To give a little background, Host Analytics moved to an account-based marketing strategy in 2015. However, they noticed that a large number of low-quality needs limited the marketing efforts for their onboarding process. The case study presents how their problem was solved when they used an automated email marketing approach from LeadGnome to qualify leads via email marketing.
3. Adobe: Royal Bank of Scotland
This study is a technical case study, which focuses on the solutions provided by Adobe for the Royal Bank of Scotland. As presented in the case study, their top challenges included fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making. They were also challenged by the requirement for eliminating disjointed systems to ensure the deliverance of digital experiences which are relevant and easy to use for potential customers.
This approach by Adobe’s led to a 20 percent increase in conversion. Additionally, it also improved their internal communications, resulted in faster optimization, and helped reduce their content management footprint.
4. OutBrain: Lane Bryant
If you are looking for a case study example related to a topic for a social cause, check out the OutBrain: Lane Bryant case study.
Lane Bryant is a leading retailer for women sized 14 – 28. They launched a campaign intending to celebrate all women and spread body positivity. Aiming to redefine the traditional and rugged notion of sexy, the retailer launched this campaign with a simple message that ALL women are sexy.
Their campaign aimed to amplify the campaign and drive traffic and engagement. In fact, the entire campaign went viral and had over 48,500,000 impressions in two short weeks.
5. LevelEleven: Staples
This particular case study is a great example for you if you are a sales professional and want to boost the working of your section or team. LevelEleven helped Staples to make sure their teams focus on the critical sales activities that matter. The result was mind-blowing as their team managed to understand the KPIs better, which matters. Moreover, they experienced an increase of 182% in key selling activities.
6. LifeSize: Rackspace
The case study by Rackspace is yet another great example of tech-oriented case studies. Rackspace, a world leader in hybrid cloud computing with offices throughout the world, was looking to collaborate and communicate across offices.
To sort this out, LifeSize created a video solution for Rackspace, which helped them to build stronger relationships across international offices.
7. Gravitate: Global Expeditions Group
The Gravitate: Global Expeditions Group is one of the best online case studies that you can refer to. This has proven to be a great example if you are looking to understand how to break up a detailed case study to make it easier for the reader to understand and comprehend. Focusing on a particular content marketing strategy, the company classified different parts of the case study under different sections. Certainly, they found a great way to entice their potential customers to keep them wanting to learn how they managed to do it.
8. Five9: WeedMan
WeedMan is a popular lawn care company, which wanted to connect with more prospects and sales teams reps. So, the company had an idea to use their phone-based reps to connect with prospective customers. Five9 assisted WeedMan in achieving that by migrating their data to the Cloud, and the case study shows how small businesses like WeedMan should adopt storing business data on Cloud.
9. Red Hat: North Carolina State Websites
The North Carolina Department of Information Technology, mandated by the governor, was needed to update the website of the states to ease the complex processes with limited technical sources.
10. CoSchedule: English Heritage
If you want to adopt a different way of writing your case study format, you can refer to the CoSchedule: English Heritage case study. CoSchedule treats or presents their case studies as customer stories. They highlight their customers and state how they helped their customers. To do so, CoSchdeule has added snapshots and quotes from their English Heritage Employees, which helped readers to visualize what the company is talking about.