#announcements

I feel like this is an ongoing discussion amongst the industry and at every company I've worked at. 🙂

I think it's great to start with understanding the purpose case studies are serving in your org. This will help dictate how much the age of the case study matters.

For example, if sales people are regularly referencing case studies, they will fall out of relevance quicker for that function, as customers don't want to have a 7 year old case study as an example of people using your product.

But if they're just logos being displayed on the website, that can still be useful, even if the case study that supports the logo is a bit old.

At my past gig, case studies were a very long process, so once we had all approvals in place to use it in our marketing, we kept it live — regardless if the interviewee(s) left the featured company

We chose to only do case study takedowns if the customer fully churns. We had Airtable automations setup via Salesforce syncs that updated us in real time in Slack when a customer churned, and then we handed off the takedown process to the content and web team a bi-weekly basis

There were several times when we would refresh/update case studies if we saw the account continued to deepen its usage of the product and there was an added layer of a story to tell that would benefit our strategy. We usually did this on an ad hoc basis as we saw expansion deals come in

Thank you both so much!! Very helpful discussion and suggestions!

I totally agree w/ the folks above - and would add - industry standard (depending on your industry, of course) is that case studies over 2 years old should at least be considered for removal (we've done annual audits of all case studies in my previous jobs). BUT we often kept older case studies IF (the customer hadn't fully churned of course) it was an industry or solution we didn't have a lot of customer proof for OR if the logo was too valuable to remove (i.e. enterprise logos that are generally difficult to obtain). If a case study was older and we still had a good relationship with the customer, and the bandwidth / case study is deemed valuable, we'd sometimes do a super light refresh to it so the product terms were up-to-date, etc. and make sure it was on the latest case study template, etc. Hope that helps. I know SlapFive has an automated a reminder to audit content on x date that you specify which is super handy.

@Sarah McCoy SUPER helpful. Thank you for that. I'm going to start auditing soon & I like the criteria you laid out when evaluating each story.