Chapter 9
Software and Tools as Content

Imagine that you have a minimal marketing budget, zero content creators, and a goal of 100,000 unique monthly website visits. How is this even possible? For Takipi, a tool for web developers to identify bugs in their code, this was the challenge they faced. How they solved this common marketing conundrum is where this story gets exciting. They coded their way to 100,000 website visitors.

It all started by figuring out the assets they had at hand. In her blog post (www.startupmoon.com/coding-marketing-how-we-coded-our-way-to-100k-unique-visitors/), Iris Shoor, vice president of Product and Marketing at Takipi, says that the company has access to unique data from its customers. “The first time we published content that relied solely on developers' work was pretty random. When we had to choose in which Amazon region we wanted to store our data, we ran some tests and found out there was a big difference between the regions. Sounded like an interesting story. We spent an extra day improving our script and making sure we got the data right. The output was super interesting––the AWS Olympics. The results were featured on VentureBeat and published on our blog, bringing massive traffic of our target audience––over 15,000 unique visitors,” Shoor wrote.

After hitting it big with data, Takipi moved to creating simple free tools to attract their target audience via inbound channels like search engines and social media. “We created java2014.org and scala2014.org. It's a simple calendar, with all Java and Scala events for this year. We outsourced collecting all the events, and used ODesk to build the events list. It's useful, has high SEO potential, and drives nice traffic of very targeted users,” Shoor explained.

With these two examples, and other projects, Takipi was able to drive more than 100,000 unique website visitors by simply making their prospective customers' lives a little easier by writing code instead of prose.

Writing Code Instead of Text

The basis of inbound marketing is the same regardless of the delivery: provide value to build trust before engaging in a marketing or sales transaction. The delivery format, however, needs to differ depending on the strengths of your company. If your company employs web developers, free tools might be the right option for you. The challenge is that the time of a web developer is a very scarce resource. This means that as a marketer you have to make the right argument to win the time of the developer over other projects. Your executives want to put developer time where it will create the most enterprise value for the company.

As you would write an awesome outline for a blog post, you need to write a project plan. What if you have never built a free tool before? How do you know how to create a plan the executive team will support?

A great free tool starts with an important first step: Talk to real humans who you would want to use it. This may be simple advice, but many companies fail to do this. What are the common problems that your customers have? What are the issues that your salespeople get asked about over and over again?

From here you can begin to develop a project plan for your executives to approve and your web developer to use. These plans are like a creative brief that is often used in marketing to guide design projects. A strong project plan for a free tool should include:

1. A clear definition of the target audience.
2. A strong problem statement outlining the problem the tool will solve for the target audience.
3. Core features needed in the initial version of the tool.
4. A project timeline and milestones.

Having a project plan, even a simple one, will make communicating with your web developer and other stakeholders easier and will ensure that everyone on involved is aligned with the development of the tool.

Replace Humans with Machines

One of the first free tools we built in the early days of HubSpot was WebsiteGrader.com. Over the years, WebsiteGrader.com turned into MarketingGrader.com, which has now graded more than 4 million websites. It was a huge success for us. Marketing Grader is a great way to generate new inbound leads for our paid marketing software product because it had a strong viral coefficient. People would grade their own websites and then share their scores on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or e-mail and drive their connections to find out their own grades. We all love to be graded.

Not only did the tool spread across the web, it also had the added benefit of helping the user understand what aspects of his or her website and inbound marketing needed to be improved. This made an initial conversation with one of our salespeople a logical next step.

The kicker is that we didn't just magically come up with the idea for Website Grader. Instead, Brian was essentially doing this manually when he was demoing HubSpot software to prospective customers. Brian would compare them to their competition, and would show them problems with the search engine optimization of their websites. Dharmesh suggested that he could build a web application that automated everything Brian was doing manually each time he talked with a prospect. Like that, Website Grader was born!

Another approach is to build a free tool on an existing platform with its own audience. This is the approach that InsightSquared, a software company that provides simple business intelligence software to Salesforce users, took. According to Zorian Rotenberg, VP of Marketing and Sales at InsightSquared, “We came up with our free apps by finding a single, tangible need that applied broadly across our target market. But it also had to be a need that we could address with a relatively simple concept that tied back (at least loosely) to our overall offering. We spend a ton of time helping and working with new and experienced sales and marketing teams, so we know the pain points they face day-to-day. We've built a number a free tools to deliver better analytics and insights to Salesforce users.”

The InsightSquared team built several free tools for Salesforce users including: Sales Funnel, an app that instantly calculates the stage-by-stage conversion rates for your opportunity stages and presents it in an intuitive, CEO-friendly funnel report, and Sales Leaderboard, a tool that enables executives to motivate their teams through healthy competition and by celebrating reps' successes.

How have these tools performed for InsightSquared? According to Rotenberg, “Our free apps generate some of our best performing leads. By allowing leads to experience the strength of our product firsthand, we create a very receptive audience for our inside sales team. Our conversion rate from free app leads is almost 20 times that of our average campaign.”

Take a look around your business. What is something that one or more of your employees do repeatedly to demonstrate value to prospective customers? Automating this action, if possible, is an awesome place to start for your first free marketing tool.

Provide a Next Step

It is key to remember that your free tool is part of your marketing funnel. Most often it will be a way to attract more attention at the top of your marketing funnel. Because the use of your free tool is likely the first interaction a person is having with your company it is critical that your tool includes a next step to move him or her through the marketing funnel. When building Website Grader we created a feature that allowed the person to get an e-mail version of his or her report and opt in to additional marketing e-mails from HubSpot.

E-mail opt-in is only one way that you can provide the next step in your marketing funnel. Additionally, you can also include calls-to-action to other lead generation conversion events on your website, and have users connect with your company on social media channels or any other way that brings them closer to being a long-term member of your marketing audience.

Kill Bad Tools Quickly

You don't have a crystal ball. You don't know if a free tool will catch fire or fizzle a few days after launch. While you need to solve for your prospect and build a tool that is simple to use, you ultimately don't have control over how successful the tool is going to be long-term. However, you can control how long you support a tool that isn't effectively helping you accomplish your marketing goals.

If a tool isn't working, shut it down. Don't spend precious marketing and development resources on a project that isn't working. It is easy to feel that you have to “make it work” because you put a lot of time and effort into building the tool. Resist this feeling. Admit it didn't work and move on to the next free tool idea or marketing campaign. The key to inbound marketing is to iterate and improve. Sometimes this means getting rid of projects that aren't delivering to make way for new projects that have great potential.

Tools Don't Market Themselves

Products don't market themselves. This is a great urban myth spread by companies that overinvest in product development at the expense of marketing resources. When you decide to build a free tool as part of your inbound marketing mix, you also need to create a promotional campaign to support the launch of the tool to the public.

You might think it's best to start out by limiting your tool to a small group of beta users. Companies do this because they believe they can build a sense of exclusivity by only letting a small number of people use the tool. They expect those beta users will begin to discuss the tool online, and that this will create demand from other people. With free tools, however, this approach is not effective.

A more effective approach is often to preview the free tool to influencers and the media. A few days prior to launching the tool, give industry influencers and reporters exclusive access so that they can write articles and blog posts that can be released the day you launch the tool. You can also get quotes from the industry influencers and use them in your launch materials.

In addition to the prelaunch preview you also need to build a coordinated inbound marketing campaign. This campaign should include the following marketing aspects:

1. Blog posts to promote the tool.
2. Feature promoting the tool on your website home page.
3. E-mail marketing campaign to existing contacts.
4. Scheduled social media messages promoting the launch of the tool.
5. Online advertising to support the launch (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Don't overlook the power of an effective inbound marketing campaign. It can't fix a bad tool, but it can supercharge the growth of a good one.

Inbound in Action: Wealthfront

Wealthfront is the world's largest and fastest-growing automated investment service. Wealthfront believes that everyone deserves sophisticated investment advice. Much of their inbound marketing strategy is built on creating content and resources for their audiences that support this mission. For example, Wealthfront publishes several articles weekly to its Knowledge Center that serve to provide readers with actionable financial strategies and guidance, provided by expert authors, that are accessible to nonclient and client readers alike.

Additionally, Wealthfront has built a series of free tools that readers can use to simulate data, providing important insights into trends and historical performance that is useful to financial decision-making.

One such tool, Wealthfront's Post-IPO Stock Sale Simulator, models stock data from 10 different tech companies together with financial performance results of the company stock treated with five different sales strategies. Because it is impossible to time the market, it can be difficult to strategize how to buy and sell stocks, and what effect an individual's selling decisions would have on her portfolio. Wealthfront's IPO Stock Sale Simulator is an evergreen tool that enables users to evaluate the performance of a portfolio as a result of making a variety of selling/holding decisions.

Creating a tool with high utility prolongs its lifespan, and for Wealthfront, the Stock Sale Simulator is among the top content items users return to and share with friends, over a year after its release. Additionally, since the topic of post-IPO sales planning comes up with every new IPO announcement in Silicon Valley and beyond, the content and data presented in the Stock Sale Simulator is newly relevant each time a tech company announces this major milestone.

Another such tool that Wealthfront created to provide a high value data source for its readers is the Startup Salary and Equity Compensation Tool. Since the majority of Wealthfront clients are millennials with jobs in the tech industry, many will change jobs or careers several times before they retire. Each time, they will be pondering the worth of their compensation offers, sizing up the total packages and wondering if they are commensurate with their expectations of their own market values. Wealthfront collected data from hundreds of private companies, spanning over 14,000 nonexecutive salaries and modeled a tool for users to be able to assess their compensation offers relative to industry, size of company, stage of growth, and the level of their position.

Like the Stock Sale Simulator Tool, this asset continues to be among the most highly trafficked sources of content that Wealthfront has released for public consumption.

To Do

1. Interview your customers to get ideas for free tools.
2. Look at any successful free tools in your industry and analyze why that tool is successful.
3. Outline and build your marketing campaign in parallel with the development of the tool.
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