How can free tools help a SaaS product dramatically improve lead generation and brand awareness
Convincing prospects about the value of your product is an uphill task. The growth team in any company has a singular goal — get as many prospects as possible excited about your product so that they sign up.
Thus, are born various customer acquisition strategies — free trials, e-books, paid ad campaigns, inside sales etc.
But there are problems with all these acquisition strategies. Some are expensive. Some are ineffective.
Today, I want to focus on an interesting lead generation tactic for Saas businesses.
Its called “free tools”.
The idea behind a free tool is simple.
Its a tool separate from your core product. The tool helps you generate qualified leads at a much lower cost than paid acquisition or sales. — Hiten Shah
Free tools come in multiple forms — interactive calculators, graders/analyzers or browser extensions. They help showcase the value that can be derived by using the core product.
HubSpot's Website Grader tool is one of the finest examples of a free tool that became a lead generation magnet for Hubspot. It takes website URL as input and analyzes site performance as output.
The Website Grader gets 25k+ organic visits per month, has 1.2 million backlinks and assists in the acquisition of millions of dollars in revenue each year — Ross Simmonds
With that context let’s dive deep into free tools and understand how you can create a free tool for your company.
Benefits of having free tools
Free tools offer the following benefits to companies to create them:
- Act as a fantastic source of inbound leads by showcasing immediate value to end user. More importantly, this is a sustainable source of lead generation as it lowers your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
- Help demonstrate value to the entire organization by showcasing ROI to all possible stakeholders.
- Great marketing assets which you can use in your blog posts, email campaigns or even launch on product hunt.
- Increase search traffic — Users are always searching for free tools on Google. So, having a free tool gives you the opportunity to rank high in the search results.
- Help you test demand for a product before starting work on it — If you are getting lot of hits on your free tool, it shows that people have a genuine problem (which can likely be monetized).
Various kinds of Free tools offered by companies
1. Calculators
They are interactive widgets which receive input (in form of numbers) from the user and give a personalized result in return. It could be an ROI calculator, savings calculator, price comparison calculator etc.
Examples
- Clari’s revenue leakage calculator helps detect which factors are contributing to your revenue leak and how much you stand to lose.
- Cumul.io’s SaaS ROI calculator compares cost of building your own analytics platform vis-a-vis embedding analytics via cumul.io
- VWO (A/B testing experimentation platform) offers multiple calculators for calculating duration, sample size, statistical significance of your A/B test.
- Service Titan’s ROI Calculator helps identify benefit of using Service Titan.
2. Graders/ Analyzers
They take a simple input (such as a website URL or answers to specific questions) and in response give you an analysis or a grade. This is followed up with recommendations for improving your grade.
Examples
- Hubspot’s website grader that rates your website across different parameters
- CoSchedule’s headline analyzer that analyzes your article’s headline
- Semrush’s keyword generator tool that gives keyword suggestions (to write content on) for any topic
- Privy’s Shopify store grader reviews your Shopify store, gives you a grade and tell you ways to improve it.
3. Browser Extensions
- Coschedule’s headline studio extension — After installation, this extension allows you to analyze a headline on any website (in a single click)
- Clearbit’s connect — A Gmail extension that gives anyone who installs it instant access to enriched information about contacts within Gmail.
Clearbit CEO writes — Building free products that showcase what our product can do has been our single largest source of inbound leads for our paid products.
It is clear that free tools such as graders and calculators can act as a lead generation magnet. In the next section, we answer some questions to help you get started.
What type of free tool to create
Hiten Shah talks about creating a free tool based on your customer segment:
- If you’re targeting developers, create open-source and free developer tools.
- For marketing and sales, use free tools to help people identify weaknesses and show they can improve.
- For product people, build a free tool with a use case that’s related to your core product, but with a lower barrier to entry.
Guidelines to follow while creating a free tool
- Give immediate value to the user — Whenever somebody uses your free tool, they should be able to derive value from it within a few minutes.
- Super easy to use — It should be incredibly easy to give input(s) to the free tool and get an output from it.
- Relevant to your business — When users derive value from your free tool, they are extremely likely to sign up for a paid version of your product.
Conclusion
There is a strong chance that free tools are an under-utilized tool in your marketing playbook. If leveraged well, they can help generate leads, create brand awareness and showcase upfront, the value of using your product.
So, think about this.
What free tool can you create today to give immediate value to your customers?
