Engineering As Marketing

For the longest time I have been a staunch believer that Content Marketing is one of the best ways to grow a business.

This is because whether you’re selling a $19/mo SaaS product or a $5,000/mo consulting engagement, trust is something you have to capture from every potential new customer.

And what better way to do that than by showing them a sneak peek inside your brand, your style, your message, and the solution they’re signing up for.

But Content Marketing doesn’t only mean Blogging. Written, long form content isn’t the only hammer to the nail that is inbound marketing.

About 2 years ago we launched an initiative at Castos to change that, and start exploring what Content Marketing 2.0 could look like.

Essentially, what types of content can we put out into the podcasting community that tick all the boxes that we think about with conventional written content marketing:

• Builds trust
• Solves a problem
• Can rank in Google
• Extends our brand image
• Enhances our digital footprint

And there were two places that instantly came to mind: YouTube (obviously), and Free Tools.

“Free Tools” you say?

Yep, building free tools that solve a small sliver of your product’s overall solution, and are entirely free.

So, for a podcast hosting solution like Castos you can imagine that all podcasters need things like a Cover Image (so we built Dynamo), they might need to come up with a cool name for their show (so we built a name generator), they might need to look up their RSS feed (so we built a podcast RSS feed lookup tool).

While we start exploring how the tools work from a marketing perspective, I’d ask you:

What free tools could you create that solve real problems for your ICP?

Data To Back This Up

Still have doubts about the impact of free tools as marketing (or as I like to call it “Engineering as Marketing”)? How about this traffic graph for the popular video editing tool Veed.io:

Millions of pageviews a month, no doubt leading to thousands of free trial starts.

Yep, free.

This is the ultimate “Build it once and get paid forever” kind of project.

How about from our projects?

Here’s a snapshot of how our Dynamo image generator tool has performed since we launched it:

This is actual usage data from Amplitude. 13,000 images created in the 18 months it’s been live. Not bad for a few hours of work.

But what about searchability, and traffic? Here’s a snapshot from our most recent Google Search Console report

Ok so we’re not Veed and aren’t pulling down millions of pageviews a month, but for these free tools, that we spent maybe 5 hours creating, to be our fastest growing pages is really worth taking note of.

Getting Started With Engineering As Marketing

So, you’ve drank the Koolaid and are ready to dive in?

Let’s explore how to get started with Engineering As Marketing.

There are 4 steps you need to take to create free tools that will have a positive growth impact on your business:

Identify a finite need that customers have

This is usually solving a portion of your overall solution’s feature set. Limit it as much as you can to something you can build without any code, or just code in the browser. No servers running, no stuff to maintain.

Build a landing page for it

This is where my SEO roots die hard. I do believe that every tool page should be extremely SEO optimized.

Now for all the Makers out there, I know this ruins the fun, but the whole goal of this is for people to discover your product through search. And if you don’t build a search-optimized landing page, then you’re doing all this work for nothing.

Create next steps

Once you’ve build the free tool and have an optimized landing page for it to live on, then it’s time to think about how you can guide those free tool users to the next step in signing up for your larger solution.

Is this a popup CTA asking them to start a trial? Do you require an email address to download the image you just created? Do you make them create an account to export the report you just built?

Some natural way to continue the relationship with these free tool users, and encourage them to explore your more comprehensive solution.

Market it

While blog posts and other types of marketing assets don’t do great on communities like Hacker News, free tools do amazing there.

People love free stuff, and you look like a hero for building something that’s entirely free and sharing it with the world.

I especially like this approach for technical SaaS founders who may be hesitant about promoting their written content. You surely would be proud to show off a free piece of software you built. Right?

Go forth, and build

As you’re looking at the landscape of growth options for your business, while considering conventional blog content is definitely worthwhile, it may also be time to think about alternative types of content, and Engineering As Marketing may be a great fit for you and your business.