A software approach to the standard lead generation playbook.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before when it comes to driving leads; ads, ebooks, webinars, newsletters and so on. However, when you are woking with developers, or are a developer, oftentimes you can take these common strategies and implement them with a software twist.

Specifically, you can spin off a small part of your core products’ functionality into a lightweight tool that is free to use, but requires a signup. Or, you can develop an adjacent tool that is free to use but targets potential paying customers.

Below, we’ll discuss three methods that we’ve seen founders and companies use to drive leads using spin-off or lightweight software tools.

Method 1: The Mortgage Calculator.

The first example that comes to mind for the strategic use of a lightweight software tool is the mortgage calculator. This tool allows people to calculate their mortgage costs and targets prospective home buyers. So, unsurprisingly, companies that service mortgages are the ones building this software tool and using it to drive leads. A quick Google search confirms this assumption.

But, expanding on this, you can use this strategy in your company as well. If your target customers have some sort of need for a calculator, or a calculation of some sort, you can build a tool that performs the calculations. There are so many use cases for this; tax estimators, insurance estimations, savings projections etc.

You’re going to want to make this tool easy to use, and simple. You probably don’t want to even require a signup as the goal of the tool would be to drive consistent eyeballs to your website and other content with the goal of developing a brand and potentially getting newsletter or lead form signups.

Method 2: The Plugin.

When it comes to developing a tool for lead generation, you’re going to want to expose the tool to as many users as possible, for free. Now, if you’re just starting out, you probably don’t have an audience or customers; so how can you get your tool in front of people?

This is where plugins are extremely valuable. If you create a plugin for an existing platform, you automatically expose the tool to the plugin-store of the platform - which gives you free exposure.

For example, if you made a screenshot tool for Google Chrome, there are millions of users browsing the Chrome plugin store. Chances are someone will see your tool from the plugin library and start using it. Fast forward a couple months, you could have thousands of users that know of your brand, use your tool, and that you have collected lead info on.

There are plenty of platforms that are worth building a tool for, but it’s important to ensure that the tool still targets your customer profile. For example, if you have an application that helps architects manage their projects, you don’t want to build a screenshot tool. But, you may want to build a plugin for Google Chrome that has a handy collection of common architectural equations and analysis calculators.

Check out the video below if you want to see an example of someone who just developed a chrome extension, and was able to monetize off of the extension alone.

Method 3: Open Source It.

Lastly, an interesting way to drive leads is to build a democratized, open sourced tool for a community to contribute too. From there, you can build your reputation, drive traffic to premium version, or foster an audience.

This is a bit different from the previous two methods in the sense that it is typically a larger scaled undertaking. With a calculator or plugin, you’re looking at developing a quick productivity boosting tool. However, an open sourced tool (typically) is going to lean more on the side of exposing essentially a complete application rather than a smaller tool.

A prime example of this is https://excalidraw.com/. Excalidraw is a free, open source tool that we use daily at Benmore for white-boarding. It’s extremely helpful and is extremely user friendly. Furthermore, there is an API and general developer support as well. Regardless, if you go to https://plus.excalidraw.com/, you can see a premium version of the application that is geared a bit more towards enterprises.

This is a genius play from a business perspective. The free tool is used by tons of people and is open, transparent, and community driven. However, there is a paid version for customers that need more utility.

That being said, as you start to build your project or formulate your idea, think about a part of the functionality that could lend to community-driven growth through open sourcing.

If you thought any of the above methods were interesting or want to talk more to us about developing software-enabled marketing tools, let’s talk!

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