5) Engineering-as-Marketing
Concept
In this lesson, we'll see how you can use "Engineering-as-Marketing," also called "Side-Project Marketing" or "Growth Tools," to get pre-sales.
In his book "Traction," Justin Mares defines "Engineering-as-Marketing" as "using engineering time to create useful tools like calculators, widgets and educational micro-sites to get your company in front of potential customers."
Engineering as Marketing can take different forms, including:
- Tools, like Pablo from Buffer.
- Quizzes, like BuzzFeed's Quiz Party.
- Calculators, like Gusto's Burn Rate Calculator.
- Directories, like Baremetrics' Open Startups.
- Aggregators, like Hacker News from Y Combinator.
- Games, like Versoly's Founder Bingo.
- Templates, like ActiveCampaign's CRM Google Sheet.
- Checklists, like Gusto's Employee Onboarding Checklist.
- Converters, like Kapwing's Image to Video converter.
Among others.
While this isn't a widespread marketing practice, it's probable that you've personally used one of these tools in the past, as they have lately been gaining popularity.
Pros and Cons
The reasons for this increase in popularity are many.
In the first place, Engineering as Marketing isn't as competitive as other strategies, like content marketing. This kind of tool tends to require more time and resources to be created compared to content, which is why there're so many articles and so few tools.
In the second place, these tools provide repeated usefulness. Content is frequently consumed once and forgotten; these tools can be visited and used repeatedly over time.
In the third place, these tools are pretty shareable and linkable. People are more willing to share things that require more work to be created. Due to the extreme amount of content available, most content creation is seen as a low-effort task. Building these tools, instead, is seen as a high-effort one.
However, these benefits of Engineering as Marketing come with the disadvantage that it generally takes more time to build these tools than to create content. They are particularly costly because they require developers' time, which is the most expensive labor for most businesses.
Having said that, many of the examples mentioned above could be built without developers' help. No code tools are really powerful nowadays.
Building the Tools
I don't want to get into details on building these tools because each of the types mentioned above are really different between them.
But I do want to make a comment about how you can choose which tools to create.
Many founders brainstorm tool ideas with a product-oriented mindset. This leads them to create only tools that are strictly related to their businesses.
For example, if a founder has a business selling domains, following this approach he'd build a domain availability tool.
However, in most niches, you probably won't come with any tool ideas if you have this product-oriented mindset.
You'll need to brainstorm in a customer-oriented way, coming up with tools that satisfy one of your potential customers' needs, though not one that's related to your business.
Shopify does this really well. They have many Engineering as Marketing tools oriented to business owners, who are their target customers, but aren't related to eCommerce at all, which is what their business is about. These tools include a business name generator and a slogan maker.
They do it with the hypothesis that some of their tool users might be considering creating an eCommerce, and when they come across Shopify, they might convert into customers.
Promotion
Once you've built your tool, you have to promote it, just as it happens with content.
Promoting these kinds of tools is relatively easier than content. People are fine with self-promotion as long as you're providing value, and it's clearer that a tool provides value than that a piece of content does.
I won't get much into the promotion techniques as they are the same I talked about in the previous lesson.
These tools have the potential to bring organic traffic as well, but it'll take them some months to start ranking on Google if they ever do, so you shouldn't depend on that when pre-selling.
Converting Users into Customers
Once you drive users into your tool, you have to convert them into customers. You can use the same strategies mentioned in the previous lesson to do so.
Passive ways to convert users into customers include linking to your pre-selling offer from your tool, including your branding on the tool, and having an email newsletter somewhere on the tool to collect email addresses.
Active ways include limiting certain features of the tool to customers, asking for email addresses to users to give them access to the tool, or, what I like the most, generate the need for your product with your tool.
A great example of this last strategy is what HubSpot does with its Website Grader. This tool gives your website a score from 0 to 100 and some insights on things you have to improve. Some of these things can be improved using HubSpot.
This is how Website Grader generates the necessity for HubSpot.
Example
SparkToro used Engineering as Marketing smartly as a pre-launch strategy.
They built 3 free tools related to their product and target audience, which brought them many social shares and backlinks to their website.
Kapwing does a good job on Engineering as Marketing as well. They have dozens of free tools related to video editing, which is what their business is about.
These tools rank well on Google for dozens of keywords and bring them a huge amount of organic traffic, which can convert into customers.