The Rise of Free SaaS Tools as Lead Magnets (& How Marketers Can Take Advantage)

Download Now: Free State of Marketing Report [Updated for 2024]

As Wiz’s Head of Marketing Tom Orbach says, “Mini tools are 10x more powerful than free trials.”

For the last 20 years, tech marketers have been giving away e-books and PDFs. I think Orbach would agree that this era is coming to an end.

Thanks to AI, no-code, and outsourcing, the smartest tech marketers are now giving away mini software tools … entirely for free.

This is something I like to call ‘free tool marketing.’

Here’s how it works.

What is free tool marketing?

In MBA speak, free tools are referred to as ‘loss leaders.’ A loss leader is a free-ish mini product that gets customers to buy a bigger product.

For a perfume company, it might be a free sample of perfume at the mall. For my hometown gas station, Wawa, it was free coffee every Tuesday in 2024. Now, in tech, the norm is to give away free tools to get you in the door for paid ones.

But how do you figure out which mini tool(s) to build?

There are two main ways:

1. Look for low-difficulty, high-volume keywords.

The goal here is to snag a little bit of traffic that may be interested in your paid software.

You’re not gonna rank for your niche’s main keyword overnight, but mini tools are like mini bets. Each mini tool gives you a better shot at ranking higher for your most important main keywords.

Use tools like Ahrefs to find keywords that are low-difficulty keywords with a KD around 0-5 with as high volume as possible. Even as low as 1,000 searches/month is good to start.

For example, the keyword ‘social media manager jobs‘ has a keyword difficulty of 0 and 7,200 searches per month. If you’re an AI resume writing tool or a hiring platform like Indeed, you could spin up a free AI resume writing tool specifically for social media managers looking for jobs.

Here’s another example: The keyword ‘Instagram giveaway template’ has a keyword difficulty of 5 and 500 searches per month.

If you’re an image creation platform like Canva or an ad agency that helps brands do Instagram giveaways, you could create a free AI Instagram giveaway template generator using something like OpenAI’s DALL-E model or Midjourney.

2. Look within your product for features that could be free tools.

Do you have any existing features that could be free tools?

For example, if you’re a personal finance app, maybe it’s a compound interest calculator. Or if you’re a video editing software, maybe it’s a free video resizer. The options are endless.

Pro tip: Obviously, don’t give away all your software’s secret sauce. But most times, you’ll be able to find at least one feature to offer at no cost.