Stop Blogging and Start Building

We’re currently experiencing a content gold rush. It seems like everyone today is blogging — no matter how mediocre, no matter how unoriginal the content. Blogging is a great way to prove your authority on a given topic, and everyone is getting on board.

Erica Berger of The Economist says we have reached “Peak Content”, a time of hyper-competition and extreme saturation when it comes to content marketing.

So, what can marketers do to get heard in all this noise? Well, the answer is simple — differentiate!

You can either build tools or focus on creative content production and distribution channels to drive engagement and generate ROI for your business.

The above image displays marketing channels have evolve over time, and how marketers can use them to promote their content like Snap stories, Youtube videos, Podcast and so on.

Building tools is also a part of creating content. In this article, we will talking about how tools can generate better ROI in terms of traffic, leads, and revenue.

Tools provide leverage and get Press too

HubSpot co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, created the first version of Website Grader in three days back in 2006. Website Grader grades your website on things like:

performance
SEO
mobile
security

Millions of websites used this tool, and HubSpot generated thousands of potential leads from it.

Alex Tew, founder of Calm, a meditation app, has used tools successfully multiple times. When he was preparing to launch his first startup in 2008 — popjam.com, a social network for sharing humorous content.

Alex had the idea to build a game around this. Popjam.com was all about sharing funny content so there was a natural fit. His team built a game called, SockandAwe.com — a pun on the US military term ‘shock and awe’, which went immediately viral and got tons of press.

Sockandawe.com got over 10 million views in the first month and captured over 120K emails. When popjam.com launched, this email list was their first audience.

Many startups have made big by just offering free tools. So, I reached out to their founders to seek their opinion on building tools vs blogging, and here is what they said:

Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot

He always believed more in free tools than producing only content.

Alex Tew, Calm

Alex has built many free tools to promote his business. Read what he has to say about it.

Ajay Paghdal, Linkio

He agrees with Erica that Content has been very saturated and we should focus more on creating high-quality content along with free tools.

Alexander Isora

Alex is a tech entrepreneur, so he prefers to create valuable tools over writing articles.

Ben Lang, Langonline

Ben has a mixed feeling, but he does believe that tools are essential and can provide better return.

Dru Wynings, Diffbot

When we asked Dru, he was quite straight and pretty right. If you got the skills, then build a tool.

Michael Navazhylau

He gave us a very unique point that tools can be modified to shape as helpful, and it will be relevant for years, and years.

Nathan Beckford, Foundersuite

When we asked Nathan what he thinks about building tools vs writing content, this is what he said:

Oleg Campbell, Reply

The founder of Reply found it more fun to build something new rather than just sharing your experience in content form.

Peter, Brand Grader

While they had fun building tools, and it did generated tons of leads, but he believed that it takes a lot of work. Hence, it depends on your business.

Luis Lopes, AmpleMarket

We asked Luis about his opinion on building tools vs blogging, and he had a very practical advice for founders.

So…how do you know which tools to build?

The right tool for you will ultimately depend on your business, but here are some opportunity areas to look for.

Help your customers complete a task easily.

These tools are generally a free feature in your product or a separate product that is closely affiliated with your core product. The goal is to help potential customers who are at different stages of their buying journey, complete tasks in a relevant domain.

For Inspiration, look at these companies how they embrace tool building in their Growth strategy.

Ipsy created Ipsy Open Studios to help Influencers produce better videos, where Buffer created Pablo to ease the creation of social media graphics.

With Moz site explorer tool, the users can check domain authority for any website.

Build free resources and Microsites your users find valuable.

Here, the goal is to generate traffic and subscriber base by building an asset that your audience can use repeatedly.

For Inspirations:

Invision gave away amazing free UI kits and then built a plugin for Sketch to make designers lives easier. On the other hand, Squarespace built an easy logo creator to help their users pursue their entrepreneurial dream.

Build an online community for your target audience

Here the idea is to create a perpetual audience that you can target any time. It also helps you become a valuable part of audiences life and sets you up as an influencer.

YCombinator built a community of tech entrepreneurs and enthusiasts called HackerNews. Y Combinator is one of the best and biggest startup incubator programs in the world.

Sean Ellis built Growthhackers.com as a community of marketing professionals. The first version of GrowthHackers leveraged Ellis’ Twitter following of about 10,000 people to begin attracting visitors to the website. Once traffic started coming in, they worked to build a sense of community by reciprocating all visitor interactions.

Moz and Hubspot teamed up to build community of inbound marketers called Inbound.org, which we're all very familiar with.

How do these builders feel about the success they have found using the tools that they built?

Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot also built a chatbot called Growthbot that helps marketers and sales professionals with on demand information about keywords, monthly visits, top performing content, competition research etc. Here is what Dharmesh said about Growthbot in a recent interview:

“My hope is that not only will the tool be useful to existing HubSpot customers but that it also extends HubSpot’s brand and reach to prospective customers.HubSpot believes strongly in the idea that you should create value for your market before you to try to extract value.

We have reached millions [of users] through our free content, free education and training, and free tools. GrowthBot extends that idea by offering another useful (and free) tool built for our target market. ”

Patrick Whatman, Head of Content at Mention, built Brand Grader, a free online reputation management tool that helps you assess and compare your brand and your competitor’s online performance. Here’s what Patrick said about finding success with free tools:

“We really enjoyed building the Brand Grader, and it generated a lot of business for us in a short period of time.”

These examples have shown that helpful tools can provide companies with a long-term lead generation machine.

Next Steps

To build these tools, you have first have to start with your users. Understand their needs, challenges, and then take a more qualitative approach to get more insights about them.

You can also take user interviews, and run surveys to get creative ideas on what can be built.

I recommend following a typical MVP product development cycle to validate your ideas first and then do the hard work of developing and launching them.