Have you ever been to Grader.com and gotten a marketing grade for a website? Amazingly, over one million people have done it. And, you know what, it’s an unbelievable lead generation channel for HubSpot. Much like content marketing – blogging, white papers, ebooks, SEO, etc – has been a mainstream marketing tactic for over a decade now, there’s a new kid on the block: micro apps.
A micro app is a custom web application that provides some type of useful value, like Grader.com’s automated evaluation of marketing best practices for a website, in exchange for contact information (e.g. we’ll give you some value at no charge in exchange for becoming a lead). Micro apps are more difficult to build and more expensive to maintain, but also provide more value and interactivity compared to traditional content marketing.
Here are some more micro app examples (Disclosure: I’m an investor in these companies):
- SalesLoft’s Prospector – Semi-automatically mine the web to build lists of leads (this micro app was so successful it was turned into a full product)
- Rigor’s OnlineCurl – Run the cURL commandline tool right inside a web browser
- Rigor and Kevy’s APIstat.us – Check the uptime of popular cloud-based applications
- Rivalry’s Crown Report for Sales – Find out how a sales rep stacks up against other sales reps
Due to the technical nature of micro apps it’s never going to be as popular or mainstream as content marketing, but for the sophisticated companies that can pull it off, micro apps will be an excellent source of lead generation.
What else? What are your thoughts on micro apps as next generation content marketing?
David Cummings on Startups 
David,
This post resonated with me. As traditional content marketing targeting industry-specific topics becomes ever more saturated, micro apps allow more capable technology companies to further differentiate their services by providing these (free) micro apps. Nowadays, just about anyone can create a WordPress blog and begin writing articles to target specific keywords, etc, but it takes real technical skill to develop a valuable micro app. At LeaseMatrix, we took it one step further (I would enjoy hearing whether you think this step was the right thing to do).
We recently built an office space calculator (see http://lease.io/office-space-calculator) which prospects can use on our site, or embed on their own site. We have found that, while there isn’t any link juice coming from the “powered by…” link at the bottom of the iframe, it still drives a reasonable amount of traffic to our site, which we would have not have otherwise gotten. I haven’t yet quantified whether traffic from this widget and sister embeds actually drive signups, though.
http://BuiltWith.com is one of my favorite examples of a micro app. It is so useful!
Dead on. I recognized the opportunity last year and built the equivalent of WordStream’s PPC grader for the enterprise and called it the Boost Relevance Report: https://www.boostctr.com/Account/CRMSignup/boostreport
As an added bonus, we partnered with Marin Software to co-brand and was able to leverage their established marketing budget to really push it far beyond we could as a startup.
Being able to multiply effectiveness by using them and their sales force as a distro channel, capitalizing on their marketing resources and partnering with a well-established player in the space was incredible for us-
Agreed. These are a great way to build brand awareness and show a little goodwill by dedicating development resources towards a useful free tool.
We built one that crawls your website and emails you a content audit template with an inventory of the assets on your site: http://freecontentaudit.com
Very cool micro app! Do you have a screenshot of an example content audit someone would receive by filling out the form?
Thanks for sharing Grader.com, Got a score of 82, not sure if its good or bad though.