Grade your Web site

     HubSpot, provider of an inbound marketing system that small businesses use to leverage search engines, get found by more prospects, and then convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers, created the nifty Website Grader as a free diagnostic tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of any Web site. The tool has spread through word-of-mouse to their target customers, including marketing professionals, Web designers, and business owners interested in improving their Internet marketing. These people see tremendous value in learning how successful their site is at attracting visitors.

     The free Website Grader tool helps identify companies in need of HubSpot’s paid services by drawing those companies to the HubSpot site. Plus, after using the tool, many users of Website Grader conclude on their own that they need help improving their Web marketing.

     “We wanted a tool that would both help us figure out if a company was a good fit for the product we sell…and hopefully would actually attract people to the tool to let them self-select by running a report on their own Web site,” says Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief software architect at HubSpot. “We thought that if we built a valuable enough tool it would generate a lot of viral traffic, helping us to generate lots of leads at a really low cost and grow our business.”

     To build buzz around Website Grader, Shah and his colleagues at HubSpot promoted the free tool on the popular HubSpot blog and then leveraged the blogosphere and social media to drive word-of-mouse. The team posted messages in discussion forums, submitted the site to social media Web sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, and commented on other people’s blogs with a link recommending Website Grader as valuable tool people might like to try.

     The success of the Website Grader tool has been staggering. HubSpot launched Website Grader on February 23, 2007, and in only nine months over 150,000 unique URLs were submitted for grading. The tool was featured in a PC Magazine article as one of the Top 100 Undiscovered Websites, and “A-list” bloggers such as Guy Kawasaki have written about it.

     “We’ve captured over 35,000 opt-in email addresses from people who have used Website Grader and have produced over 1,000 sales leads,” says Shah. That’s a remarkable result for a tool that cost virtually nothing to create and to promote though viral marketing strategies. “Our salespeople use a Website Grader report in every deal they work on, as a diagnostic tool to review with the prospect. That [report] then shows how HubSpot software, our paid product, can help them with Internet marketing. Therefore, even when it is not the original lead source, it is a valuable tool for closing a lot of other business.”

     The real proof of the success of Website Grader comes from the amount of new business it has created. “We’ve closed deals with over thirty new customers to date as a result of the Website Grader viral marketing strategy,” Shah says. “That represents about $250,000 in customer lifetime value. We’ve also produced another sixty sales opportunities currently in our pipeline, with a potential customer lifetime value of $500,000 if we close them all.”

     Source: The New Rules of Viral Marketing (David Meerman Scott) e-book