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Imagine giving potential customers a free taste of your SaaS product right on your website. Many top SaaS brands are doing exactly that — and reaping major rewards.
From Shopify’s eCommerce to Canva’s design tools, offering a free version of your product can be a powerful growth strategy. These free tools attract millions of visitors, earn valuable backlinks, and bring in traffic worth millions of dollars.
Want to see how it’s done? In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into Red Hat’s clever free tool strategy and how they funnel thousands of visitors to their value calculator page.
Why SaaS Brands Invest in Free Tool Pages
Unlike businesses with physical products, SaaS brands can let users sample their products with a free or limited version directly through their website. This method not only demystifies the product but also engages users more directly than any other marketing landing page can.
Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform, is a great example of this strategy. Their business name generator tool not only aids in generating business names but also funnels significant traffic into Shopify’s marketing ecosystem. This tool alone is responsible for over $6 million worth of traffic — that’s serious value from a single page.
By offering a vast set of free tools on their site, Shopify provides enormous value to their users and shows they care about small businesses. And it pays off — just look at the traffic and inbound links:
Plenty of other SaaS companies are benefiting from offering their best free tools, too.
Canva’s mock-up generator enables users to create visuals effortlessly, helping people visualize and sell what their product or website will look like. Of course, you need to sign up for a free account to use it!
Sitechecker offers a free SEO tool that helps users analyze and optimize their website’s performance, thereby drawing in traffic that is highly relevant to its services.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is another great example, providing immediate feedback on the effectiveness of marketing headlines.
All of these examples show how giving someone a free tool can be a powerful way to attract valuable traffic. But Red Hat takes it to the next level.
Maximizing Visitor Value — Red Hat’s Free Value Calculator Tool
Red Hat has developed an innovative way to engage their audience and showcase the potential returns of their offerings through their free Value Calculator Tool. This sophisticated tool serves as a great stop on the customer journey, providing a detailed and personalized assessment of the potential ROI customers can get from deploying Red Hat’s products.
Here’s a closer look at how this tool works and its strategic importance.
Step-by-Step Usage
- Setting Priorities: Users begin by selecting their company’s main objectives from a list that includes enhancing business agility, increasing efficiency, optimizing costs, and bolstering security. This step ensures that the output aligns with the user’s strategic goals.
- Firmographic Information: The next step involves entering detailed firmographic data, such as the company name, industry, country, annual revenue, and the number of employees. The annual revenue slider ranges from $50 million to over $50 billion, and the employee headcount scale starts at 250 and stretches up to 250,000, making it clear that the tool is geared toward large-scale businesses.
- Visualization of Potential Returns: After processing the data input, the tool generates a visual chart displaying the estimated value Red Hat can deliver, broken down by the selected priorities. This visualization aids in quickly assessing how Red Hat’s solutions can impact different areas of the user’s business.
- Detailed Customized Reporting: For users who wish to dive deeper, the tool offers the option to download a full customized report. This feature, however, requires filling out a comprehensive lead-capture form that includes contact information, ensuring that Red Hat can follow up with interested parties.
Strategic Lead Qualification
Of course, a visual like the one above prompts questions — how did they arrive at these numbers? To get that information, you can fill out a lead-capture form and download the detailed report.
The detailed report request acts as a dual-function mechanism — it not only provides users with a more in-depth analysis but also helps Red Hat identify and qualify leads based on the completion of the form.
In fact, the form for the detailed report starts its annual revenue scale at $50 million — if you make less than that, Red Hat isn’t interested in capturing your lead information. The form filters those entries out automatically. Similarly, its employee headcount starts at 250.
That means Red Hat can simultaneously capture important information, provide value, and filter less lucrative visitors.
It’s an elegant combination of features that others can certainly emulate as well. You just need to create a tool with a clear value that answers a simple need your audience has. In this case, it’s the need to evaluate what a tool is worth.
Next, integrate a lead-capture form into the way people can get the deeper insights they’re looking for.
Finally, you can include firmographic filters to screen out entries that don’t meet your ICP.
Red Hat Uses 1000s of Interlinks to Funnel Visitors to Their Tool Page
Red Hat’s free tool works as a great lead magnet — but how does the company get it in front of their target audience?
Through the strategic use of internal linking.
Despite the tool page showing a surprisingly low 0 organic traffic and minimal referring domains or external backlinks since its publication in May 2023, the internal structure of Red Hat’s website compensates significantly for what may initially look like shortcomings.
Let’s break it down.
Robust Internal Linking Strategy
Red Hat has deployed an aggressive internal linking strategy, with over 6,300 internal backlinks directing users from various parts of their website to the free Value Calculator Tool page.
These interlinks come from diverse subfolders such as topics, blogs, and service pages, ensuring that visitors navigating through any related content have direct pathways that lead to the tool.
The Role of Organic Traffic
Organic traffic forms a crucial part of Red Hat’s overall marketing engine — 59% of Red Hat’s web traffic is organic, underscoring the effectiveness of their SEO and content strategies.
But, as I mentioned before, not much of that traffic is actually going to the tool page.
That’s okay — the tool page doesn’t need to generate its own traffic because of the internal linking strategy.
Pages that get high organic traffic, like Red Hat’s topic pages, are the fuel behind this. These glossary-like articles are the core of Red Hat’s internal linking framework. They address a variety of beginner and intermediate questions and cover a broad spectrum of topics relevant to Red Hat’s array of open-source products and paid services.
By serving as a repository of Top-of-the-Funnel (ToFu) content, these pages capture early interest in related topics and guide visitors deeper into the website, ultimately funnelling them toward the Value Calculator Tool.
For example, here are a few high-traffic topic pages that refer traffic straight to the tool:
In fact, out of all 21,384 pages on Red Hat’s website, about 30% of them direct visitors to the calculator tool page. This extensive use of internal links embeds the tool across various content layers, ensuring it is consistently highlighted as a resource throughout the visitor’s journey on the site.
Aggressive internal linking strategies like Red Hat’s build on the value of ToFu content to fuel revenue-generating engines like the Value Calculator Tool.
However, there remains an opportunity to increase visibility even further.
By expanding the internal linking strategy to include additional pages, especially those with high visitor engagement but no current links to the tool, Red Hat could potentially capture an even larger audience and guide more visitors toward the Value Calculator Tool.
Optimize Your Content Strategy Like the SaaS Greats
Free tools are a key growth lever for a wide range of leading SaaS companies, from Shopify to Canva and, of course, Red Hat. Red Hat’s free tool is meant to deliver value to both its visitors with valuable information and to Red Hat’s sales and marketing teams through lead qualification.
A lot of the time, we focus on organic traffic here. But in this case, it’s the referral traffic that matters, directing visitors from more than 6,000 other pages on Red Hat’s website. This structure takes advantage of what each page type specializes in: ToFu pages generate traffic, and tools like the value calculator convert visitors into leads.
If you want to see a masterclass on ToFu content, you should check out our breakdown of DialPad’s 50k keyword SEO moat. But if you’re interested in more ways to refer traffic to your website, you can learn a thing or two from 1Password in our breakdown here.
