Marketing teams can ship an interactive tool without a developer
The most linkable, most shared thing a marketing team can publish is usually a tool that gives someone a number about their own situation. If the maths already exists in a spreadsheet somewhere in the business, marketing can put it on the website without booking a development sprint.
Why a tool outperforms another guide
A calculator earns attention that an ebook does not, and it keeps earning it after the campaign ends.
It answers a question about them
A visitor will tell you their square footage, headcount or current spend to find out what it means for them. That is a far higher-intent interaction than downloading a PDF, and it tells you what they actually care about.
People link to useful things
A working tool is a linkable asset. Industry sites, forums and suppliers cite calculators because they are useful to their own readers, which is a much easier backlink conversation than asking someone to link to a landing page.
The inputs are first-party data
Every submission is saved as a record with the values behind it, so over a few hundred uses you learn the distribution of your market's inputs, not just how many people clicked.
Gate the result, not the tool
Let people use it and ask for an email to send the detailed report. The exchange feels fair because they have already had value, which is why gated results convert better than gated downloads.
Three things marketing teams usually build first
All three start from a workbook that already exists somewhere in the business.
A savings, ROI or pricing calculator that gives a real answer, embedded on your own page.
See how it worksA maturity score, readiness check or benchmark, with weighted scoring behind it.
See how it worksA searchable catalogue or selector, so visitors find the right item instead of a PDF.
See how it worksMarketing owns it after launch
This is usually the deciding factor. A tool that needs a ticket for every change stops being updated.
Copy, styling and layout
Labels, help text, sections and branding are configured, so a wording change before a campaign does not go into a backlog.
The numbers stay with the experts
The engineer, analyst or finance lead who owns the model updates the workbook and it is re-uploaded. Marketing does not become responsible for the maths, and nobody has to translate it into code.
Embed it on your own page
Run it on your site so the traffic, the analytics and the SEO value stay with your domain rather than on someone else's subdomain.
Marketers who have done it
Two of these were built by the marketing function itself, and one by an agency for a client.
We worked with consultants to initially build this tool. We decided to use Excel to implement lookup tables for temperatures and annual cooling hours of the HVAC system. We could hand the workbook out to customers and email it to them, but we wanted to take it one step further, and use SpreadsheetWeb to create a better web version, where we can put it on our website, so we can track its usage and keep it gated.
SpreadsheetWeb was everything I was looking for: a platform built upon Excel spreadsheets, with an easy to use interface and excellent customer support. The integration possibilities fit my requirements, and the set up was easy.
Technology Finance Partners build value-based sales and marketing programmes for enterprise software companies, and used the same approach to deliver a web-based ROI tool to a client.
Find the spreadsheet someone in your company already built
It is usually in sales engineering, finance or product. Start free and put it on your site, or tell us what you want the tool to answer and we will tell you what it would take.