Lead magnets – compelling offers that you give away in exchange for a prospect’s contact information – are a staple of marketing, especially in the B2B space. Most often found in the form of downloadable content like ebooks, PDFs, checklists, there’s one particular type of lead magnet that felt the need to highlight in this post.

I’ve been seeing standalone, engineered products used as lead capture devices more frequently over the last few years, and with good reason. It’s the new “try-it-before-you-buy-it” marketing tactic and I have seven examples to share with you here.

HUBSPOT WEBSITE GRADER

When Hubspot does something, we should all take notice, as the company is the undisputed king of inbound marketing. Website Grader analyzes your site’s speed, mobile performance, SEO, and security, and gives you grades and improvement tips. I counted 14 “read more” tags that take you to Hubspot blog posts about each topic.

LEADPAGES LANDING PAGE GRADER

Landing Page Grader from Leadpages is an almost exact replica of Hubspot’s Website Grader (if you can’t beat ’em, copy ’em!), rating your landing page elements and providing recommendations for making it more effective. No further educational content here, though, like Hubspot’s blog post links.

GRAMMARLY PLAGIARISM CHECKER

Grammarly attempts to show off its language processing technology with a free Plagiarism Checker tool. The catch? It tells you that errors have been found but forces you to make a Grammarly account in order to see those issues and ways to correct them.

COSCHEDULE HEADLINE ANALYZER

Coschedule, which offers scheduling software for content marketing, has a free tool called Blog Post Headline Analyzer, promising to “score your overall headline quality and rate its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value.” In addition to providing scores and recommendations, Coschedule includes several blog posts for deeper context.

USERTESTING UX TOOL

Peek, by the folks over at UserTesting, has very little pomp and circumstance. It is just a slimmed down version of its full paid product offering.

MOZ OPEN SITE EXPLORER

Open Site Explorer helps marketers “research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging links.” Similar to Peek by UserTesting, Moz offers this tool free in a limited version.

BERKLEE ONLINE GUITAR TUNER

The Online Guitar Tuner from Berklee Online may not be an earth shattering piece of software, but it certainly provides value to the educator’s target market. Differing from the other examples in this post, the tool is 100% free in its full version but is paired with a CTA to download a piece of content (Guitar Degree Handbook) in exchange for your email.