Commence the arm tightening

A pharmacy may be the last place you’d think would attract children.

But my young cousins and I often ended up at that corner of the shopping center because the pharmacy had the most advanced technology in town.

One by one, we would take turns sitting at the wooden desk. After placing a tiny arm through a permanently attached cuff, we’d press the green button on the blood pressure machine to commence the arm tightening.

While systolic and diastolic readings didn’t mean much to us as kids, this free community resource did its job beautifully.

It’s not like someone using this machine could immediately buy hypertension medication—they’d need to see a doctor for a prescription. It was meant to get shoppers to associate the store with their health. After that, perhaps, their medications.

That machine, which entertained me as a child, was a physical example of using tools as marketing.

There’s a chapter in Developer Marketing Does Not Exist dedicated to this topic. It mentions how these three startups used the same tool to drive traffic to their main site:

• Twilio
• Runscope
• Insomnia

In my recent post for Heavybit, I share how tools can be an effective way to attract developers to your company. Use Free Tools to Market Your Developer Product shows how you can follow in the footsteps of Twilio, Runscope, and others with a simple tool as marketing.