| title | description | services | documentationcenter | author | manager | editor | ms.assetid | ms.service | ms.workload | ms.tgt_pltfrm | ms.devlang | ms.topic | ms.date | ms.author |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Go-to-market benefits of the Azure Marketplace | Azure |
The GTM benefits of the Azure Marketplace and AppSource for app and service publishers |
Azure, Marketplace, Compute, Storage, Networking, Blockchain, Security |
ellacroi |
nunoc |
marketplace |
article |
07/05/2018 |
ellacroi |
After you've published your offer on AppSource or in the Azure Marketplace, you can use your listing as a launchpad for joint go-to-market (GTM) activities with Microsoft. Driving traffic to your Marketplace offer and nurturing Marketplace leads, for example, are great ways to accelerate your business growth.
In this article, we share many marketing best practices for growing your business in the Marketplace.
The tables in the next sections provide suggestions for creating engaging marketplace offers. To write and configure your marketing materials, go to the Cloud Partner portal.
| Storefront setting | Best practice |
|---|---|
| Offer Name | Provide a strong title: Your app name should communicate the core value that your customers receive. Including search keywords in your app title can help your app to be ranked higher in search engine results. Follow a set title format for consulting service listings: [Offer Name]: [Duration] [Offer Type] (for example, Contoso: 2-Week Implementation) Adhere to brand guidelines: Follow Microsoft Trademark and Brand Guidelines and other relevant, product-specific guidelines when you refer to Microsoft trademarks and the names of Microsoft software, products, and services. |
| Offer Description | Provide a clear offer description: Clearly describe your offer's value proposition in the first few sentences of your description. Keep in mind that the first few sentences might be displayed in search engine results. Do not rely on features and functionality to sell your product. Instead, focus on the value you deliver. Use industry-specific vocabulary or benefit-based wording as much as possible. Core components of your value proposition should include the following information:
|
| Storefront setting | Best practice |
|---|---|
| Industries: AppSource apps and consulting services only | Select industries if your offer addresses industry-specific requirements: Call out industry-specific capabilities in your offer description. Note: The maximum number of options varies by offer type and is indicated in the Cloud Partner portal. |
| Categories | Select categories that align best with your offer: Choose the categories carefully, because customers use them to search for relevant apps. Be sure to call out how your offer supports category-specific needs in the offer description. Note: The maximum number of options varies by offer type and is indicated in the Cloud Partner portal. |
| Products that your app works with (3 max): AppSource apps only | List additional products and technologies that your solution uses or extends: For example, Azure IoT Hub or Azure Machine Learning. |
| Search keywords (3 max) | Use search keywords that help business users find your offer when they search in the Azure Marketplace and on AppSource or by using search engines: Identify the top three search keywords for your offer; incorporate the search keywords in your offer summary and description; and list the search keywords here. |
| Storefront setting | Best practice |
|---|---|
| Offer logo (PNG format, 48 × 48): search page | Design and optimize your logo for a digital medium: Upload the logo in PNG format to the search page of your offer. |
| Offer logo (PNG format, 216 × 216): app details page | Design and optimize your logo for a digital medium: Upload the logo in PNG format to the app details listing page of your offer. |
| "Learn more" documents | Include supporting sales and marketing assets under "Learn more": For example, white papers, brochures, checklists, or PowerPoint presentations. Save all files in PDF format. Your goal should be to educate customers, not sell to them. Add a link to your app landing page to all your documents, and add URL parameters to help you track visitors and trials. |
| Videos: AppSource, consulting services, and SaaS offers only | The strongest videos communicate the value of your offer in narrative form: Make your customer, not your company, the hero of the story. Your video should address the principal challenges and goals of your target customer. Recommended length: 60-90 seconds. Incorporate key search words that use the name of the videos. Consider adding additional videos, such as a how-to, getting started, or customer testimonial video. |
| Screenshots (1280 × 720) | Add up to five screenshots: Incorporate key search words in the file names. |
To help you maximize the benefit of listing in the marketplace, we collected the following best practices for marketing offers on AppSource and in the Azure Marketplace. First, be sure to review the marketing best practices and resources on the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). This site is your gateway for all marketing and programmatic resources related to partnering with Microsoft.
In addition, the quality of your marketplace offer and your commitment to customer-centric demand generation help drive growth for your business. Engaging in these activities helps Microsoft amplify your GTM work and feature key solutions across the storefronts in the marketplace.
After you’ve created a great listing, the following marketing initiatives will help you grow your business:
-
Build a strong value proposition.
Identify your potential customer and the key differentiators of your solution. -
Create a unique landing page on your site to make your app listing stand out.
Drive traffic from your site to your offer and make a great first impression. Based on your offer listing, customers decide whether they want to learn more and try your solutions. -
Enable a test drive or other trial experience.
Users want to experience your app firsthand. Publishers have historically seen much higher lead conversion rates from listings that offer a test drive or trial. -
Optimize your listing to help boost search engine rankings.
Incorporate search keywords in your app name, summary, and listing. -
Enable lead sharing.
Obtain your customers' contact information when they try your app right in your CRM system. Make sure you have a process in place to follow up on these new leads. -
Build your demand-generation plan.
Use your marketplace offer listing as the landing page for marketing calls to action. If you've enabled lead sharing, each time customers try, test drive, or deploy your offer from the landing page, you obtain their name and contact information. -
Promote your app on AppSource and/or in the Azure Marketplace.
Link to your app listing, and use URL tagging each time you link to your app. -
Create marketing and promotion campaigns.
Plan and build campaigns to drive awareness and engagement, with a clear call to action that directs traffic to your marketplace listing. -
Get customer feedback.
Invite your customers to submit a rating and review of your listing site. After they've started a trial, they receive an email message inviting them to share their experience with other customers. -
Get actionable insights.
View the Insights dashboard in the Cloud Partner portal. Track how many visitors your app listing gets, and how many try your app. Learn details about the performance of your marketing campaigns and which content performs best. -
Use GTM services benefits.
Take full advantage of our GTM services. Learn more about benefits that are available through the MPN.
A marketing campaign is a series of promotional activities or marketing tactics that are aimed at driving your audience to a desired action or outcome. As you're designing your campaign, consider the following best practices:
First, determine the actual buyer versus the purchase influencer. They might be different people within an organization, and your tactics and calls to action for each role might differ. Ask these evaluation questions to help you better understand your audience:
- How much control does the buyer have over the purchasing decision?
- How much influence does the influencer have?
- What does the influencer influence?
- Does this person influence budget or which solution is picked?
Knowing the answers to these questions helps you make decisions about where to invest your sales and marketing resources.
These days, typical customers are most of the way through their journey by the time they visit the marketplace. Buyers get this far in the decision-making process by learning about solutions and assessing options in advance. You want to design a campaign that aims to be where your buyers and influencers learn about solutions well before they consider purchasing one.
The audience for each industry, vertical, or category is different. Does your audience learn online, through email, at trade shows, through social media, or through conversations with trusted advisors? Depending on where and how your audience learns, you should design activities and distribute your marketing dollars accordingly. The combination of these tactics becomes your campaign strategy.
You should define success for your campaign in the marketplace and create clear key performance indicators (KPIs). You can run multiple campaigns with different end goals, of course. The ultimate goal is usually increased revenue or customer acquisition; however, your marketing campaigns might be tied to goals at other stages of the buying cycle. Here are a few examples:
-
You have newly launched your product in the marketplace. In this case, you might find that your marketing resources are best spent on audience education and lead generation. Success might be defined by the number of leads generated from your marketplace listing. In this case, your marketing tactics (and landing page) would focus on drawing customers to your marketplace listing.
-
You have a trial set up in the marketplace and your product requires some level of engagement and experience before a purchase takes place. Consider a campaign goal of the number of trials downloaded. In this case, the call to action for your campaign tactics would focus sharply on encouraging a trial in the marketplace.
-
Your product or category is well known, and you have purchase capabilities set up in the marketplace. Consider skipping the trial call to action and direct your audience to your Get It Now link in the marketplace.
-
Your offer is established and mature. Consider focusing your campaign efforts on upselling your customer base and driving action toward increasing purchases in the marketplace. Your messaging would focus on encouraging customers to purchase through the marketplace. Your KPI could be the revenue that's generated through the marketplace.
Whatever the maturity of your offer and the goals of your organization, the following are keys to maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign:
- Remain focused on the goals.
- Map out a set of integrated marketing tactics that are aligned to the goals.
As part of being a new publisher in the marketplace, you receive some free marketplace GTM benefits from Microsoft. Think critically about how to use these benefits in your campaign strategy. Let our marketing team know your marketplace campaign goals and your desired audience action. Microsoft can help customize these deliverables to work into your plan.
For additional content about campaign building and marketing practices, be sure to engage in the Smart Partner Marketing program, a benefit of joining the Microsoft Partner Network.
As part of the publishing process, consider what type of offer to create, and choose a category for your offer on AppSource or in the Azure Marketplace. Be sure to select a category that's appropriate for your solution, so that it is displayed accurately to potential customers.
Marketplace featured offers are chosen based on which offer the best customer experience and take advantage of high-quality partner marketing engagement. The following criteria increase the likelihood that your solution becomes part of marketplace featured offers:
- Clarity of the listing
- Quality of the solution
- Reliability of the technology
- Growth of platform usage by your customers
- Your level of engagement with creating high-quality marketing material
To maximize the likelihood that your offer is featured, invest in the success of your marketplace offering. To ensure a great customer experience for your offer, consider the following approaches:
- Ensure that your marketing artifacts are uploaded and displayed correctly.
- Drive high-quality traffic to your offer in marketplace by creating high-quality demand-generation campaigns.
- Grow the consumption of your AppSource or Azure Marketplace offers by driving demand, providing high-quality customer service, and providing timely updates on your offer.
For more information about how featured offers fit in the context of your GTM benefits, see GTM benefits in the marketplace.
When your offer is listed on AppSource or in the Azure Marketplace, you have earned the benefit of displaying the Available on AppSource or Available on Azure Marketplace badge on your website.
The AppSource badge is available in three sizes. You can download the badge along with guidance on how to use it at Promote the availability of your app on Microsoft AppSource.
The Azure Marketplace badge is provided as part of your free go-to-market benefits.
When you link from the AppSource or Azure Marketplace badge on your site to your listing in the marketplace, support strong analytics and reporting by including the following query parameters at the end of the URL:
- src: Include the source from which the traffic is routed to AppSource (for example, website, LinkedIn, or Facebook).
- mktcmpid: Your marketing campaign ID, which can contain up to 16 characters in any combination of letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens (for example, blogpost_12).
The following example URL contains both of the preceding query parameters:
https://appsource.microsoft.com/product/dynamics-365/mscrm.04931187-431c-415d-8777-f7f482ba8095?src=website&mktcmpid=blogpost_12
By adding the parameters to your AppSource URL, you can review the effectiveness of your campaign in the analytics dashboard in the Cloud Partner portal.
In the Insights section of the Cloud Partner portal, you can view a high-level performance overview of your offer. The best practice for working with the information in these reports is to reconcile it with your internal data. Use the information to help prioritize your marketing campaign actions.
The Analytics section of Cloud Partner portal (currently in preview and available only for AppSource offers) provides a rich Power BI dashboard. You can use the dashboard to view traffic on the detail page of your offer. New features for this dashboard are rolled out in an ongoing way.
Also in the Cloud Partner portal is documentation on Microsoft campaigns. You can use the documentation to set up and track your campaigns.
The following reports are included in the high-level performance overview section:
- Summary snapshot of orders
- Usage
- Deployments
- Customer trends on the Insights home page
- Detailed orders, usage, and customer data
- Orders and usage, shown as a monthly summary or as a six-month trend view
- Usage and orders broken out by several criteria
Detailed reports display customer information, such as company name and geographic location at the postal code level. Consider using this information to compare your customers or compensate your sellers. Microsoft provides the following attributes about your customers:
- Reseller
- First Name
- Last Name
- Company Name
- Transaction Date
- Subscription Name
- Azure Subscription ID (pay-as-you-go customers only)
- Cloud Instance Name
- Order Count
- Customer Country Region
- Customer City
- Customer Communication Culture
- Customer ZIP Code
Nurturing leads from the marketplace is a key enabler for successful engagement with marketplace users. Start by ensuring that lead management is enabled for your listing and configured correctly in your company CRM system. By doing so, you receive the signals and contact information for the users who interact with your listing in a queue to be processed for qualification.
Use the following practices for your leads:
- Enrich marketplace leads with additional data from your marketing and sales databases. A marketplace customer might already be in one of your lead nurture systems from a prior marketing campaign or as an existing customer.
- Score leads and use a variety of nurture paths for various actions in the marketplace. A customer who tests your application is in a different stage than one who initiates a purchase, for example.
- Process leads data frequently. Recency of engagement with customers is a key driver for success.
- Nurture your leads by using email or inside sales or pre-sales to ensure proper qualification before they enter your sales pipeline.
- Align your efforts with your overall marketing campaign strategy. For more information about how to access the Co-Sell program, see Promote your business with Microsoft.
New listings in the storefronts in the marketplace are eligible to receive free marketplace GTM benefits. After you place a listing, marketing specialists at Microsoft will contact you or your marketing contact to kick-start the activities. There is nothing for you to do except to engage with Microsoft when you are contacted.
The activities that Microsoft provides vary depending on your solution status in the marketplace. Benefits significantly increase for listings.
| Storefront | Additional available benefits | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| AppSource |
|
||
| The Azure Marketplace |
|
To maximize the impact of these activities, Microsoft encourages you to have your launch plan ready to implement. You might want to use your landing page for many of your launch tactics.
Your GTM support includes templates, web content, training, and tools to promote your business.
- For more information about GTM support, visit Microsoft go-to-market services.
Our goal is to support publishers like you and help simplify selling your app or offer in the storefronts in the marketplace. By listing in the marketplace, you access additional free marketing, sales programs, and resources.
If you have not already signed up for the Microsoft Partner Network, do so before you continue. For more information about the MPN, go to the Microsoft Partner Network page.
The MPN provides guidance on:
- New business opportunities.
- Connecting with teams or partners.
- Solutions and training to help grow your skillset.
To promote your offer or app and to access more benefits and resources, use the following table:
| Benefits | Resources |
|---|---|
| Use your Core Benefits | As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, you receive a set of core benefits that can help save time and money. The benefits can also help you strengthen your capabilities, better serve customers, and build connections to reach your full business potential. For more information about core benefits, visit Core Benefits and Requirements. |
| Earn your Cloud Platform Competency | Earning a competency helps you differentiate yourself among other Microsoft partners. Earning a competency also helps you demonstrate technical expertise and customer success in the market. Competency is a prerequisite for many key partner programs, such as Co-Sell. For more information about Cloud Platform competency, visit Cloud Platform Competency. |
| Become IP Co-Sell Ready | You might be eligible for the IP Co-Sell Ready program, which allows you to collaborate directly with Microsoft sellers and other partners on target customer opportunities and account planning. Your solution becomes visible to Microsoft sellers in the seller solution catalog. Microsoft sellers are rewarded for collaborating and winning with you. For more information about the Co-Sell Ready program, including eligibility requirements, visit Promote Your Business. |
To learn more about marketplace GTM services, go to Go-to-market services.