Best practices for marketing and listing your offer
Article
This article offers suggestions for marketing, creating, and engaging Microsoft commercial marketplace offers.
Marketing best practices
Keep marketing best practices in mind as you create and list offers to the commercial marketplace, provide customer trials, and connect with Microsoft customers and the partner community. If you optimize your offer listings and go-to-market campaigns, you can accelerate your customer acquisition. To learn how to get the most out of your online marketing efforts, download the Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace best practices guide.
For apps, provide a clear title that includes search keywords to help customers discover your offer.
For Consulting Services, follow this format: [Offer Name: [Duration] [Offer Type] (for example, Contoso: 2-Week Implementation)]
Offer description
Provide a clear description that describes your offer's value proposition in the first few sentences. These sentences can be used in search engine results. Core components of your value proposition should include:
Description of the product or solution.
User persona that benefits from the product or solution.
Customer need or pain the product or solution addresses.
Use industry standard vocabulary or benefit-based wording when possible. Don't rely on features and functionality to sell your product. Instead, focus on the value your offer delivers.
For Consulting Service listings, clearly state the professional service you provide.
Offer logo (PNG format, from 216×216 to 350x350 px): 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. Partner Center resizes it to the required logo sizes.
Offer logo (PNG format, 48×48 px): search page
Partner Center generates this logo from the Large logo you uploaded. You can optionally replace the logo with a different image later.
Learn more documents
Include supporting sales and marketing assets under Learn more; examples include:
white papers
brochures
checklists
PowerPoint presentations
Save all files in PDF format. Your goal here 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 other videos, such as a how-to, getting started, or customer testimonials.
Screenshots (1280×720 px)
Add up to five screenshots. Incorporate key search words in the file names.
Important
Make sure your offer name and offer description adhere to Microsoft Trademark and Brand Guidelines and other relevant, product-specific guidelines when referring to Microsoft trademarks and the names of Microsoft software, products, and services.
When creating media for your offer, make sure that the assets you create are welcoming and inclusive for all. To learn more about how to create accessible media, see Create accessible media.
Link to your offer page from your website
To easily direct users to your offer in the commercial marketplace, use our Get It Now badges on your website or in your digital marketing collateral. Find these badges in our Marketplace Marketing Toolkit.
When you link from the AppSource or Azure Marketplace badge on your site to your listing in the commercial 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
After adding these parameters to your AppSource URL, review the effectiveness of your campaign in the analytics dashboard in Partner Center.
Listing creation technical best practices
Navigating Markdown can be tricky. To help, we've compiled some best practices for revising and reviewing offer listings for the commercial marketplace in Partner Center. The commercial marketplace listing technical best practices guide shows how to edit your listing and preview your Markdown code.
The Microsoft commercial marketplace is a catalog of cloud applications and services that contains offerings from Microsoft and thousands of partners. In this learning path, you'll be introduced to concepts that will help your organization get ready to sell your cloud products and services through the commercial marketplace.
As a Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience analyst, you’re responsible for configuring, customizing, and expanding the functionality of Dynamics 365 Sales to create business solutions that support, automate, and accelerate the company's sales process.
This playbook (guide) helps partners create offers and transact on marketplace. The guide was created to recommend best practices to onboard you and guide you through the marketplace experience.
Learn about the commercial marketplace, an online marketplace for applications and services that let businesses of all sizes offer solutions to customers around the world.