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Hello, I'm Sonal Pardeshi, Product Marketing Manager for
the Office Ecosystem team.
This video is targeted for people developing and
marketing add-ins and apps for Office.
The Office Store that is embedded
within the Microsoft Office apps, like Excel or Outlook,
etc., has many visitors each day.
But simply listing your app in the Store and waiting for
organic visitors will yield only some new visitors each day.
However, there are many competing services available
within categories such as CRM or data visualization, and
it can be challenging to attract customers.
The bottom line is, waiting for
organic visitors will only get you a certain level of success.
This video describes how you can build marketing campaigns
to drive users to try your Office add-in, and
how to target users effectively, and track campaign success.
Before rushing into channels, ads, and budgets,
you should draw the outlines of what you want to achieve.
You don't need a strict marketing strategy, but
it's important to understand the goal of your campaigns.
In addition to expanding your user base,
do you plan to target users who work in a specific field, or
even in specific organizations?
Will you be generating leads within your add-in?
Are you planning to upsell to users once they have become
engaged with your solution?
And will these users be potential candidates to share
your solution within their organization?
Based on these answers, you can move forward to plan the best
marketing activities fitting to your goals.
Invest in channels that yield the best results.
You may know based on previous marketing campaigns what works,
but do expect a period of learning and
trying out variations as you explore multiple strategies
to see how your customers respond.
If you don't have an existing customer base,
it's good to start building awareness by running campaigns
that allow you to learn about the audience, messaging,
and creatives with low cost.
Search engine marketing is a great place to start,
since it allows you to easily set keywords and control your
budgets, but be mindful of the keywords that you select.
Keywords that give high amounts of impressions and
a good CTR, or click-through rate, might
not have the best conversion to actual add-in launches.
Targeting too broadly will also burn your budget quickly.
Keywords such as Microsoft Word might get users to click on your
ad, but the user's intent might be to purchase Office products,
and not find ways to expand the use of them.
So selecting more specific keywords fitting your add-in,
such as PowerPoint templates or Excel charts,
might get you less traffic but more qualified users.
As you can see by the example from Pickit,
they chose PowerPoint.
Once you have a good understanding of your audience,
you can expand your marketing to include different social
media channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
These platforms allow you to do specific targeting
beyond geo-location, device, and age.
You can target users who have interests related
to your add-in, or who work in a field that is
relevant to the core use case of your solution.
Engaging and re-engaging with your users is commonly done
using direct email marketing.
Setting up email campaigns is fast and cheap, but
stay mindful of not spamming your users.
Keeping your style and messaging consistent, and
relevant to your add-in is key.
Otherwise, you will see users opting out from the email list.
Based on the information you have gathered about your users,
you can target people who are, for example, power users of
your solution, influencers within an organization, or
even IT professionals.
A blog is a perfect place to let people know about
your add-in and all the great capabilities it has.
You can highlight specific features, give tips on getting
the most out of your solution, and share news and updates.
Your blog, landing page, or webpage is also a great
place to convince people to try your add-in.
The pages you host yourself will also enable you to collect more
insights on visitors who have expressed interest towards your
solution.
You can run retargeting campaigns for
people who have visited your site, collect email sign-ups,
and even connect visitors with your sales department.
Whatever channels you choose to use, tracking your marketing
efforts will help you to understand what works or
doesn't work about a campaign, and help evaluate the return on
investment for the campaign cost.
We'll now show you how to use campaign tracking ID
to allow you to better understand the impact
of your individual marketing efforts.
A campaign tracking ID means a combination of
two parameters that you can add to the URL
when you link to the add-in page in store.office.com.
The first parameter is the identifier of your
marketing campaign.
It can include up to 16 characters,
a combination of letters, numbers, underscore,
dash, for example, blogpost_12.
The second parameter is your store provider ID, which you can
find on your store provider page in store.office.com.
This ID will always start with the letter PN for provider name.
Let me show you how can you quickly create this campaign
tracking URL from the Office Store site.
I'm going to navigate to the Bing maps add-in page and
create a campaign tracking URL for this add-in.
Let's first copy the store link for the add-in.
So you can pick up the add-in ID number and the link
that you will need to generate this campaign tracking URL.
We will also need to create a campaign ID, which can be up to
16 characters, as I have shown earlier.
In order to get the store provider ID,
let's go back to the Office Store page and
click on the provider detailed information.
In this URL, you will be able to pick up the provider name ID.
And insert that into your Provider ID parameter.
Now, we simply copy the CampaignID parameter and
the Provider ID parameters, and append that into
your store URL to create your campaign tracking URL.
Adding these parameters to your campaign URL will enable us to
provide more information about your campaign's user funnel.
We can provide you the number of users who visited your add-in
page in the Office Store,
number of users who clicked to acquire the add-in.
And finally, the number of users who successfully installed and
launched the add-in inside Office.
This capability is currently available for free Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint add-ins listed in store.office.com.
Soon we will share these campaign insights with you
on the Seller Dashboard.
This will give you the tools needed to analyze the success
of each campaign and focus your efforts on channels and
messaging that works.
In the meanwhile, we have set up an email account for
requesting your campaign data.
And you can send a request to the omexdatarequestior,
and we'll send you the number of users arriving to your add-in
page, the users who clicked to acquire your add-in, and
the number of users who successfully complete
an installation in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Take charge of your add-in success, and
remember to evaluate which marketing channels work best for
your customers, create multiple designs for
your marketing collateral to explore what resonates best, and
use campaign tracking IDs to track end to end success.
This guidance is also available in
the Microsoft Developer Network under promote your app or
add-in, on dev.office.com,
and in the Office ISV Go to Market guidebook.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
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