More and more, in-app marketplaces are becoming a requirement for B2B SaaS marketing companies. The explosive growth of well-known SaaS companies like Salesforce, Shopify, Slack, Atlassian, BigCommerce, and HubSpot has occurred in large part because of the app marketplaces and integrations they offer their users.
Whether your customers need to integrate your app with 5 or 5,000 other solutions, building a public or in-app marketplace empowers your customers to have the seamless customer experience they are now looking for.
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Marketing user-facing integrations via a B2B public or in-app marketplace significantly enhances B2B SaaS businesses in several ways:
Marketing user-facing integrations demonstrate the value and benefits of integrating B2B SaaS products with systems or platforms that customers already use. Showcasing how the integration enhances their existing workflows and improves productivity, attracts more customers driving higher adoption rates.
User-facing integrations can set B2B SaaS businesses apart from competitors by highlighting the seamless and robust integration capabilities of the product. Spotlighting integration solutions create a unique selling proposition for the business as a preferred choice for customers who prioritize integration and interoperability.
Marketing user-facing integrations opens doors to new market segments or industries that rely on specific integrations. Targeting customers using complementary systems or platforms allows a B2B SaaS business to expand its market reach and tap into previously untapped opportunities.
User-facing integrations create upselling and cross-selling opportunities — it emphasizes the value of integrating additional modules, features, or add-ons. By demonstrating to current users how integrations further enhance the functionality and benefits of the B2B SaaS product, businesses can encourage existing customers to upgrade or expand their usage.
Marketing user-facing integrations attracts potential partnership opportunities with complementary software providers or technology platforms. Collaborating with other businesses to offer integrated solutions benefits both parties by leveraging each other's customer bases to create mutually beneficial marketing campaigns.
B2B SaaS businesses that excel in user-facing integrations can establish thought leadership and gain recognition within the industry. Businesses can position itself as a trusted authority in the integration space, attracting more customers and strategic partnerships, by displaying successful integration case studies, publishing relevant content, and participating in industry events.
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Ultimately, the most successful app marketplaces are those where tech partners are eager to build into your product, or at least happy to have an integration to your product.
Marketing to business development teams should involve a mix of general marketing and product marketing. Key ways you can market your partner program and marketplace to partners:
See an example of Box’s Technology Partner Program Guide here.
Campaigns should focus on the business value of joining the ecosystem of solutions in your marketplace. This can be done by presenting:
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Tech partnerships involving user-facing integrations sit at the intersection of partnerships, product, and engineering. To scale an in-app marketplace, getting third-party developers on board is key. Excited developers result in more integrations built and maintained, ultimately creating a better user experience for your customers.
How you can market to developers:
These initiatives should exhibit benefits that developers care about. This can be done by highlighting:
Marketing the marketplace to prospects and customers is essential to driving adoption and showing ROI. These campaigns should highlight individual integrations and the app marketplace itself.
How to market to prospects and customers:
The more you have involved beta customers in the marketplace build and rollout, the more they will amplify its official launch.
On launch day you’ll want some kind of event, whether it is a large conference your organization is holding or a webinar. During this event, you can showcase one or two beta customers. These customers should be as high profile and as enthused as possible.
You should start promoting this event two weeks out to prospects and customers. If possible, you should segment these communications to reflect which integrations the prospect will be most excited about.
A mix of emails, social, and ads (and any other channels you use to promote webinars) should be most effective. On social, tag and thank the beta customers who will participate in your event.
Including marketplace images and describing important use cases in your marketing newsletter a few weeks before launch can also help to lift the number of registrants.
If you own or participate in any communities on social media or Slack, announce the event in the weeks leading up to the launch.
You’ll likely have a few integrations in your marketplace before launch and you’ll want to leverage these partnerships to draw attention to the launch.
You can include your top two partners in your event day webinar — they can showcase their integrations and what customers can accomplish by using them.
Ensure that all the marketing materials submitted by partners (or written by your team) are clear, helpful, and easy to understand. You will likely have explanatory marketing materials inside your app and your public marketplace.
Ask your partners to promote the webinar leading up to the launch, and to promote the marketplace on the day of the launch. For any partner that has relevant, strong website traffic, you should ask to write a guest blog on the marketplace and your integration that they can publish on launch day.
Ask to include 3-4 of your most important partners in a press release on the marketplace. This can amplify your news as each of their teams work to get it placed and shared.
If any of your partners own active communities, see if they will let you promote and announce your webinar in those communities.
Ahead of the launch, enable your partners’ sales teams with decks and info sheets on your product and the integration and encourage them to share it with relevant prospects.
After the initial launch, you will want to continue to engage your prospects, customers and partners so that they use the marketplace and continue to provide feedback on the experience and how it can be improved.
Ongoing marketing initiatives can include regular webinars on getting the most value out of the integrations, case studies featuring customers using integrations, and segmented suggestions for using the marketplace to accelerate business objectives.
