We are a Salesforce ISV with a time tracking and project management app on the AppExchange. We’ve had leads flowing in from the AppExchange and prospects are evaluating our app and purchasing it. Now comes the hard slog. How do we ensure that more prospects hear about our app and the wonderful things that it can do for them. And with so many apps listed on the AppExchange for each category, how do we stand out?
We’ve tried several methods in the past. Ranging from Google Adwords to Linkedin Ads to promoted content on Twiter. We’ve tried email marketing and Salesforce’s AMP program too. A lot of these are fairly expensive options. But there are several free ways to market your AppExchange app too. Amanda Nelson’s article has some great ideas on marketing your app for free. You should definitely check it out.
Like several ISVs that we’ve spoken to, our marketing budget is finite and restricted :). So in looking out for simple but effective marketing options, we figured that guest blogging would be a good option for us to check out. And the Salesforce AppExchange is a great place to start publishing great content. It’s a fantastic place to build brand awareness among your target audience.
My first article Slack + Salesforce = More Productivity appeared on the AppExchange blog on January 26th 2022. I thought my experience would be useful for other AppExchange Partners
Here are some guidelines on how to get published as a guest blogger on the AppExchange.
- Your first step is to check out the Salesforce guest blogging guidelines. Once you’ve done that, figure out a topic that will be of interest to your customers.
- Submit an application to the AppExchange Social Media Marketing Content team with details of your AppExchange blog post idea.
- If the Content Marketing team likes your idea, they will email you asking for a draft of your blog post. You need to set this up as a shared Google doc or as a Quip doc. This way the Content Marketing team can easily share any feedback and/or edits with you.
- Once you share the draft with the Content Marketing team, they will review it and get back to you with their edits and suggestions.
- You then use those suggestions and flesh out your complete blog post. Use relevant statistics, images and other visual aids to make your post more interesting.
- There’s a section at the end of the blog for an author bio. That’s a great place to include a listing to your AppExchange App.
- Once you are done with all of your writing work, submit the post back to the Content Marketing team. They will queue it up to be published. On average, they share two blog posts a week. So you should have your blog post published within a month, except during holiday periods.
- The Content Marketing team also does some social media marketing of the blog posts. I haven’t seen that yet for my blog post. But I’m hoping that will happen soon. 🙂
I hope you found these guidelines helpful. Go ahead and give guest blogging a shot and share your feedback. Meanwhile, I would love to hear your comments on Slack + Salesforce = More Productivity.
