Technology buying is becoming more self-directed, digital, and AI-assisted. Instead of beginning with a specific product or vendor, customers start with the business problem they want to solve.
Microsoft Marketplace is evolving with them.
With intelligent discovery in Marketplace, customers describe a business challenge in natural language, receive contextual recommendations, compare solutions, and ask questions as they evaluate options.
If you want to see how the experience is changing for customers, start with Accelerating AI adoption with intelligent discovery in Microsoft Marketplace.
For software companies, there is another side to the story.
If Marketplace is getting better at connecting customer needs with relevant solutions, your listing needs to provide useful, relevant information about what you offer. As the blog points out, that makes the quality of your Marketplace listing part of your growth strategy.
Want to skip right to a no-cost, fast listing optimization in App Advisor to improve your listing on six categories that customers care about?
Customers start with business needs, not product names
Imagine a retail leader looking to improve demand forecasting or an operations team trying to automate repetitive workflows. They may not know your company or product name. Increasingly, they don’t need to.
Intelligent discovery lets customers describe goals, challenges, or desired outcomes in natural language. Marketplace uses that context to surface relevant solutions.
According to Microsoft’s early preview results, customers using intelligent discovery were 68% more likely to find solutions that met their needs and take the next step toward purchase.
That raises an important question: Does your Marketplace listing clearly communicate the solution your customers are searching for?
With Intelligent Discovery, customers can now:
- Use Smart Search to pinpoint their needs, without even browsing,
- Start an interactive chat on any Marketplace listing page, with answers grounded on the listing detail,
- Compare products using a toggle on multiple listings that produces a customer-focused grid with specifics like price, ratings, and plans
With these tools, customer browsing can be more targeted. It also allows your Marketplace listing to shine if you have these details.
Your Marketplace listing needs to address customer questions
Your listing still needs to make the business value case for your solution on Marketplace. A strong listing should make it easy to understand who your solution is for, what problem it solves, how it works, and what outcome a customer can expect.
- Be specific about the business problems and use cases your solution addresses. Explain important Microsoft integrations, requirements, limitations, deployment options, and the path to buy or get started.
- Use the language your customers use to describe their needs throughout your title, summary, description, captions, and metadata.
- Give them enough information to evaluate your solution. Representative screenshots or videos can demonstrate the experience. Current security, privacy, compliance, support, customer evidence, and reviews can help establish trust.
This becomes even more important as the buying experience becomes conversational.
Customers can use interactive chat on Marketplace product pages to ask about capabilities, integrations, industry use cases, and fit. Your listing supplies important context as customers explore and evaluate your solution.
App Advisor can show you where to improve
If you have a published Marketplace offer, App Advisor can review your listing and provide personalized, AI-powered recommendations for improving it.
Rather than manually comparing your listing against pages of guidance, you can see specific opportunities to make it stronger.
Maybe your description focuses on features but doesn’t clearly explain outcomes. Your value proposition needs to be sharper. An important Microsoft integration is hard to find. Your screenshots don’t give customers enough context.
The point is not to add more words or even stuff your listing with keywords. It is to make your information clear, comprehensive, and relevant to a customer deciding whether your solution fits their needs.
Intelligent discovery & App Advisor: two sides of the Marketplace experience
The connection is simple.
- Customers describe what they need. Intelligent discovery helps them find and evaluate relevant solutions.
- You describe what your solution does. App Advisor helps you strengthen the Marketplace listing customers use to understand and evaluate it.
Together, those experiences reinforce why a listing optimization in App Advisor can no longer be a one-time publishing task.
Your product will likely change—you’ll launch new capabilities, reach different industries, add Microsoft integrations, learn more about customers, and sharpen your capabilities and positioning. Your Marketplace listing should evolve with it.
Publishing is just the start of your Marketplace growth
Getting an offer onto Marketplace is only a starting point. You have to optimize your listing to grow your presence.
Look at your listing from the perspective of a potential customer starting with a business need rather than your product name.
- Can they quickly understand the problem you solve?
- Can they tell whether your solution fits their environment?
- Do you give them enough information to confidently take the next step?
As Marketplace discovery becomes more intelligent, the answers to those questions become more important.
Use App Advisor to review your published Marketplace listing, get personalized recommendations, and make it easier for customers to understand why your solution fits what they need.