Benefits of Publishing your app on Marketplace
By: Michael Purnell
Tags: Marketplace, Developer, Zoom, Apps, Integration

With our new marketplace attracting millions of new developers to integrate Zoom within their platform and users downloading marketplace apps for an enhanced experience, we wanted to point out the many benefits and strategies to launch and maintain a successful app within Zoom’s marketplace.

Benefits

When launching you app within marketplace, you’ll not only be introducing your product or service to millions of other Zoom users to try out and love your app but this also gives you a chance to scale your company’s branding at a global level. In addition, by incorporating Zoom’s world class products and services within your platform, you’ll be able to improve your Customer Satisfactory scores. Since customers are already using Zoom to power their meetings, you’ll have access to Zoom’s enormous customer base since all customers using Zoom are routed to marketplace when looking of an integration app.

Backend Requirements

If you previously built an appusing our legacy developer site, your app is most likely set up as an account level app on the marketplace. With launching a new app within marketplace, you’ll have the ability to create & switch to a user-level app for full multi-tenancy. Also, with a user-managed app, you can make your app private for beta testing or publish it for all of Zooms customers to consume.

While users will be downloading your app, you’ll also have the ability to set your Webhook events at the user level to know different events that occur for each of your users. Also, you’ll need to securely store their data since you’ll be granting users access to specific privileges, obtain credentials for session management, and remove any unnecessary data if the user decides to uninstall your app. With users downloading your app from the marketplace, your user-base will increase drastically, you’ll want to think about how your platform is built to support the user signup flow and possibly offer new accounts a freemium model.

Front-End App Consideration

While creating & submitting your app to marketplace, you’ll want to make sure that your app is secured to protect your users’ privacy.

Using Scopes

Incorporate scopes within your app to limit the access that your customer has while using your app. For example, your app can limit itself to just its needs to work such as creating a meeting for a specific user or subset of users instead of having full administrative API rights of creating meetings for all users. Try to keep your scopes as lean as possible, leaving out permissions that your app doesn’t need.

Mitigating Security Risk

When creating an app, take into account security risks such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, Broken Authentication, Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Also, when securing your app you want make sure to never hard-code any sensitive credentials, you will also need to hash passwords using salt algorithms, and encrypt access and refresh tokens.

App Support

By having your app available for anyone to download and use, you’ll need to make sure to have a support plan in place, just in case your users might have an issue with the app or how it works.

Customer support

Zoom’s marketplace includes a support button on the app’s detailed page. Have a detailed support article listed on marketplace site with details on how to install and configure your app, best practices, FAQs, links to your blog containing easy-to-find content and include a support email and phone number for users to get in direct contact with you.

Maintenance

Since your app is in the hands of users across the world, users will most likely be using different versions of your app. It’s recommended that your team develop a DevOps strategy to quickly make secure code changes and updates without worrying that your certain features could be broken for users who haven’t recently updated your app.

Marketing

Now that you’re planning on launching your app on Zoom marketplace, you’ll want to make sure that you at least have a marketing strategy in place to attract new customers.

Marketing Campaigns

You might also want to set up marketing campaigns through different channels to make sure that you can reach your target demographic. Promoting your app with a consistent sticky message with savvy promo materials will help attract more leads.

Become social by promoting your app on blogs and popular social media platforms. On social media sites, you can use hashtags to reach even more of your target customers. In your blogs, you can use case studies from existing customers to entice new customers to try out your app.

On your company’s website it’s best to create a landing page where you can go into greater detail about your app’s incredible features and provide a clear Call to Action to navigate or download your app.

SEO Optimization & Best practices

You’ll want to optimize your SEO and implement SEO best practices you want with keywords that best describe your apps title, description, url, image alternative text etc. Ensure that you have search friendly urls when linking your app within other websites. With high quality images, your app will stand out to first time users and with a detailed image description , spider bots can easily detect the app. These elements are important to drive conversions.

Also, you’ll want to Monitor your SEO ranking by using an SEO tool or opening a browser in incognito mode and search for your app. The better your ranking, the more traffic you’ll drive to your app!