Best marketing support models for Microsoft resellers

Ask ten Microsoft resellers who does their marketing and you'll get ten slightly awkward answers.

"Well, I do some of it. We've got an agency for the website. There's a freelancer who writes the blogs. Oh, and the distributor ran a campaign for us last quarter."

That's not a criticism. It's how most partners work. For our research study, Microsoft Partner Marketing, Measured, we asked 501 Microsoft partners in the UK&I and the USA how their marketing is resourced. On average, each partner picked roughly 2.3 different models, and nobody said "none of the above".

So if you're weighing up outsourced marketing services for Microsoft IT resellers, you're probably not starting from a blank page. You're deciding what to keep, what to change and what to hand over. This guide compares the main options (in-house, freelancer and agency) against the four things that matter most: service fit, channel expertise, scalability and commercial impact.

Firstly, the lay of the land. In the UK&I, the most common setup was a director or owner covering marketing alongside another role, chosen by 38.8% of partners. Next came a broad channel marketing agency (34.8%), a dedicated in-house team (32.4%), a specialist Microsoft partner agency (30.8%) and a single in-house marketer (28%). Freelancers came in at 21.2% and distributor support at 20.8%.

Only two of those eight options describe someone internal whose whole job is marketing, and neither is at the top.

There are some interesting transatlantic differences, too. Partners in the USA lean more towards generalist agencies (38.2% against 26.8%) and freelancers (25.9% against 21.2%). UK&I partners keep more work in-house and are more likely to use a channel agency. Put simply, the USA tends to buy craft, while the UK&I tends to buy channel knowledge.

Let's start with the most popular option, because it's the one most partners never actually decided on.

Across the whole study, 35.7% of partners resource marketing through a director or owner doing it alongside another job. And the top constraint on partner marketing? Competing internal priorities, at 32.9%. Those two numbers are within three points of each other and almost certainly describe the same businesses.

When marketing is the second half of somebody's job, it loses to the first half. A customer escalation lands, a renewal needs saving, a proposal's due by close-of-play on Friday, and the campaign slips a fortnight. Do that four times a year and you've lost a quarter.

It's a perfectly sensible place to start, and plenty of partners get by on it. But it isn't a model you can grow on.

A dedicated in-house marketer or team has real advantages. They know your proposition, your customers and your sales team. They're in the room when priorities change, and they don't need a brief to understand what the business is trying to do.

The catch is capacity. The average partner runs 10 of the 20 marketing activities we asked about and plans to add 8-9 more within twelve months. That's SEO, paid social, ABM, marketplace listings, case studies and reporting, often on one person's to-do list. Nobody does all of that well.

It shows in the data. 27.2% of UK&I partners named headcount or in-house skills as a top-three limit on their marketing, against 19.9% in the USA.

Best for: owning the strategy, the proposition and the relationship with sales. It isn't necessarily the right answer for every piece of delivery.

Freelancers are flexible, cost-effective and often brilliant at one thing, whether that's copy, design, paid media or video. For a reseller that knows exactly what it needs, they can be ace.

But freelancers rarely own the plan, and they're only as good as the brief they're given. There's also the key-person risk. If your one PPC contractor takes a holiday, so does your paid search.

Then there's channel knowledge. 25% of partners say over-reliance on vendor-supplied material is limiting their marketing. Hand a freelancer a Microsoft campaign-in-a-box without clear direction and there's a good chance you'll get the same assets hundreds of other partners are running, just with your logo on.

Best for: defined, repeatable tasks, with someone internal steering.

Agencies are already well established in this market. 62.7% of partners use some kind of agency, and 30.9% specifically use a Microsoft partner marketing agency. So the question for most resellers is which kind of agency, and what for.

Generalist B2B technology marketing agencies bring strong creative and plenty of craft. The trade-off is that they'll often learn the Microsoft ecosystem on your time (and your budget).

Broad channel marketing agencies understand the reseller model, distribution and multi-vendor marketing, and they're a good fit if Microsoft is one vendor among several.

Microsoft specialist agencies offering managed marketing services know co-op, MDF, solution areas and the shift in incentives towards net-new growth.

Now, you'd expect us to make the case for the last one. Resultful is a Microsoft partner marketing agency, after all, so take this with a pinch of salt. But the numbers make an interesting point. Budget ranks eighth out of ten on the list of things limiting partner marketing, at 18%, while the complexity of funding rules sits second overall at 29.3%, and top in the UK&I at 31.2%. From experience, we've seen partners stand to lose six-figure sums because nobody owned the claims process. Channel expertise isn't a nice-to-have when a sizeable chunk of your marketing money comes with rules attached.

If every partner's plans came off, the average partner would be running eighteen of twenty activities within a year. And when we asked about priorities, eleven options were separated by just 4.4 points. That's what it looks like when nobody's choosing.

So when you judge a support model on scalability, don't ask whether it can do more. Ask whether it can do the right things properly, then flex up for a launch or a funding window and back down afterwards. Agencies and freelancers can scale up and down; permanent hires don't. That's usually the case for a blend.

This is where most support models, internal or external, fall down.

On average, marketing generated 24.4% of partners' new business, while Microsoft referrals and distributor or vendor leads together brought in 35%. Only 54.1% of partners say they can measure marketing's contribution to pipeline and revenue, and in the UK&I 13.6% simply didn't know.

And the stakes are rising. Microsoft's incentives have moved from rewarding retained licences to rewarding new licence growth, yet the most common explanation partners gave for their confidence was that their growth had come mainly from renewals (31.5%).

Whichever model you pick, ask one question before you sign anything: how will we know this worked? If the answer isn't tied to pipeline, it's not a commercial answer.

For most resellers, the answer is a blend, with ownership kept inside the business.

Before any of that, try an exercise from the report. Work out how many hours marketing really gets in a normal week, then in a week when a customer escalates. Once you've got that number, you can make a real decision: protect the time, hire into it, buy it in, or cut back what you're trying to do until it fits. All four are legitimate. Carrying on as though the time exists when it doesn't isn't.