Ask a Microsoft reseller who runs their marketing and you'll rarely get one name. You'll get a list. There's a director who picked it up when the last marketer left, an agency doing content, a freelancer on the website, and whatever the distributor is running this quarter.
Nobody designed that. It got assembled, a decision at a time, and every one of those decisions made complete sense on the day it was taken.
The trouble comes later. When marketing is spread across four half-owners, nobody can be held to it, and when a board asks what marketing delivered last quarter, there isn't a single person in the room who can answer without caveats.
So before you compare providers, it's worth being clear about what you're actually buying. Not "marketing services". A way of giving marketing a whole job.
Why "a bit of everything" is the most expensive option
Most partner marketing plans have nine or ten things on them. A blog. LinkedIn. A newsletter. Some paid search. An event. A webinar somebody's been asking about since March. Case studies, when there's time.
The instinct is a good one. You don't know which channel will land, so you hedge. But almost every channel has a level below which it produces nothing at all. A blog published when there's time doesn't build an audience. A nurture sequence that stops after two emails is a list, not a campaign.
Below that line you're not getting a smaller return. You're getting no return, quietly, for a year, which is exactly why the pattern survives from one year to the next.
That matters for this decision, because most partners go looking for an outsourced partner to add capacity to a plan that's already too wide. If you buy hands to run twelve things instead of ten, you've bought more of the same problem.
The criteria that actually count in this channel
General "how to choose an agency" advice doesn't travel well here, because partner marketing has plumbing that other marketing doesn't.
Do they understand how the money works?
Co-op, MDF, distributor programmes, another vendor with a pot open this quarter. Knowing which programme covers which activity, what evidence gets asked for, when the windows open and how claims get approved is specialist knowledge. It's also the highest-return skill in partner marketing, because it turns money you already qualify for into marketing that actually runs.
Will they push back on vendor-supplied material?
Co-branded content is free, professionally produced, approved and easy to claim against. It's also the same content hundreds of other partners are putting their logo on. A provider who only ever executes the campaign library will make you look exactly like everyone else, efficiently.
Do they get the partner sales motion?
Marketing that ignores Microsoft referrals, distributor leads and account team relationships is marketing built for a business you're not running.
Can they tell you what worked?
Plenty of providers will report activity: posts published, emails sent, impressions. Fewer will agree a written definition of a qualified lead with your sales team and report against it every month. The second is worth far more than the first.
Who owns the thinking?
This is the one that decides whether the relationship works. More on it below.
The five routes, honestly
We run a marketing agency for Microsoft partners, so treat the following with appropriate scepticism, and note that two of these five are options where we wouldn't be the answer.
An in-house hire
Good at institutional knowledge, being available, and owning the proposition work nobody else will do. Falls over when the brief is too broad for one person, or when there's nobody senior enough to direct them. A capable marketer with no direction produces busy, not results.
A fractional or part-time marketing lead
Good at bringing senior judgement to a firm that can't yet justify a full-time director. Falls over when they get used as cheap execution capacity instead of for the direction you hired them for.
A generalist B2B agency
Good at craft, capacity and getting campaigns out of the door properly. Falls over when the channel context has to be explained from scratch every quarter: what co-op is, why the distributor has an opinion, why a Microsoft designation matters to a customer.
A channel or partner specialist agency
Good at funding mechanics, the partner sales motion and the ecosystem, the plumbing basically. Falls over when you want a genuinely outside perspective, or you need something the channel has no view on. Specialists come with the channel's assumptions baked in, and sometimes those assumptions are the problem.
Distributor marketing support
Good at getting activity live at low or no cost, using programmes that are already funded. Falls over the moment you need differentiation, because the same support is available to every other partner on the same terms.
You'll notice costs are missing. They vary so much by scope, seniority and region that any figure here would be misleading within a year. Ask three providers of the route you favour to scope and price the same brief. That'll tell you more than any benchmark.
The three things you can't outsource
Whichever route you pick, three responsibilities stay with you.
Deciding what your firm stands for. No external party can settle that argument for you, and the specifics that make a proposition stand up almost never live in the marketing team. They live with the people who delivered the work.
Deciding what marketing is for this year, in two objectives rather than ten. If you can't name the two, no provider can prioritise for you and you'll get a bit of everything again.
And holding the monthly conversation where the numbers are actually looked at. Ten minutes, same figures, same format.
An agency handed all three isn't being used well, and won't perform well. The partners who get the most out of an agency are the ones who keep somebody internal to own the thinking, and that's true whether the agency is us or somebody else entirely.
What good looks like in the first ninety days
Whoever takes the job, in-house or outsourced, the first quarter should produce four things you can point at.
Three claims you'd actually defend
The three claims you lead with on your website, tested against a simple question: could a competing Microsoft partner put this exact sentence on their site tomorrow without lying? If yes, it's a category description, not a proposition.
An honest activity list
Every activity you run, listed and marked as evidenced, assumed or inherited, with the hours each one gets. That hours column changes more minds than any strategy deck.
A signed definition of a qualified lead
Written down, agreed by both sales and marketing, and used in reporting from then on.
One number on the board slide
Reported every month, same slide. A number reported monthly becomes a trend within a quarter, and a trend is the only thing that survives a budget conversation.
That's a reasonable brief for any provider. It's measurable, it needs no additional budget, and if somebody can't commit to it in ninety days, that's useful to know before you sign anything.
So which one's best?
The honest answer is that the best outsourced marketing service for your business is the one that fills the specific gap you've got, and most partners haven't pinned down what that gap actually is. If the problem is direction, more execution won't fix it. If the problem is that nothing runs, another strategy document won't either.
Get clearer on that first, then go shopping. You'll buy better, and you'll brief better.