Microsoft Partner Marketing, Measured.

We listed twenty marketing activities, from SEO and paid search through to ABM and marketplace optimisation. The average UK&I partner is already running nine of them and plans to add another eight in the next 12 months.

If those plans come off, the typical partner will be running eighteen of the twenty by the end of 2027.

Most partners have one marketer, or a director fitting marketing in around the day job. You can probably guess how that goes. The report shows what the partners who are getting it right do instead.

We asked partners what most limits their marketing today. Budget came eighth out of ten, chosen by just 19.2%.

So what came top? The complexity of funding rules, chosen by 31.2% of UK&I partners. That figure is higher still among the people who actually have to claim the money.

That matters, because a sizeable chunk of partner marketing runs on somebody else's money. Among partners funded by Co-op or MDF, 60.6% said their marketing would stop or reduce if Microsoft funding was withdrawn.

For the average UK&I partner, marketing brings in roughly two in every ten new customers. Microsoft and distribution between them bring in more.

Then we split the answers by job title, and things got interesting. The boardroom and the marketing desk didn't agree on budget, on who does the marketing or on whether marketing's impact can be measured. That last gap is the widest in the entire study. We'll let the report tell you how wide.