For CMOs, Brand & Product Marketers, and Channel Leaders

If you’re a technology marketer, your directive probably looks something like this:

 – Scale reach with buyers to build awareness, trust and preference, to increase sales and revenue –

Channel is an extension of this in that partners help scale reach with end buyers, influence purchase decisions and expand sales beyond internal teams, resulting in increased revenue often coupled with faster close rates and lower CAC.

To help achieve the directive, heavy investments are made into marketing with large budget allocations dedicated to complex data schemes and paid media strategies: social, search, display, native, ABM, intent data, retargeting, etc.

Budgets increase, tech stacks sprawl, the promises of data get loftier, and complexity quickly grows out of control.

All the while, there’s a marketing channel sitting at your fingertips through which high-propensity, high-intent buyers are easily accessible during the exact moments in which they’re hungry for solution information – partner websites.

Chances are, however, you’re nowhere to be found.

The Canary In The Coal Mine

We worked with PartnerOptimizer to audit tens of thousands of partner websites.  We looked specifically at through-partner brand representation, solution content presence and content recency.  The results are eye-opening:

On average, only 35% of partner websites accurately represent the vendors and vendor solutions being sold by those partners.

The two most consistent gaps are:

• Invisibility – No vendor branding or solution content present at all to support the vendor-partner relationship
• Outdated content – Solution content is outdated, carrying average publishing dates from 2022 or prior (to put this in perspective, this means that AI isn’t even in the conversation)

The net effect – if you are invisible to buyers, or your products seem irrelevant to buyers due to outdated content, you’re harming your brand, pushing buyers to competitor solutions and leaving revenue on the table…not really inline with the directive.

It’s Not A Marketing Problem – It’s A Strategic Gap Coupled With Process Breakdown

Given how widespread the representation gap is, it’s important to understand why it exists and persists.  Vendor teams are producing tons of content and building programs to scale targeted distribution and exposure.  Partners are vested in quality marketing operations that paint both their businesses and the solutions they offer in the best light possible as to attract and do business with end buyers.  Seems pretty much hand-in-glove…so what’s the rub?

On the vendor side, functional silos between brand, product and channel tend to derail collaborative effort and effects.  Brand and product marketers are measured on marketing metrics related to direct-to-end buyer reach and engagement, with little channel interplay.  Channel is measured on through-partner revenue often without accountability to marketing.  As such, activating and measuring partner websites as a marketing channel isn’t assigned to anyone.  Therefore, it doesn’t happen.

To better understand the partner perspective, we asked them about it.  Partner responses were clear and consistent.  They agree that maintaining vendor brand visibility and current content about vendor solutions is important.  They also agree that they run the risk of irrelevancy when their resources are out of date.  However, their biggest hurdles to maintaining adequate vendor representation are time and process.  They don’t have time to support the manual processes associated with maintaining current, accurate representation on their websites for the upwards of 20 vendors that they work with.  (And no, CMS/DAM functionalities within your PRM are not the answer as these tools require a push-pull manual process.)

The lack of cross-functional strategy on the vendor side coupled partner process breakdown creates through-channel marketing blind spots, spawning program dissonance and fractured end buyer experiences.

Fix the process.  Fill the gap.  Power your ecosystem.

Partner Websites Aren’t Important Though…Or Are They?

It used to be that you could run Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs to target individual accounts, drive traffic back to a landing page, get some wins and distribute leads out to partners.

The days of linear GTM motions are over.

Fast forward to today and the foreseeable future and it’s all about buyer-led, Ecosystem-Based Marketing (EBM).

Suraj Atreya , a Field and Partner Marketing Leader at Rackspace Technology, so perfectly stated, “Each enterprise deal today is a network of accounts + partners + platforms + commitments moving in sync. Buying is distributed across hyperscalers, GSIs, ISVs, and data ecosystems that shape customer decisions long before your SDR books a meeting.”

I couldn’t agree with Suraj more, though I’ll extend this buying behavior to SMB and mid-market as well.

Ecosystems surround your buyers to serve as the very fabric of influence that guides purchase behavior.

The power of EBM comes through mapping your buyers to their ecosystems and planning activation accordingly.  In doing so, you’ll move beyond ABM to influence entire cohorts of buyers while meeting them where they are, which goes a long way when it comes to building authority and trust.

Examples of what may be included in buyer ecosystems are:

• Review sites like G2
• Marketplaces like the SAP Endorsed App Marketplace
• Social media
• Analysts like Jay McBain
• Industry publications
• Trade shows
• Thought leadership
• Peer networks
• Strategic alliances
• Complementary vendors
• Consultancies like Bridge Partners and AchieveUnite
• And yes, AI

Consistently found across essentially all buyer ecosystems are partners.  When you consider that the average buyer now works with up to seven partners during their research, purchase and implementation processes, you can consider partners to be an ecosystem in unto themselves.

However, if you look at your budget, you’ll probably not find line items or team allocations associated with activating and measuring partner websites as a marketing channel in the same way you will see line items for other ecosystem components like G2 and Gartner.  (Another symptom of the strategic gap.)

It’s time to rethink this.  It’s time to reconsider how partner websites can serve your marketing strategies and assign resources accordingly.  EBM requires 2% of 50 different things to come together in a well-orchestrated manner.  Partner websites are an easy 2% to activate.

This Sounds Great, But What Are The Impacts On Revenue

Let’s hear from the experts on this:

Crossbeam reports that ecosystem-led deals are 53% more likely to close at a 46% faster rate and that these deals are often larger than direct deals and typically carry lower CACs

In the Bridge Partners 2025 Ecosystem Compass Report 64% of surveyed organizations say more than half of their new customers come via partner-influenced deals

In short, ecosystem-led deals help you scale reach, logo acquisition and revenue, faster, and at lower costs.  Pretty much the holy grail of business!

This is probably a good time to bring up the Pareto Principal stating that 80% of your revenue is coming from 20% of your partners.  Though, based on recent conversations with channel leaders, the ratio is probably closer to 95:5.

Simple test – look at your through-partner representation as it exists today on websites belonging to your top 20% (or 5%).  Then look at your representation across the other 80% (or 95%).  See the correlation?

If you could enable more of your partners to consistently represent your brand and solutions to end buyers, do you think there would be a positive impact on revenue?

Channelscaler , EULER and xAmplify are building capabilities centered on making partner business easier and automated.  Reach out to your AE and ask if they have a capability or integration that you can tap into.

AI-powered marketing platforms, like Structured , offer automated distribution capabilities as part of larger, multi-channel programs.  If you’re building something bigger, this may be the right solution for you.

Talk to the consultants you work with. Bridge Partners and AchieveUnite are two of the best.  They are there to help you assess your needs, find the best solutions and create best-in-class partner programs.

And finally, look to point solutions like ChannelBridge.AI , that are singularly focused on solving for this specific representation gap.  Working with a point solution gives you the flexibility to build your own toolbox, often at lower costs, while enhancing overall strategy and partner experience.

Regardless of the route you take, it’s important to first map partner websites into your ecosystem strategy so that you understand the implications across your organization and how best to measure performance.  This will help you maximize and measure program ROI.

Speaking Of Measurement

We’re in an age where everything must be measured.  Measurement gives us the data that guides our understanding of strategy performance.

The first step of measurement is establishing baselines.  This will help you understand where performance stands today and how strategies have moved the related needles.  To this end, it is important to understand what metrics quantify performance to ensure the value of your reporting.

Every organization is different, but here are several ideas of how the impacts of activating partner websites can be measured across your organization:

Let’s Wrap It Up Already, TL;DR

Partner websites are no longer passive real estate. They are active, high-trust points of influence sitting directly inside the ecosystems that shape how buyers learn, evaluate, and choose solutions—yet most vendors leave this channel underutilized, unmanaged, and unmeasured. By closing the strategic gap between brand, product, and channel, and by automating the processes that prevent partners from keeping content fresh and accurate, vendors can transform these overlooked touch points into a scalable marketing engine that expands reach, accelerates revenue, and lowers acquisition costs. In an era defined by ecosystem-based buying, activating partner websites isn’t just a marketing tactic—it’s a competitive imperative that turns your partner network into a measurable source of authority, trust, and profitable growth.

 About the Author:  Leland is a Co-Founder of ChannelBridge.ai.  ChannelBridge automates content syndication to partner websites, eliminating associated workflows by up to 100% while also significantly reducing costs.  Email Leland today for more information:  leland@channelbridge.ai

How IT Vendors Can Position Themselves For Both AI Discoverability and SEO Dominance

In today’s content-driven marketing landscape, vendors in the IT channel face a unique dual challenge: getting discovered by both human buyers and machine intelligence. As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude become more common in B2B research workflows, the need to be referenced, indexed, and summarized by these tools is more critical than ever.

But here’s the catch — these models aren’t scraping the internet in real time. They’re trained on publicly available data up to a fixed cutoff date. For ChatGPT, that date was June 2024. So if you want to show up in AI-powered answers in the future, you need to think about content creation and distribution like it’s still 2024, because the next training period and cutoff date will soon be on the horizon.  In other words, you need to be creating and distributing content at scale, now!

This post is your guide to doing exactly that — and how ChannelBridge.ai helps make it easy, at scale.

Why LLMs Won’t Reference Your Brand (Yet)

Here’s what most marketers get wrong:
Just publishing content on your corporate blog or issuing a press release doesn’t guarantee inclusion in an LLM’s training data. These models are trained on a mix of licensed, publicly available, and high-authority data — and most corporate content gets left out unless:

• It’s widely linked from other authoritative domains

• It’s indexed and crawled frequently by search engines

• It’s included in datasets commonly used to train models (like Wikipedia, news archives, etc.)

In other words, if your content doesn’t travel, it doesn’t get seen — not by buyers, not by search engines, and certainly not by AI.

From Partner Marketing to AI Visibility

To state the obvious, through-partner marketing is extremely important.  In today’s landscape, buyers are working with up to 8 different partners during their purchase process.  As such, partners largely own marketing.  However, in the context of AI-powered overview answers and the need to be indexed in and referenced by the models themselves, partner websites are also serving as content distribution nodes that help you scale content indexation.  Scaling content indexation translates directly to being visible to AI models.  The more visible you are to AI, the more likely it will be that your content is referenced.  By using a tool like ChannelBridge.ai, vendors can:

• Automatically syndicate their latest content (e.g. case studies, product updates, blogs) to all participating reseller websites

• Scale backlink generation across a large network of channel partner domains

• Increase indexation rates for existing and new content

• Strengthen topical authority in both traditional SEO and AI search summaries

• Position content to be included in future LLM training data due to its wider reach and referenceability

Why Indexation + Backlinks Matter (Even for AI)

Most language models are trained using content that’s:

1. Public

2. Prominent

3. Frequently referenced or linked

This is where ChannelBridge.ai becomes a force multiplier. By automating content delivery to hundreds or thousands of partner websites, you massively increase your digital footprint — without needing additional media spend or manual syndication efforts.

Each partner site acts as a content mirror, and each link back to your owned domain builds your backlink profile — a traditional SEO win, yes, but also a signal to AI training pipelines that your content is reputable and valuable.

Checklist: Making Your Content Discoverable by AI (and Humans)

Want to improve your odds of being indexed by a model like ChatGPT in the next training cycle? Follow this roadmap:

✅ Write high-quality, educational content relevant to your products and customers
✅ Host that content in crawlable formats (HTML over PDF when possible)
✅ Use schema markup and follow SEO best practices
✅ Distribute that content to your reseller network automatically via ChannelBridge.ai
✅ Encourage backlinks by embedding links in syndicated content
✅ Get listed in public directories, marketplaces, or review sites (like G2 or Capterra)
✅ Pursue media mentions or press releases on indexable sites
✅ Create a Wikipedia entry if your brand meets notability standards

TL;DR: Make Content Like It’s 2024

Your future visibility in search — both traditional and AI-powered — depends on what you do right now. If your content isn’t easily accessible, broadly distributed, and frequently linked, you’ll miss the chance to show up in buyer research workflows, search engine summaries, and AI-generated answers.

ChannelBridge.ai makes this scalable by automating the distribution of your content across the most important network you already own — your reseller base.

If you want to future-proof your marketing and start being the answer buyers find, it’s time to make content like it’s 2024.

Ready to automate?  Reach out to us today!

Two powerful change agents are converging right now in the IT Channel: 

1. The shift to Channel 3.0 (think marketplaces, AI-powered products and agentic services)
2. Uncertain macroeconomic conditions forcing capital constraints and putting vendors in the position of doing more with less.

The combination of these two catalysts is making one thing abundantly clear – process automation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a requirement for survival.

Doing what ChannelBridge.ai does, we’d like to present one specific use case that makes automation shine:  through-channel content distribution.  Content that supports customer consideration, customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, feature adoption and renewal is critically important to revenue production.  Afterall, this content really serves as the interface between vendor solutions and end buyer purchase processes.  (Hint – This is why your CMO maintains heavy investment into content production.)  While the intent has always been to scale through-partner content distribution, the execution consistently falls short.

**Point in fact, we worked with PartnerOptimizer to audit partner websites at scale and found that roughly 70% of partner websites either lack reference to the vendors they’re aligned with, or worse, they present outdated content and messaging that misrepresents vendor value and diminishes buyer trust. 

**Specific point in fact, we audited 1,552 partner websites for a global cybersecurity vendor and found that only 20.6% of those websites mentioned the vendor in any way.  We also found that the most recent content representing this vendor on partner sites was from 2023.  Believe me when I tell you that there was a few minutes of silence in the room when we presented our findings.

Channel leadership listen up!  This isn’t a cosmetic issue—it’s a revenue issue!

Outdated or absent vendor representation on partner websites leads to a host of downstream consequences: missed deals, weaker market positioning, and negative brand distortion at scale. When your buyers research solutions online and your message is missing—or misaligned—you’re either invisible or irrelevant.  This reduces partner activity levels and actively diminishes revenue opportunities.  (Unpack that for a second – if your partner hasn’t updated content about your offerings in 2 years, do you think you’re top of mind with your partners?  Do you think they’re including you in their marketing programs?  Do you think their sales teams are even talking about you?  The answers are NO.)

With big investments pouring into content marketing and the importance of quality execution being clear, why does this problem persist?  The answer is surprisingly simple – the processes related to through-partner content distribution are largely manual and they break down.  It’s not that your partners don’t want updated content about your offerings on their website.  They simply don’t have the time and/or the technical expertise to support the updates.  Plus they probably work with upwards of 10-20 vendors all asking them to do the same thing.

What’s the solution?  Automation.

Upsides To Automation:

Now that we’ve established that manual processes don’t work, especially as they relate to through-partner content distribution, let’s look at the upsides that you can expect from automating this process:

• Consistent Content Distribution: Most vendors manually send assets to partners through portals, DAMs, or email, hoping partners post them. Automation (think ChannelBridge.ai) replaces this uncertainty with guaranteed distribution—your content goes live on partner websites automatically, ensuring you’re always in the conversation with timely, relevant content that positions your offerings in the best way possible.
• Improve Partner Activation Rates: Many partners lack the time, knowledge, or resources to market effectively. Automated syndication gives every partner—regardless of size—the ability to market like a pro, reigniting their go-to-market engagement.  By automating this process, you help your partners get back in the game while also ensuring that your offerings are part of the conversation.  This will automatically create a lift to partner activation levels.
• SEO Performance: Partner marketing and SEO fit have a hand-in-glove fit.  Automated back linking at scale from partner websites dramatically improves SEO performance for your brand..  It’s probably a good time to mention that organic search results are far and away the most trusted form of media.
• Lifecycle Marketing: From acquisition to feature adoption through renewal, automating content distribution ensures partners have the right content at the right time to support every phase of the customer journey, automatically.
• GenAI Overview Answers:  GenAI overview answers are rapidly changing search behavior and accelerating end buyer research processes.  The trick to being included in the overview answers is to scale content indexation.  Automating distribution is a surefire way to do this.  (Plus, being included in GenAI overview answers brings the wow-factor.  Your leadership will love it!)
• Increased Revenue Generation:  We’ll answer this one with a question.  What do you think helps your partners win deals….content from 3 years ago about needs that no longer exist or content that you authored this morning about your most current product offerings?

Do More. Spend Less.

Back to those pesky macroeconomics that we’re all facing right now, vendors need to be ruthlessly efficient. Automation (aka ChannelBridge.ai) allows you to scale your brand presence, modernize your through-partner marketing, cut costs and eliminate the need for human intervention—all at once. By eliminating manual workflows and reducing reliance on headcount, vendors free up resources to be redeployed toward strategy, innovation, or direct revenue-generating activities.

Summary
In today’s evolving channel landscape—defined by economic pressure and the rise of marketplace-driven, AI-enhanced products and services—vendors cannot afford inefficient, manual workflows. Through-partner content distribution is a mission-critical process that remains broken for most vendors, costing them visibility, credibility, and ultimately, revenue. ChannelBridge.ai addresses this gap head-on by fully automating the distribution of vendor content to partner websites, ensuring accurate, up-to-date messaging at scale. The benefits are clear: improved partner activation, stronger SEO, increased inclusion in GenAI search summaries, and a consistent customer experience across your partner network. In a time when doing more with less isn’t optional, automation is the only path forward—and ChannelBridge.ai delivers it at a fraction of the cost compared to the manual process you’re using today.

Ready to automate?  Reach out to us today!

Tech marketing leadership – this one is for you!

Being a co-founder of ChannelBridge, I talk with lots of partner and channel marketing leaders, and CMOs within the IT Channel.  Given what ChannelBridge is built to do, we always talk about their content distribution channels and their rates of through-partner representation.  Invariably, I see the same scenario play out time and time again:

1. • Through-partner representation rates are very low. Point in fact, we just ran a partner website audit for a global cybersecurity vendor and found that only 20.6% of their partners mention them in any way.
2. • Brand and product content on partner websites, when present, is typically out of date. For the same vendor referenced above, the average content publishing date on partner websites dated back to 2023.

Interestingly, during these same conversations many marketing leaders state that despite the conditions above they are spending money on native advertising to support content distribution…and the monthly budgets are typically big.

If this sounds like you, it’s time you know there’s a better way…let’s dig in!

What Is Native Advertising:  For clarity, native advertising is simply a means through which you can pay for placements, aka ad inventory, within publishing environments.  The creative used for native ad inventory mimics the look and feel of the actual editorial content.  This is done to make native ads feel more organic, or native, to the publishing environment to increase the likelihood of audience engagement with the ads.  Typically, advertisers use their own content as the basis for native creative because the inventory itself is meant to mimic editorial placements.  From an audience targeting perspective, marketers can buy native inventory within contextually relevant publishers or they can layer in data-driven targeting elements, like intent data, to help increase their odds of exposing their ads to only people that are potential buyers.  (Yes, you can layer contextual and data-driven targeting together, but this will typically diminish available scale to unusable levels.). Cost dynamics of native advertising are usually based on CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) or CPEs (cost per engagements, like clicks).  Depending on factors like desired scale of reach, publisher CPMs and desired frequency of exposure, average monthly budgets specifically for native campaigns range from $5K to $25K or more.

At face value, native advertising is a great way to ensure distribution of that killer content your team just published.

However, if you have a network of partners, you already have your own native ad network at your fingertips that doesn’t require any audience data or media budgets to power!  You just need to activate it.  Here’s the how and why:

How:  This is the easy part.  Simply distribute your content to your partners for placement on their websites.  Your content should live in their blogs, customer success stories, case studies and other resource sections.  The reality is that your partners want this content.  Your partners aren’t content marketers and you as a vendor have a more highly-skilled content team behind you, hence the reason why your partners haven’t updated their blogs since 2023.  Give your partners great content to use and make it easy for them to use it and it’s mission accomplished!

Why: 

1. Increase Through-Partner Representation: Seems like this is stating the obvious, but you want consistent, accurate, timely representation on partner websites.  End-buyers are visiting your partners’ websites to better understand available technology options and, in many instances, to purchase these solutions.  If your brand and products are nowhere to be found or your products look out of date, you can forget about closing the deal.
2. No Data Required: Cookie-powered audience targeting tools, like intent data, are sunsetting.  I’ll argue that these tools were never that effective, but that’s a story for another day.  These data tools are also expensive.  For context, the average annual cost for B2B intent data from providers like 6Sense and Demandbase is $50K!  On the flip side, people visiting your partners’ websites are inherently high-intent and you can reach them for almost no cost.  These people are following their own self-directed search to visit the partners they work with and trust to better understand the technology options that may help them solve for the challenges they face.  As such, when these end-buyers are on partner websites, you’re reaching them at a time when they are in a buying mindset (right time) in a contextually relevant environment that they trust to deliver the information they’re looking for (right place) with content that helps them down their path to purchase (right message).  This is literally the holy grail for targeted content distribution!
3. Enhanced Credibility and Trust: Most people don’t like or trust ads.  However, people do trust the partners they work.  Content distributed through reseller websites benefits from this inherent trust factor. Buyers view your reseller partners as credible sources of technology recommendations, making them more likely to engage with and act on content featured on those platforms. This credibility boost is difficult to achieve with traditional native advertising, where the connection between content and brand is often seen as purely transactional.
4. Seamless Integration into the Buyer’s Journey: The IT buying cycle is complex, often involving multiple stakeholders and extensive research. Native advertising struggles to align with this journey, as it interrupts the experience rather than enhancing it. By contrast, distributing content on reseller websites allows you to provide valuable information at precisely the right stage of the decision-making process.  This level of contextual relevance drives engagement and conversion more effectively than ads placed on third-party platforms.
5. Quality Of Acquisition: The unfortunate reality of the digital advertising ecosystem is that it’s riddled with fraud.  Bots click on ads to game the system and gobble up your budget.  Need proof?  Just look at your own analytics, specifically at engagement metrics by acquisition channel.  Invariably, the lowest engagement and conversion rates come from paid advertising.  Compare these metrics to those produced through organic acquisition channels, like distributed content, and you’ll see a night and day difference…high engagement and conversion rates.  Why? The traffic is from actual human beings that used a self-directed journey to find your content.
6. Impact On Broader Marketing Motions: Ads are just that, ads.  They don’t impact other marketing channels.  However, distributing content through your partners websites does.  Here are a few specific examples:
   • Improved SEO outcomes through scaling quality backlinks coming from relevant websites
   • Increased content indexation improves your odds of being included in GenAi overview answers
   • Niche audience reach – your partners often attract audiences that are hard to otherwise reach
   • Improved UX and brand perception on partner websites
   • Increased trust, authority and credibility in the market

7. Sales Enablement: Your partners’ sales teams often look to their own websites to provide information that helps them navigate sales conversations with end-buyers.  If the information they need to better position your products with end-buyers isn’t there or it’s out of date, those sales teams will move on to talk about other products with their customers.  You have to make it easy for sellers to access content about your products.  By distributing content to your partners’ websites, you help ensure that their sellers always have current, accurate information about your products to use in their sales conversations.

**Pro-Tip:  Align your content with customer acquisition, feature adoption and renewal to help your partners market across the full customer life cycle.

8. Cost Reduction: The actual media spends and data costs associated with native advertising are significant.  Distributing content through your partners’ websites, however, is significantly less expensive as no data is required and no media spends are necessary.  Yes, you still need to invest in quality content production.  However, the function of distribution itself can be fully automated for a fraction of the cost compared to typical media budgets.  So, not only are you relieving the need to spend money on data and advertising, but with automation in place you’re also saving on the costs associated with the distribution process itself (think payroll).

How ChannelBridge Fits In:  We built ChannelBridge to be a plug-and-play, one-touch solution for through-partner content distribution.  As a vendor, all you need to do is continue publishing great content to your website.  ChannelBridge will automatically index and distribute your content to your partners’ websites 24x7x365.  On the partner side, the process is also fully automated.  Once they integrate ChannelBridge into their websites, they literally don’t have to do anything to keep their websites up to date.  ChannelBridge makes distributing content through your partners’ websites effortless for both you and your partners.

What’s ChannelBridge Cost?  The cost of using ChannelBridge varies based on the number of partners you want to include in your program.  However, our average cost is around $20 per partner per month which is exponentially less than your typical native ad budget plus data costs.  Factor in your savings on time, effort and payroll and this becomes a no-brainer!

Conclusion:  If you have a partner network, you essentially have your own native ad network at your fingertips, but one that offers way more efficiency and effectiveness compared to paid ads.  When using your partners’ websites to serve as your content distribution channel, you’ll target the right people at the right time and in the right place with your messaing, thereby increasing favorable marketing and revenue outcomes.  Add automation technology like ChannelBridge to the equation and you’ll also make the process of content distribution effortless and way more cost effective than paid ads.

Ready to maximize your partner network?  Reach out to us today and we’ll make it happen!

As you know, resellers play a crucial role in the IT channel by bridging the gap between vendors and end customers, driving vendor revenues to new heights.  Given the weight your resellers carry for your organization, it’s critically important to listen when your partners speak, especially if they’re complaining about the dynamics of your partner program. 

To this end, Channelnomics just released their annual research on the “Top 10 Grievances Partners Have With Vendors” based on their analysis of thousands of partner comments.  Number 4 on the list – insufficient marketing resources.

Alright vendors, it’s time to step it up because this complaint has been in the top 10 for pretty much the entire history of the channel.  Are you listening to your partners?

This should go without saying, but if you’re not providing your resellers with effective marketing tools and resources, they will struggle to effectively communicate the value of your solutions, ultimately impacting sales and customer engagement. To foster stronger relationships and drive mutual success, vendors must empower their reseller partners with robust marketing support.  If you won’t, your competitors will, enabling them to take market share from you.

With this hot topic in mind, here are the top 4 ways vendors should be providing essential marketing assistance to their resellers.

1.  Provide Content That Supports Pre- and Post-Purchase Needs

One of the most impactful ways to support resellers is by providing high-quality marketing content that supports both pre- and post-purchase needs. This content should align with key areas such as brand marketing, thought leadership, product marketing, feature adoption, and renewal. By covering the entire customer lifecycle, vendors enable resellers to educate potential buyers at every stage of their journey—from initial awareness to long-term product engagement—while ensuring brand consistency and credibility.  Not only does this help your partners market, it also helps their sales teams better understand and position your products with end buyers.  Essential content types include:

• Product descriptions, specifications, and use cases
• Thought leadership articles that highlight industry trends
• Case studies and customer success stories
• Whitepapers and solution briefs
• Engaging video content and product demos

By offering this comprehensive content strategy, vendors help resellers drive customer acquisition, engagement, and retention, ultimately strengthening the overall sales pipeline.

2.  Offer Co-Branded Marketing Assets & Joint Venture Campaigns

Resellers benefit greatly from having access to professionally designed, co-branded marketing materials. Vendors should create customizable templates for brochures, email campaigns, social media posts, landing pages and voice of the customer programs that resellers can personalize with their own branding. Co-branded content enhances trust among end buyers, reinforcing the partnership between vendors and resellers while driving higher engagement. 

With assets created, it’s time to think about deployment.  To generate leads and drive sales, vendors should launch joint venture marketing programs with their resellers.  These programs should include:

• Co-hosted webinars and virtual events
• Targeted digital advertising campaigns
• Social media promotions
• In-person trade shows and networking events
• Content syndication and distribution programs

By actively engaging in joint marketing efforts, vendors can amplify brand awareness, increase customer reach, and strengthen reseller relationships.  Looking for a new approach to creating joint venture programs, check out Demandi.co.

3.  Move Beyond MDF with Purpose-Driven Marketing Tools

While Market Development Funds (MDF) have been a traditional approach to supporting reseller marketing, it’s time to get with the times and think beyond MDF.  MDF programs have very low activation rates because they are often complicated, and resellers simply don’t have the time to initiate marketing programs on their own. Giving your partners marketing funds to work with translates to putting more work on your partners’ plates.  Instead, provide resellers with specific tools that align with specific purposes and outcomes.  Support your partners with automated tools and done-for-them marketing programs that reduce their marketing workflows and seamlessly integrate into their sales processes. By offering intuitive, ready-to-deploy marketing solutions, vendors can drive better adoption and maximize reseller success.

4.  Automate Marketing Support to Improve Activation Rates

Partner portals are an antiquated way to distribute marketing assets to resellers as they require manual activation and deployment processes for both vendors and resellers. It’s time to provide resellers with automated marketing solutions that get the task accomplished while also reducing associated workflows. Resellers need marketing support that is automated and that’s done for them. Automation tools should be the priority to improve activation rates, ensuring that marketing content is seamlessly deployed without adding additional burdens on reseller teams. By embracing automation and removing manual complexities, vendors can ensure that resellers are fully equipped to drive sales and customer engagement effectively.

Conclusion

Providing strong marketing support to resellers is essential for vendors looking to maximize their channel success. By delivering high-quality content, enabling co-branded materials, engaging in joint marketing programs, and shifting from outdated partner portals, MDF programs and manual processes to automated marketing solutions, vendors can empower resellers to effectively market their solutions and drive revenue growth. Investing in reseller marketing support not only strengthens vendor-reseller relationships but also ensures a competitive edge in the IT channel marketplace.

Where ChannelBridge Fits In

ChannelBridge fully automates content distribution to your partners’ websites, for both you and your partners.  You as a vendor simply need to continue publishing content, as you already do.  ChannelBridge automatically indexes and distributes your content to your partners’ websites.  ChannelBridge guarantees through-partner content delivery helping you as a vendor maintain accurate, relevant representation in front of end buyers while helping you and your partners drive customer acquisition, feature adoption, renewal and ultimately brand and partner loyalty.  When it comes to fully automating content distribution, ChannelBridge is the market leader.

ChannelBridge answers your partners’ calls for better marketing support.  Are you listening?