Co-Marketing in the Channel: 64% of Partners Say It Works – Here is Why

Co-marketing is one of the most under-invested and under-appreciated tools in the channel enablement stack. Techaisle’s latest global survey (N=4500) of channel partners - spanning partners across revenue tiers, service models, and geographies - makes a data-driven case that should redirect how cloud providers allocate their channel marketing resources.

64% of channel partners report high or very high usage of co-marketing templates. That places co-marketing as the third most desired go-to-market asset in the entire enablement portfolio, behind only solution briefs and email templates, and ahead of TCO/ROI calculators, presentations, whitepapers, and ready-to-use digital campaigns. When nearly two-thirds of the channel actively seek co-marketing tools, the strategic question shifts from whether co-marketing works to why vendors are not building better co-marketing assets.

Partners Have Marketing Teams, and They Know How to Use Them

One of the more persistent misconceptions in channel strategy is that partners lack marketing capability and that they are sales-led organizations without the staff or sophistication to execute marketing programs. The data says otherwise.

65% of all partners confirm that their marketing teams regularly use cloud provider GTM assets, rising to 81% among the largest partners. Marketing teams are the second-most frequent consumers of these assets, after sales teams (76%). These are not organizations where marketing is an afterthought or a single person writing blog posts. These are teams that are actively engaged in using vendor-provided tools to drive pipeline, when the tools are worth using. The question is not whether partners have marketing capability. The question is whether vendors are giving those teams assets that match their sophistication.

Partners Are Sophisticated Buyers of Marketing Tools

The survey reveals a channel that is remarkably discerning about which marketing assets deliver value and which do not. Partners are not indiscriminate consumers of whatever a cloud provider places in a portal. They are ruthlessly selective, and their selections reveal a clear understanding of what moves deals.

At the top of the hierarchy: solution briefs and email templates - are tactical, close-to-the-sale assets - documents that a partner’s sales rep can put in front of a prospect and use to advance a real customer conversation. They work because they are specific, actionable, and directly connected to the point of sale.

Co-marketing templates, at 64%, sit in the high-value tier alongside TCO/ROI calculators and presentations - tools that help partners build business cases, defend their positioning, and close deals. Partners rank co-marketing here because they understand that jointly branded content carries more credibility with SMB buyers than either a vendor’s generic campaign or the partner’s own unbranded collateral. The data reflects a channel that knows exactly what works in its market.

At the bottom: fully packaged digital campaigns - the campaign-in-a-box that many vendor channel marketing teams build their quarterly plans around - rated as important by only 46% of partners. That is the lowest score among all asset types in the survey. Microsites and landing pages fare little better at 49%. Partners have weighed these assets and found them wanting.

The 54% Demand: Co-Marketing Only Works When It Is Co-Branded

The 64% figure becomes even more actionable when paired with a second finding. When partners are asked what single feature would make GTM assets significantly more impactful, the number-one answer - at 54% - is customizable templates for co-branding. Not better design. Not more content. Not improved search within the partner portal. The single most requested improvement is the ability to put their own name on the materials that drive their sales conversations.

This distinction is critical. A co-marketing template that carries only the cloud provider’s logo and messaging is not co-marketing - it is vendor marketing distributed through the channel. Partners are telling us, with a 54% majority, that the gap is not in the concept of co-marketing but in its execution. They want assets they can make their own. The next most requested features - standardized accessible formats and inclusion of the OEM logo on templates - reinforce the same theme: make it easy to co-brand, make it easy to find, make it ours.

The flip side of this demand is equally revealing. When asked about the biggest challenges with current GTM assets, 72% of partners say the content is too generic and not SMB-focused. 59% say the assets lack customization options, requiring significant effort to rebrand or tailor. And 47% report difficulty simply finding the right asset in the partner portal. So nearly two-thirds of partners want co-marketing tools, but three-quarters say the current tools are too generic to use effectively. That gap - between intent and usability - is where vendor investment should go.

Why Co-Marketing Works: The Commercial Mechanism

Understanding why partners value co-marketing so highly requires connecting it to the commercial outcomes it enables. The survey traces a direct mechanism: co-branded solutions increase customer trust and credibility, which, in turn, improves win rates in competitive bids and enables partners to command premium pricing. Co-marketing assets are the front end of this cascade as they are how partners present a co-branded identity to the market before the solution itself is ever demonstrated.

A partner whose marketing team is distributing co-branded solution briefs, sending co-branded email sequences, and posting co-branded social content is establishing brand authority in the market. That brand authority translates into trust in the sales conversation, and trust converts into revenue. This is not an abstract branding exercise. It is the commercial mechanism through which co-marketing delivers value: it builds the trust infrastructure that makes sales teams more effective.

The Social Media Signal

One finding that deserves its own spotlight: social media content ranks as the third most important GTM asset for partner success, at 68%, ahead of TCO calculators, battlecards, case studies, and co-marketing templates. Yet when measured by intent to use, social media content drops to 52%.

The 16-point gap between importance and intent is diagnostic. Partners recognize social media’s value - they know it drives awareness and pipeline - but they find current offerings inadequate. The most critical explanation, consistent with the broader data, is that social media assets from cloud providers are too generic to reflect the partner’s own positioning and cannot be effectively co-branded. Partners understand that social media marketing matters. They are unwilling to use assets that do not represent them.

For cloud providers, this is a concrete, addressable opportunity. Co-brandable social media templates - built around specific use cases like packaged security, AI chatbots, or data migration rather than generic cloud messaging - would close the importance-to-adoption gap and unlock a marketing surface that partners already consider high-value.

The Big Three Anchor: Build Co-Marketing Around What Customers Are Buying

Co-marketing assets are only as effective as the use cases they support, and the survey provides an unambiguous directive on where to focus. Partners rank three solution areas as dominant in SMB demand: data migration, AI and generative AI, and enhanced security. These are not hypothetical future opportunities - AI/GenAI is a top-two current demand from SMB customers, nearly equal to the foundational need for data migration.

The concentration of demand means that co-marketing assets do not need to cover every workload. They need to go deep on three. A co-brandable solution brief for packaged security. An email template sequence for AI-powered chatbot deployments. A social media content kit for data migration campaigns. These are specific, buildable assets - and they align with the sweet spot that partners identify as the best balance of manageable customization and high revenue potential: packaged security, migrations, and AI-driven features.

Partners are not asking for broad horizontal content. They are asking for deep, specific, customizable co-marketing tools anchored to the three workloads their customers are buying right now.

Measure What Matters: Outcomes, Not Downloads

The co-marketing discussion cannot be separated from how vendors measure its effectiveness. Partners are emphatic on this point. The metric they endorse most strongly is the percentage of new SMB revenue coming from cloud-provider-based services. The second is the number of opportunities registered.

What they explicitly reject as measures of commitment: asset downloads, webinar attendance, and engagement with targeted marketing campaigns. When vendors optimize for downloads and campaign engagement, they produce content designed to be consumed, not content designed to close deals. The result is the 72% problem - a mountain of generic assets that partners ignore. Measuring co-marketing by download counts is measuring the wrong thing. Measure it by whether partners are using it to build a pipeline and close revenue.

The Path Forward for Co-Marketing

The data points to a clear investment thesis. First, rebuild the GTM asset engine around co-branding - customizable solution briefs, email templates, and social media content anchored to security, AI, and migration use cases - replacing generic campaign kits with assets partners can actually put their name on. Second, make co-branding frictionless. Partners want to co-brand, but the current process is too hard. Solve that friction, and adoption follows. Third, retire activity-based metrics for co-marketing programs. Measure co-marketing by revenue contribution and pipeline creation - the outcomes partners themselves endorse.