Channel Marketing

If channel sales is about getting partners to sell, channel marketing is about getting partners to market. The goal is to put your brand and your product in front of the partner's existing customer base — using the partner's voice, channels, and trust — at a fraction of the cost of reaching that same audience directly.

Three Layers of Channel Marketing

Most programs operate across three distinct motions:

• To-partner marketing — Marketing aimed at the partner themselves, to recruit, enable, and motivate. Newsletters, partner conferences, certification campaigns, tier-promotion offers.
• Through-partner marketing — Marketing the partner runs to their customers on your behalf, usually with co-branded assets and MDF funding. Email sequences, webinars, paid campaigns, events.
• With-partner marketing — Joint campaigns where both brands invest and share leads. See co-marketing for the deeper dive.

Common Channel Marketing Programs

• MDF (market development funds) — Vendor-funded budget partners can request for approved marketing activities. Usually tied to partner tier or pipeline targets.
• Co-branded asset libraries — Editable decks, one-pagers, case studies, and email templates partners can drop their logo into.
• Through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) — Platforms (e.g., Zift, StructuredWeb, Impartner) that let partners launch approved campaigns to their lists in one click.
• Joint webinars and field events — Vendor + partner each invite their audience, share registrations, split follow-up.
• Channel rebates for marketing activity — Back-end rebates partly tied to marketing engagement (campaigns run, leads generated), not just bookings.

Why Channel Marketing Is Hard

Partners — especially SMB resellers and MSPs — are not marketing teams. They sell. Most have a part-time marketer or an owner who runs LinkedIn occasionally. Asking them to plan and execute a multi-touch nurture campaign is asking them to do something they're bad at and don't enjoy.

That's why through-channel motions tend to underperform forecasts. The vendors who get this right do two things: they make execution radically easier (pre-built campaigns, TCMA platforms, "one-click launch"), and they fund the activity (MDF) rather than asking the partner to invest first and get reimbursed.

Channel Marketing vs Partner Marketing

The terms are often used interchangeably, but there's a useful distinction: channel marketing usually refers specifically to marketing through resale-style partners (VARs, MSPs, distributors), while partner marketing is the broader function that also includes tech alliances, ISV co-marketing, and ecosystem-wide programs that have nothing to do with resale.

Real Example: AWS Partner Marketing

AWS funds partner marketing through MDF tied to their APN tier system. Advanced and Premier partners can claim MDF for vendor-approved campaigns — paid ads, custom landing pages, joint events — with proof-of-execution reporting. AWS also provides editable templates, co-brandable case studies, and a TCMA-style portal so partners can launch pre-approved demand-gen plays without building anything from scratch.