What is channel marketing?

What does channel marketing mean?

The channel is every company that sells, delivers or supports your product for you. The vendor builds the product. Partners take it to customers, usually wrapped in their own services.

The list of who counts as a partner keeps growing. Rachel Brindley of Canalys says a partner program now has to cover global systems integrators, regional partners, resellers, managed service providers, cloud solution providers and the hyperscale marketplaces.¹

You'll hear partner marketing too. Most people use it for the same work, and so do I. In cloud it often means the marketing a partner does with AWS or Microsoft. Channel marketing is the wider job, and it runs on both sides of the deal.

Vendor or partner: who does channel marketing?

Both. I've worked each side, and the jobs aren't the same.

• If you sell through partners. Signing partners is the easy part. Getting them to sell is the job. They need a message they can repeat, campaigns they can run under their own name, funds they'll claim and a portal worth opening.
• If you sell for vendors. You carry many vendors and one brand, your own. Lead with your customer's problem, and bring each vendor in as proof and as funding.

Vendors tend to forget the partner's side. Brindley put it plainly: a partner coping with 30, 40 or 50 vendors needs the program to be simple.¹ Every extra rule is one more reason to sell someone else.

What does a channel marketing program include?

It depends on the vendor. These are the pieces I check first.

• A PRM. Partner relationship management, the software and processes behind the program. TechTarget lists content management, lead distribution, deal registration and sales analytics among the usual features.²
• Campaigns partners run as their own. The vendor builds them and the partner sends them under its brand. They work when they sound like the partner.
• Co-op and MDF. Co-op accrues from what a partner already sold. MDF goes out ahead of sales, for what the vendor expects the partner to do.³ More in co-op or MDF.
• Distributors. For many vendors, the route to thousands of resellers. See selling through distributors in Canada.
• Measurement. Which deals partners found, and which ones they helped win. See partner-sourced or partner-influenced.

Why is channel marketing harder in 2026?

More partners touch each deal. Canalys counts about seven per deal on average.¹ AWS cites a 2023 Canalys study in which 44% of customers relied on four or more partners.⁴ So you're marketing to a group, and everyone in it wants credit.

Customers are cutting suppliers. In May 2026, ITPro described enterprises trimming their software and vendor lists after years of sprawl. It quoted 2025 figures from Zylo, a SaaS management vendor: large enterprises run 660 SaaS applications on average, and 52.7% of those licences go unused.⁵

Spending is moving to cloud marketplaces. Omdia put enterprise spending on hyperscaler marketplaces at $45.5 billion in 2025 and expects $163.1 billion by 2030, with almost 60% of marketplace transactions channel-enabled by then.⁵ If you sell on AWS, the AWS Marketplace guide covers the Canadian side.

Partners also struggle with the money they already get. In Omdia research reported by Channel Dive in July 2026, over 40% of partners couldn't tell which MDF activity had the biggest impact. More than half said vendors didn't give them enough marketing resources.⁶

The partner who used to resell a product line now has to sell an outcome. ITPro's advice to partners is to act as estate advisers: audit what the customer already pays for, map the overlaps and trim.⁵

What changes in Quebec?

Language. A business in Quebec has to make its website available in French, along with its catalogues, brochures and other commercial documents. An English version can sit next to it, as long as the French one is of comparable quality.⁷ Fines for a violation range from $3,000 to $30,000, and double for a repeat offence.⁷

For a vendor, that means a Quebec partner can't run your English kit as it is. Machine French shows, and partners notice it before their customers do. More in Quebec French for partner marketing.

How do you start a channel marketing program?

I use the same four steps every time, whether I work for the vendor or the partner.

1. 1Write down which partners sell you today, which ones should, and the number that would prove it.
2. 2Build the plan: recruitment, enablement, campaigns, funds and events, each with an owner and a date.
3. 3Test it with your channel team and with a few partners who will tell you the truth.
4. 4Run it, and report what partners sourced and what they influenced in separate columns.

The channel marketing page shows how I work on each side.