The customer journey has fundamentally changed. Customers are forming preferences earlier, conducting more independent research, and moving across more channels before they engage in a sales conversation. AI is accelerating this change by reshaping how customers discover information, compare options, and interact with marketing.
For partners, this creates more opportunities to influence decisions, but it also raises the standard for effective marketing. A new study by Omdia, Mastering the Modern Customer Journey: The Partner’s Path to Marketing ROI (download pdf),1 shows that modernizing your marketing strategy with AI at its center can enable you to reach customers across the full journey and improve marketing return on investment (ROI).
Microsoft provides two practical ways to put that strategy into action: co-operative marketing (co-op) investments* for eligible partners, and Partner Marketing Center Pro**, a benefit of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. Partners can access Partner Marketing Center Pro by purchasing at least one partner benefits package, attaining a Solutions Partner designation, or enrolling in ISV Success.
Modern marketing has reached a tipping point
Traditional B2B funnels assumed that customers followed a predictable path from awareness to purchase. Today’s journeys are more self-directed and nonlinear. Customers conduct extensive research before engaging a vendor, drawing on AI tools, search engines, social channels, industry experts, review sites, digital marketplaces, and partner content.
Omdia maps 28 critical pre-sales touchpoints across awareness, consideration, and transaction, followed by additional post-sales moments related to onboarding, adoption, optimization, and expansion. These moments give partners an opportunity to educate customers, demonstrate expertise, and establish trust.
AI is adding another dimension to this shift. According to Omdia, 73% of organizations report that AI is enhancing customer engagement through personalized marketing and improved click-through rates.
This means AI is no longer limited to content creation or experimentation. It is becoming part of the foundation for how marketers identify audiences, customize messaging, localize campaigns, evaluate engagement, and improve performance.
The untapped growth opportunity
While the opportunity to influence customers is expanding, marketing investment has not kept pace with changing buyer behavior. Omdia found that 62% of partners invest less than 10% of their marketing budgets in demand generation.
Measurement is another gap. Omdia reports that 46% of partners do not measure the impact of their vendor-funded marketing investments. Without consistent measurement, partners have less visibility into which activities are creating engagement, contributing to pipeline, or warranting additional investment.
The answer is not simply to spend more. Partners need to direct resources toward the moments that matter, connect activities across the customer journey, fully activate available investments, and use AI and data to improve execution. Omdia identifies four strategic shifts that can move partner marketing from disconnected activity to a repeatable driver of growth.
Four shifts to improve partner marketing ROI
1. Make FY27 co-op part of your strategic marketing plan
Omdia found that 43% of partners use less than half of their available vendor-funded marketing allocation. By making fuller, more intentional use of these investments, you can extend campaign reach, maintain an always-on presence, and build pipeline across the customer journey.
For FY27, co-op is evolving to give partners clearer direction on where to invest, greater consistency across markets, and a simpler path from planning to execution, including:
- Focus investments with greater confidence. Clearer guidance directs investments toward activities designed to increase awareness, create demand, and build pipeline.
- Plan centrally and execute across markets. With global guidance on spend activities, organizations can build a strategic plan once and activate it across regions with greater consistency.
- Spend more time on strategy and execution. Streamlined activities already simplify the co-op experience, while upcoming Partner Center views and a co-op agent will simplify the claims experience and reduce administrative effort.
FY27 also increases the focus on always-on demand generation, with 50% of co-op investment directed toward activities that increase awareness and build pipeline. For distribution partners, a new to-partner category provides a clearer way to invest in motions that engage and enable partner networks at scale.
Start with your business priorities and the customer opportunities most relevant to your organization. Define the audience, build a connected campaign that moves customers through the journey, and establish how success will be measured. Once the strategy is in place, map each campaign component to the applicable co-op categories and activities, so every investment supports a clear objective.
The FY27 co-op guide and resource collection bring these changes together. They explain why the program is evolving, where to focus investments for stronger ROI, and how to use the updated categories, activities, and tools to plan and execute more strategically.
2. Invest in the moments that influence buyers
Customers begin forming opinions well before they speak with a seller. That makes early-stage demand generation increasingly important, especially as customers research across AI tools, search, social channels, digital marketplaces, peer networks, events, and partner content.
Paid media should be a core part of a multi-touch marketing plan, not a standalone tactic. When connected to the broader customer journey, paid media can extend your reach, keep your organization visible across buying channels, and engage customers where they are researching, comparing options, and making purchasing decisions.
Use paid media to amplify thought leadership, promote webinars and events, drive traffic to marketplace listings, and retarget engaged audiences with relevant next steps. Pair it with email nurture, social engagement, search optimization, marketplace engagement, and sales follow-up to create a more connected journey from awareness to consideration to action.
Start with the customer journey, then choose the activities. Define the audiences you want to reach, the business outcome you want to drive, and the information customers need at each stage to keep moving forward. Then build a connected marketing plan that gives each activity a clear role in moving customers through the journey.
For FY27, co-op places greater emphasis on demand generation, including a 50% investment focus, with clearer guidance for planning and execution. Eligible partners can use this guidance to direct available investments toward connected activities that influence customers earlier in the buying journey and move opportunities forward.
3. Build connected, multi-touch customer journeys
A single asset, email, or event is unlikely to sustain engagement across a complex buying journey. Omdia recommends coordinated campaigns that provide relevant information across multiple channels and stages.
A multi-touch motion could begin with thought leadership and paid social content, continue through email nurture and a solution-focused webinar, and progress to a customer story, workshop, assessment, or proof of concept. The objective is not to repeat the same message. It is to give customers the right information as their needs and questions evolve.
Partner Marketing Center Pro is designed to accelerate campaign execution without starting from scratch by giving partners access to ready-to-use Microsoft campaigns and AI-assisted capabilities for discovery, customization, personalization, translation, launch, and reporting. You can adapt campaigns for your organization, audiences, and market priorities, then use performance insights to refine future execution.
If your organization does not yet have access to Partner Marketing Center Pro, review the available partner benefits packages and select the option that best aligns with your business priorities and growth plans.
4. Modernize marketing operations with AI and measurement
AI can empower partner marketing teams to execute more efficiently, but speed alone does not create ROI. Partners also need consistent measurement to understand engagement, improve campaign performance, and make informed investment decisions.
Use AI to reduce repetitive work across campaign discovery, personalization, localization, and execution. Then use performance data to identify which messages, audiences, channels, and calls to action are creating meaningful engagement.
Partner Marketing Center Pro combines ready-to-use campaigns with AI-assisted customization and personalization. These capabilities empower teams to adapt Microsoft-created campaigns for their organization and audiences, while campaign reporting provides insights that can inform future execution.
Additional capabilities include:
- Version control to manage and restore published assets
- Collaborative commenting and review to centralize feedback and approvals
- Expanded translation services with human and machine translation options
- Analytics access control to strengthen governance and security
In the first three months of availability, Partner Marketing Center Pro was adopted by more than 10,000 partners, driving engagement with 86,000 customers, demonstrating the growing demand for AI-assisted marketing tools.
Put the research into action in FY27
The opportunity is to build a modern, repeatable system that reaches customers across their journey.
- Start by reviewing the Omdia research and identifying the customer moments where your organization can have the greatest influence.
- Build your FY27 co-op plan around clear business priorities, connected campaigns, and measurable outcomes.
- Then use Partner Marketing Center Pro to personalize and activate ready-to-use campaigns with greater speed and consistency. Partners that do not yet have access can review the available partner benefits packages and choose the option that aligns with their business needs.
By making strategic use of available investments, building multi-touch journeys, and combining AI with measurement, you can increase discoverability, strengthen customer engagement, and turn more of your marketing activity into measurable business value.
Disclaimers:
1. Source – Omdia, Mastering the Modern Customer Journey: The Partner’s Path to Marketing ROI, June 2026. Analysis of partner marketing investment, customer journey engagement, measurement practices, and AI-powered marketing effectiveness. Results are not an endorsement of Microsoft. Any reliance on these results is at the third party’s own risk.
*Co-op benefits are available to eligible partners and are subject to program terms and conditions.
**Partner Marketing Center Pro is a benefit of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. It is available to partners that have purchased at least one partner benefits package, attained a Solutions Partner designation, or are currently enrolled in ISV Success.