Differentiate or Disappear

The “most important thing” about marketing “ is to differentiate," emphasized Elizabeth Burton, Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s Partner Marketing Leader at last re:Invent, highlighting that 130K partners competing for attention.

Start with a "working backwards" framework: map customer needs against your solution's strengths to find areas where you outshine competitors and deliver more customer value.

Top partners follow these marketing principles:

Create a joint marketing plan

To access funding and programs work with your cloud team to create a plan and show commitment

Target the right stage of the funnel

Hyperscalers create programs for different stages: content syndication for top-of-funnel leads, eBooks for middle funnel, account-based roundtables for bottom-funnel, etc. Plan accordingly.

Focus on customer case studies

"If you're thinking about marketing programs with AWS... the requirement is that you have a customer use case that can be publicly referenceable." They can unlock top visibility, like speaking slots.

Consider horizontal and vertical marketing

Cloud providers are focusing on both technology horizontals (security, data, AI) and industry verticals (financial services, healthcare).

Marketplace Marketing Flywheel

Michael Musselman, who scaled Lacework's AWS partnership from 0 to MM, highlights treating co-marketing as part of marketplace strategy: "While I'm not a marketer, the marketing team and CMO are my best friends."

At Astronomer he amplified growth with AWS's Seller Prime program: "It came with a whole bunch of MDF like tens of thousands of dollars.

Not only are we going to go do this, which we should have done anyway…, but AWS is going to help us double our marketing budgets."

Key insight? "It's literally gifts from the cloud provider…you're paying… with the fact that you're a partner and my consumption is on their cloud. It's very different than giving away margin at the revenue.”

Wiz's Marketing Blueprint

Nadav Tzuker who led Alliances and now in Product Partnerships at Wiz, highlighted in our Cloud GTM Leader course Wiz focused approach:

"We put most of our focus on conferences" - a major part of Wiz strategy is key conferences like re:Invent, Next, and Ignite. By being proactive and building relationships with CSP marketing, Wiz used conference sessions to massively amplify their exposure.

Social media is essential: "AWS Startups has 100K followers, Microsoft has 20 million, Google Cloud has almost 2M. We'll never get to those numbers in our own LinkedIn pages."

Wiz solution? Create joint content around events, videos, or case studies and work via partner marketing to get featured. CSPs have quotas for social partner promotions.

What’s your strategy?