TOP MICROSOFT 50 PARTNERS INBOUND MARKETING EXCELLENCE Featuring interviews and commentary from Nintex, LiveTiles and our own experts, and a foreword from David Meerman Scott. andf ive 20215016 andf ive +44 0203 805 7791 We help Microsoft partners www.fiftyfiveandfive.com communicate more effectively, reach new audiences and drive leads. We [email protected] offer a number of digital, content and strategic marketing services. @takefiftyfive WELCOME CONTENTS THE TOP 50 MICROSOFT PARTNERS, PLUS THE LONG LIST OF 250. M ARKETING ADVICE AND GUIDANCE FOR TECHNICAL FOUNDERS. INTERVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES. Foreword Partners 11-30 The six month 01 David Meerman Scott, author 21 Our ranking continues as we 44 marketing fitness plan of the New Rules of Marketing look at parters 11-30. Get your marketing plans in and PR discusses the power shape with our six month of content marketing. LiveTiles interview guide. 28 Hear how the technical founder of LiveTiles has used Key findings Partners 51-250 cutting edge marketing 03 What did we learn analysing 46 Read the extended long list techniques to grow his 25,000 partners? What were of partners ranked 51-250. the key trends we saw? company. Twitter infographic About us Ranking vendors 34 Do you know how many 49 A little more about Fifty Five 05 How we ranked vendors, and tweets Microsoft partners and Five. the criteria we used to get to send every year? When they our top 250. send them, and to whom? Partners 1-10 Partners 31-50 08 Who topped our list and 35 We complete our top 50 with came in at number 1? a look at partners 31-50. Nintex case study 19 Kim Albrecht tells us how Nintex put great content marketing into practice. DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT FOREWORD here used to be only three ways to generate attention for your business: buy expensive T advertising, beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you, or hire a huge sales staff to bug people individually about your products. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the web that your buyers are eager to consume—what many call Inbound Marketing. Online success comes from thinking like a publisher, this report will help you do that. For many organisations, reaching buyers with inbound marketing content has a powerful, less obvious effect: content brands an organisation as a leader in their market. Instead of just directly selling something, a great site or blog tells the world that you are smart, that you understand the market very well, and that you might be a person or a company that would be valuable to do business with. If you’re already using Inbound Marketing, these pages will show you how to refine and improve. If you’re new to Inbound Marketing, this report will set you on the right track. David Merrman Scott Marketing Strategist and bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR 01 THE STATE OF INBOUND MARKETING KEY FINDINGS As we’ve combed through a couple of decimal places between final placement in the thousands of blogs, websites and runnings. The average overall score of the top 10 was a mighty Twitter feeds (plus a lot of 7.29 out of 10. company LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ profiles and more), we’ve With the super charged nature of this year’s list, what are the key got to know a lot about the findings from our research? people behind the brands, about what they do and how they CONSISTENCY ACROSS CHANNELS IS KEY present themselves to the world. We’ve seen a huge range of The digital revolution has changed the way we do marketing. innovative approaches to digital There is now a huge range of options open to the savvy marketer marketing – everything from – from emails to websites to a plethora of social feeds. While few hilarious tweets to truly inspiring companies have the resources to maintain a presence on all of videos and some of the most these, being consistent in the channels you do select is essential. brilliantly designed websites out So, if you’re going to blog, make sure you tie your blogs in with there. your website content and eBooks, and tell the world about your material over Twitter and other social media platforms. The What have we learned? When we companies that did best in our ranking excelled in all the first hit on the idea of ranking channels they use; we rarely saw a Twitter feed or blog that had Microsoft Partners on their been neglected for more than a couple of days. marketing in 2015, we focused exclusively on Office 365 and YOUR SHOP WINDOW SharePoint Product Vendors. This year, however, we wanted to cast a Most, if not all, of the companies on this list have impressive wider net, and rank any Microsoft websites with smooth, slick and modern interfaces. Perhaps Partner that works with or supplies unsurprisingly, Infragistics (a New York based UX design enterprise productivity tools. In company) received the highest ranking in the website category in 2015 we were looking at around our scoring. Nonetheless, many companies on this list had very 2,000 Partners. This year, we impressive websites, with great quality navigation and next looked at over 25,000. generation features such as integrated video and regularly updated landing pages. As a direct result, the standard this year went through the roof. We’ve Our report shows that WordPress is the go to CMS for 85% of the been consistently impressed by top 20. Speed was also a big factor for the best sites, with the the high quality of companies on average load time for the top 10 an impressive 2.64 seconds. this list, and there’s often been just The top 10 also paid huge attention to mobile users, with an average score of 9.6 out of 10 for mobile responsiveness. In 2015 we looked at around 2,000 Partners. “ This year we looked at over 25,000, meaning everyone in this year’s report can class themselves as among the top 1%. 03 KEY FINDINGS CONTENT REMAINS KING A recent study found a sharp increase in the number of CEOs recognising Twitter as a valuable medium. When Bill Gates declared in 1996 that on the web, Twice as many CEOs use Twitter now compared to “content is king”, few would have expected quite 2010 with over 80% of global CEOs now engaged how true this prediction would be. To have any socially. Interestingly, Facebook saw a 0% participation chance of surfacing on a search engine, companies rating from CEOs. need to produce regular, fresh and relevant content to stand out from the crowd. Sharegate scored highest for their blog in our ranking - a whopping 9.2 out of 10. Nutanix reigned supreme in 2016 on Twitter and led the way with an impressive score of 8.9. Many other firms were close on their heels with punchy, engaging and original ways of reaching audiences. Publishing daily content on their blog (and sometimes more), Sharegate dominates the first Building the perfect following vs followers’ ratio is an couple of pages of search engine results for certain important method for developing a great Twitter strategic search terms. This is testament to account. Get the ratio too high and you can look overly extremely effective SEO planning, but the keen, too low, and it’s likely your messages aren’t hitting publication of new and interesting content is just as the proverbial sweet spot. important. In this year’s top 10, we saw that for every 1 person To get anywhere near this kind of dominance, followed, 3.93 followed back. So if your ratio is Microsoft Partners should develop strong content between 1:3-4 you’re on the right track. Somewhat marketing strategies and publish consistently. This surprisingly, only 30% of this year’s top 20 had a year’s top 50 partners posted a new blog post every pinned tweet, a missed opportunity for highlighting 10.5 days. Want to break into the top 10? Our campaign material and company news. analysis found those leading the way posted on average a new blog every 4.1 days. ANOTHER WINNING YEAR Read our marketing beginners guide on page 42 to This year, the bar has been set very high for marketers learn how you can put the building blocks in place at Microsoft Partners. We can’t wait to see how brands for this kind of success. will innovate and improve in the next 12 months. SOCIAL IS ESSENTIAL Twitter remains the number one tool for brands to connect with their customers, potential leads and the latest news. 04 HOW WE RANKED VENDORS THE TOP 50 This report is a celebration of • The Partner’s blogging output digital marketing excellence of • Their overall website Microsoft Partners. It is • Their social media activity independent, Partner agnostic and in no way a reflection on the Why these criteria? Two reasons: quality of products or services of the companies we have ranked. 1. We needed to rank partners on common, comparable and accessible measures. These three marketing methods are used To create our ranking of marketing by practically all partners and were the obvious choice for excellence, we initially compiled a comparison. They are also testable and possible to compare, as long list of companies who resell or opposed to things like eBook quality or email campaigns - where consult with Microsoft enterprise the data might not be available to us or the judgement too productivity tools, or create software subjective.