What does a Top Microsoft partner company look like?

To find the top Microsoft partner companies in terms of marketing, Fifty Five and Five take an annual look at the digital marketing efforts of partners from around the world and rank them across three criteria: their website, their blog and their social media engagement.

What you’ll find is lots of valuable information and data about who is performing particularly good inbound marketing across the partner network. What you might find slightly less of, however, is specific data about the businesses that are doing particularly well – and how they compare to yours. Those looking to get differentiate themselves would do well to find out exactly who, where and how big their competition is. So that’s what we’re going to uncover in this post.

Where are they?

If you take a look at the geographical distribution of our Top 50 partners, you’ll quickly discover a few things. The first, and perhaps most obvious of these is that most companies in the Top 50 are based in the United States. In fact, as much as 32 of the companies in the Top 50 are American (64%). Of these, nine are based in California, three in Texas and one in Washington state.

The next largest concentration of Top 50 Microsoft Partners in the study came from the UK, with nine companies (18%) of the total included. The remaining nine companies are split in totals of one or two between Australia, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

How old are they?

You might be tempted to think that the best performing Microsoft Partners are the oldest, most established companies – but that’s not always strictly the case. Sure, the top performers are hardly brand-new tech start-ups, as the highest-performing blogs and social channels are built on consistency over time. But there’s a fairly broad scope of companies here – showing that there’s plenty of potential for even the smaller and less defined organisations to achieve digital marketing excellence.

The median age of companies in the Top 50 is 17, though there’s a huge range of different ages within this. The oldest on the list, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was founded back in 1939, and the most recent, Bettercloud, arrived on the scene just seven years ago in 2011.

Bettercloud itself managed to beat plenty of competitors and landed itself a healthy spot as number 8 in the Top 50 – thanks in large part to its impressive social media score. So,  there’s no reason why younger companies can’t achieve digital marketing success.

How big are companies in the Top 50?

Just as with the average age of Top 50 Microsoft partner companies, there’s a varied range of sizes of companies all achieving success. The smallest companies, of which there are nine, consist of between 11 and 50 employees, while some others are much larger. In fact, two notable businesses even have over 10,000 employees.

Those who read reports like ours on Microsoft’s most competent partners, may well conclude that the top contenders are simply operating in a different league to theirs. Barring the possibility of committing more employees to a marketing department, a larger organisation is not representative of marketing success. It’s companies that have the right marketers in their team—willing to commit the proper amount of time and dedication to digital marketing—that are seeing success.

If companies numbering as small as 11-50 employees can have better digital marketing strategies than their 38,500 competitors, it’s surely proof that it’s perfectly possible to make limited resources go a long way.

Who are the Top 250?

Though we write our annual report to celebrate the inbound marketing strategies of the Top 50 best performing Microsoft Partners, we actually produce a list of the Top 250.

The majority (73%) of our Top 250 Microsoft Partner Companies consisted of between 11 and 200 employees, versus the 50% in the Top 50.

It’s difficult to draw any direct conclusions from this comparison – and it may simply be a result of the differing sample sizes. What is clear, however, is that smaller companies are well represented among the best performing Microsoft Partner Companies – by both metrics.

Get the details on the best Microsoft Partners and improve your marketing

The Fifty-Five and Five Inbound Marketing Excellence report gives insight and understanding into what it is that makes these top performing companies’ digital marketing campaigns so successful.

In the four years since the report was published, it’s quickly become a staple of the industry, delivering vital knowledge that helps companies improve their own inbound marketing strategies.