Mark Boudreau, a Washington, D.C., digital media marketing expert, said it's a mistake to think digital marketing is just branding or sales-lead generation. "It is your forward-facing assets," he said. "Marketing is no longer linear. It is whatever you find on a search."

Boudreau said one of the biggest mistakes he sees being made is poor follow-up in the wake of sophisticated digital marketing campaigns. "Phone calls and emails aren't answered or followed up on," he said. "People are rude. They don’t have technical knowledge."

Bob Skelley, general manager of PartnerDemand Services for The Channel Company, which works with vendors and partners to create digital marketing plans backed by market development funds (MDF), said he also sees the ball being dropped at the last mile. He said partners often are not putting the appropriate top sales and technical talent on sales meetings pulled together from sophisticated digital market campaigns.

"That is where I see a lot of solution providers missing the mark," Skelley said. "A lead comes in and they treat it as a generic lead with an inside salesperson. If you are setting up a meeting with an IT decision maker, you better have technical talent on that phone call. They are going to very quickly want to vet your capabilities and understand how deep you can go and whether you can speak to the business value and pain points. If you can't pass that litmus test, the meeting is not going to go anywhere. Think of everything that went into getting a partner and IT decision maker together and invest appropriately."

Michael Hadley, president and CEO of iCorps, a Boston-based solution provider, said his company is creating a significant amount of its own original digital marketing content that's driving two to three leads per week.

"It's amazing. Our traffic is up and it is quality traffic that is being converted," he said of the iCorps digital marketing offensive. "We now have three full-time marketers and one part time intern. We are doing campaigns targeted by industry and region. We are all about analytics. We are moving into Dynamics and CRM. It is really paying off for us."

Hadley said he sees his digital marketing efforts about to break through to the next level of demand generation. "We are in the process of scaling our digital marketing and we are aggressively hiring salespeople," he said.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said his digital marketing budget is up 50 percent in the last year. "We are doing YouTube and third-party videos that talk about some of our services," he said. "People like to look at those videos on focused topics, including ransomware."