Empowering Resellers: Demand Generation and Lead Generation

Kamilla Belova

Like any other type of marketing, channel marketing’s goal is to expand business by gaining more deals and customers. In this regard, demand generation tactics are must-haves for a successful marketing strategy.

That said, there are several misunderstandings that surround the concept of demand generation and the marketing activities related to it. In this article, we’ll offer a clear definition of demand generation, how it differs from lead generation, and how both of these strategies fit into the buyer’s journey and influence it.

So, what is demand generation?

On the highest level, it’s the strategic process of stimulating and nurturing interest in a company’s products or services among potential customers. This can include a variety of marketing techniques and activities aimed at creating brand awareness, generating engagement, and ultimately driving conversion and revenue.

In a nutshell, demand generation is a marketing strategy that targets out-of-market buyers and relies on their education. The main goal of B2B demand generation is to maintain visibility in the minds of potential customers who may not currently be in a purchase funnel. This way, when they do end up needing a product or service you provide, you will already be in their consideration.

Therefore, it’s quite important that you differentiate demand generation from lead generation. Lead generation, in turn, is a process of direct and proactive communication with an already engaged audience that aims to convert that audience into leads. While demand generation fosters interest and builds relationships with audiences, lead generation actually collects data from prospects.

In this context, we can consider these strategies as covering two out of three principal stages of the customer journey. There are several versions of the customer journey, but the three following stages are key:

If you want your marketing strategy to be efficient, you need to know the specifics of each of these stages and adjust your activities accordingly.

  1. Awareness: At this stage, customers are facing a threat or problem. Here, it’s essential to attract them with various educational insights like social media posts, videos, articles, and blogs to provide them with content that resonates with the issues they face.
  2. Consideration: Once your customers become more knowledgeable about their problems and the solutions that are out there, they will start comparing options. This means you’ll want to make sure your solution is part of their consideration. To keep prospects engaged, it is best to use different tactics like email marketing, banners, and PPC advertising, as well as webinars that can help you start generating leads and collect data about your prospects.
  3. Decision: This is the stage where customers have their options narrowed down and are set to make a decision. At this point, you can nurture them with content that highlights a lot of specific technical functionalities. These could be white papers, data sheets, live demos, case studies, and more.

This might sound easy in theory, but this process is much more complex in practice. One reason behind this complexity is the fact that B2B customers do their research via multiple channels. In fact, on average, they use 10 or more channels to interact with suppliers (McKinsey). Channels can mean anything: Phone calls, social media posts, email communications, blogs, website articles; the list is infinite. You also have to consider all these channels at each of the three stages listed above. That’s quite a challenge!

Another challenge lies in the fact that B2B buyers tend to spend only 17% of their total purchase journey with sales representatives (Gartner). What about the other 83%? Well, the data suggests that this portion of the purchase journey is done behind your back, meaning that these buyers are mostly researching on their own or discussing amongst their internal teams. That’s why quality content on online channels is paramount to give buyers access to the information they need to move through the stages of their journey.

However, when we talk about channel marketing, all these complicated processes become much easier, since vendors and partners can work together when it comes to customer acquisition.

As a vendor, Veeam is fully committed to your success and growth, since we know that customers don’t just need the brand name, but need the expertise, personalized approach, and support, that you can provide.

That’s why our partner program offers you support with unique tools like the ProPartner portal and Veeam Marketing Center, which are designed to give you all the necessary sales and marketing resources you need.

These platforms give you unlimited access to best-in-class tools that can help you:

Being a Veeam ProPartner means that you can rely on our support to efficiently reach out to your audience on each step of your customers’ journey.

So now, let’s take a deeper dive into what these tips and tricks are and what Veeam resources you can use to be successful in your demand generation and lead generation efforts.

Best Practices for Demand Generation

Education

Customer education plays a significant role in demand generation. In fact, a 2019 study conducted by Forrester revealed that 90% of companies noticed a positive return on investment from customer education efforts. This is especially important when you offer complicated products and services like data backup, recovery, and resilience solutions. It’s also important to consider your customers’ pain points and threats, communicate them, and motivate your customers to resolve it. Only then should you educate customers on your products and services and position them as a response to an already perceived need. When your audience is aware and well educated, you have more chances to convert them into leads at the decision stage of their journey.

Quality Content

Content creation goes hand-in-hand with customer education. As mentioned before, customers research a lot on their own and consume tons of content before moving to the decision stage. Your goal is to make sure they pay attention to your messaging and trust it. Creating valuable content goes a long way to achieving this, since it can establish your company as a thought leader in the market. By publishing articles, blogs, social media posts, white papers, and other content pieces, you allow potential customers to discover solutions to their challenges before they move to the decision stage. This approach builds credibility and highlights your company’s expertise. This is why Veeam arms our partners with ready-made, quality assets to help you save time and resources and give you the opportunity to go straight to market.

Storytelling

Storytelling is a core part of who we are as humans. At the end of the day we won’t remember exact numbers or percentages; it’s stories that we remember and share with others. If you want to see your marketing thrive, you should saturate it with good storytelling. Stories create a connection between your company, your product, and the end user on an emotional level, which increases engagement, builds trust, and increases credibility. To succeed, put your customers at the center and make them heroes. Tell a story that will resonate with their needs, show that you understand their challenges, and demonstrate how your solutions can help overcome them. This will allow you to link each stage of your customer’s journey and touchpoint together, and therefore improve your messaging, and ultimately, your ability to drive sales. Veeam offers content that’s suitable for all the different stages of your customer’s journey, and you can customize and personalize this content according to your business needs and easily incorporate it in your own story.

Consistency

It’s truly important for a demand generation strategy to have quality educational content with a good story, but it’s equally important to spread this content consistently. This means having a unified voice and style, following a planned schedule, and standardizing messaging across different digital marketing channels. Inconsistent quality, quantity, or timing of content can lead to customer confusion. Adhering to a consistent strategy will improve the customer experience and strengthen credibility, reputation, and brand trust. To make this process easier for our partners, Veeam provides not only globally relevant Veeam messaging, but different automation tools to help you follow your content plan as well.

There are lots of digital marketing tactics that can help you put these tips and tricks into practice. Some of them should be considered a must for generating demand in the engagement stage of the buyer’s journey. These are social media campaigns, website marketing, and video marketing. Good news is, Veeam has all this covered thanks to our Veeam Marketing Center platform! Now let’s examine why these tactics are efficient and how Veeam helps our ProPartners execute them effectively.

Social Media Marketing

Approximately 5.07 billion social media users exist worldwide as of 2024, which accounts for 6.26% of the global population. This means you have to seize the potential of this channel to reconnect with your audience and harness it by posting consistent, relevant, and exciting social media content and high quality creative materials.

Good news is, there’s no heavy lifting required, since Veeam Marketing Center already has:

Website Marketing

Websites are the second most used marketing channel, just behind social media. A good website builds credibility, increases brand awareness, and starts that crucial conversion from visitors to customers.

Adding a webpage to any site is time consuming, especially if it’s for a vendor you work with. Veeam wanted things to be different for our partners, which is why we’ve made it quick and easy to add a Veeam webpage to your website via our content syndication tool.

Veeam content syndication web pages are:

Video Marketing

These days, customers are more inclined to watch videos and visuals over reading a block of text. As a result, the majority of online advertisements are now in video format, which offers a more effective way to showcase products, services, andfeatures to generate leads. According to research, videos can increase conversions by 80%, and 91% of businesses worldwide recognized this tactic as being efficient and used it in their 2023 marketing strategies.

However, this advertising format can be difficult to implement in practice due to lack of time, resources, and money. However, when it comes to Veeam, you don’t need to go through the complicated process of making a video from scratch, since we’re ready to provide you with ready-made and customizable content.

In Veeam Marketing Center, you can find tons of video content, including a co-branding video tool that allows you to add:

With the help of Veeam Marketing Center, you can get quality video content adjusted to your business needs, and use it for various demand generation activities, including social media posts or articles on your company website.

Best Practices in Lead Generation

Buyer Personas

As mentioned above, lead generation tactics are all about interacting directly and proactively with an audience that’s already educated and engaged, and therefore considering purchasing your product. That’s why, to get these potential buyers to the decision/purchase stage of their journey, you’ll need to adopt a more personalized approach to show that you really know your buyer, understand their problems, and can offer a specific solution. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona (a.k.a., user persona, marketing persona, or audience persona) is a profile of the perfect customer created through market and audience analysis. Essentially, a buyer persona is a visionary individual that encompasses the key traits observed within your wider target audience.

Creating buyer personas can help you humanize your customers and better relate to their needs, spot their pain points, and adjust the content you create, the messaging you spread, and the marketing channels you use to cater to each persona.

In the data protection industry, we usually interact with the following buyer personas:

The list is not exhaustive, and you should elaborate on your own buyer personas and build your sales and marketing strategies around their specific industries and needs. To learn more about buyer personas, visit our Marketing Success Center for more information.

Address an Acknowledged Customer Problem Instead of Just Trying to Sell

As we all know, some customers don’t recognize their own pain points. That’s why our main goal in the engagement stage is to educate them about it. But remember, once they are educated and aware of their problem, they expect you to resolve it. Statistics show that 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their needs and preferences. Therefore, in the consideration stage of the journey, your lead generation activities should not only push your products and features but highlight and explain why you’re exactly what your customers need to solve their particular problem.

To implement your lead generation strategy and the best practices listed above, we recommend sticking to the following tactics: Email marketing, event marketing, and banners for Pay-per Click (PPC) ads with landing pages. At Veeam, we believe that our partners’ success is our success, and that’s why all these options are available in Veeam Marketing Center.

Email Marketing

In 2024, the majority of B2B marketers can confirm that email newsletters remain the most high-performing kind of digital marketing for securing, generating, and nurturing leads. The global revenue generated from email marketing is projected to reach $17.9 billion by the year 2027.

ou can easily capitalize on this too with email campaigns that can be implemented in just a few clicks!

 Veeam Marketing Center’s out-of-the-box email campaigns provide:

Event Marketing

Webinars are a proven effective way to generate quality leads. According to research, over 70% of B2B webinar attendees convert to leads, since webinars focus on sharing value, not just closing a deal.

Veeam Marketing Center has powerful online event kit tools that can facilitate the process of organizing and promoting your own webinars.

Do the following with a Veeam Marketing Center online event kit:

Banners for PPC Advertising with Landing Pages

Banner ads are one of the most efficient forms of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It is a cost-effective method to improve your company’s visibility, increase website traffic, and convert viewers among a targeted audience.

In Veeam Marketing Center, you can download ready-made banners of different sizes, co-brand them, and link them to ready-made landing pages to achieve the following:

Veeam is also ready to provide lots of resources to use in the decision/purchase stage of the customer journey to nurture the leads you’ll generate. Veeam Marketing Center’s library stores different materials, including co-branded ones, that you can easily download and share with your prospects. These materials include:

We’ve covered the most useful tactics for the engagement, consideration, and decision stages of the customer journey. Of course, to achieve the best results, you can combine various demand generation and lead generation activities and use them throughout the entire journey to create more touchpoints with customers.

When you’re well-versed in different marketing tactics and ready to start, Veeam’s Marketing Concierge team can support you on your journey.

If you want to accelerate demand and grow your Veeam business, we’re happy to help you set up your account and begin lead generation activities. Make a quick appointment so we can help:

Book an onboarding meeting to plan and put your Veeam marketing strategy into effect or visit the Veeam Marketing Center for more information.

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