What are the best marketing channels for B2B?
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B2B marketing feels simple from the outside:
Post on LinkedIn.
Send cold emails.
Do SEO.
Run ads.
Build in public.
Go to events.
Start a newsletter.
Launch on Product Hunt.
Do founder-led sales.
But when you’re actually building, it’s hard to know what is genuinely worth your time.
Some channels look good because everyone talks about them.
Some look boring but bring real customers.
And some make you feel productive while generating almost nothing.
So I’m curious:
What marketing channel has worked best for your B2B product?
Was it cold outreach, content, SEO, partnerships, communities, paid ads, events, Product Hunt, or something else?
And what channel turned out to be a waste of time?
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For me it has been PH forum commenting, not the launch itself. Two of my launches got weak traction on the day, but commenting daily on other people's threads since has brought more product page visits than either launch did. It does not show up as a channel on any dashboard, so it gets left off lists like this one, but it is the only thing on your list that has actually compounded for me rather than spiking once and fading.
Softorino 💻📲
Consumer rather than B2B on my side, but search wins for a utility because the person arrives already holding the file they cannot open. So the page that ranks is a specific one about that specific problem, not the homepage. The channels that felt productive and did nothing were the ones where I had to explain the problem first.
Honestly paid ads burnt through our budget. SEO takes time but it brings qualified leads passively.
my co founder insisted on doing webinars. i was skeptical but it actually converted way better than running meta ads. sometimes boring channels surprise you.
Search, and it is not close.
I launched my marketplace in 2004 and it took two years of SEO work before it took shape. Two years of numbers that, read week by week, look exactly like failure. Then it held. After that I barely touched it and it kept the business alive for 22 years. That is the part people miss about search: the two years at the start are not a campaign, they are buying an asset. Once you own it, it pays without you.
This year I went back and invested in it again, for a reason specific to right now. Video marketing is what everyone talks about, but you still cannot replace the whole process with AI: someone has to be on camera, someone has to edit. Blog SEO you can replace at about 99 percent. The system I built has AI writing more than 200 articles a day for my service, and traffic to the site has grown around eight times in the last six months.
The waste, then, is the obvious trap inside that number. Volume for its own sake. It is now trivial to have AI produce a thousand articles nobody needed, and that buys you nothing except a slower site and a worse reputation with the search engine. Most of my work is not generating articles, it is the system that decides which article is worth writing at all. That judgment is still the human part, and it is the only part that has ever mattered.
For the B2B products I work on, direct customer conversations have been the most valuable channel. Especially with enterprise products, every customer has different infrastructure, security, and deployment requirements, so those conversations often reveal much more than broader marketing channels.
partnerships were a total time sink for us. cold outreach brought far better results much faster.
I built in public on Twitter and go mostly other founders watching not buyers. Helpful for feedback and hiring but weak for revenue. Would not rely on it alone if I restarted today.
My best channel turned out to be founder led sales calls. I closed deals just by listening to problems and building small fixes fast. LinkedIn posts brought attention but rarely paying customers for my product.
We wasted months building in public. Likes felt great but zero pipeline came from it. Founder led sales on LinkedIn direct messages worked way faster. What if you focused next thirty days only on conversations with ten dream customers?