Every B2B marketing channel works. Picking the right one is the real job.

Everything in B2B marketing works.

I’ve done over 300 hours of interviews with CMOs and VPs in B2B marketing. Spent a decade as a marketing leader myself. I can tell you – it all works. YouTube, LinkedIn (works – take it from me), direct mail, webinars, TikTok, email, events, PR, partnerships…they all can work. Even spending $75k with Gartner can work!

The problem isn’t the channel. It’s that most teams try to run all of them at once with whatever’s left in the budget. Here’s three things I’d tell every marketing team evaluating their channel strategy.

1. Pick one channel and go deep. (ie, picking every channel is the same as picking none)

The challenge isn’t finding a channel that works. It’s figuring out which channel can work for you with the ingredients you have. You don’t always have the product, the features, the timing, the wind at your back, the talent on the team, or the budget. That’s the job. You’re the chef. sometimes you only have two eggs, a slice of bread, and an onion in the fridge. What can you make with that?

Too many teams react by doing everything because it feels like coverage. The result is another B2B YouTube channel with 30 videos sitting between 17 and 62 views. Pick one channel, go deep, and stack those wins into adjacent channels once you have proof something is working.

2. Only ship what you’d actually engage with.

On every team I’ve been on, there’s a set of gut-check questions we’d run before shipping anything:

• What’s in it for me?
• Would you open this email?
• Would you attend this webinar if someone sent it to you?
• Would you click on that ad?
• Would you respond to that outreach?

If the honest answer is no, that’s your answer. The channel doesn’t matter if the thing you’re putting into it wouldn’t work on you. Most B2B marketing fails this test and gets shipped anyway because we’re optimizing for output, not whether anyone cares.

3. Good marketing is hard to defend in a QBR – here’s how to handle it

The part nobody wants to say out loud: good marketing is often bad for the company in the short term. It’s harder to measure. It takes time. There’s no UTM parameter on a brand campaign, no direct response CTA you can point to in a pipeline report.

That’s precisely what makes it work. But you need two things to pull it off: the patience to trust it, and the ability to stand in front of your CEO or CFO and articulate why you’re doing what you’re doing. Most teams skip that conversation, then wonder why leadership keeps asking for attribution reports.

Strategy isn’t the channel you picked. It’s being able to answer: why this, why now, and how long are we giving it?

– Dave

PS If you work in marketing, embrace this. Treat your job like a craft. Have conviction. Don’t follow best practices. Use your brain. Be creative. Disrupt things inside your company and push for a new way of doing things. This is more important than ever now that everyone has access to the Slop Machine™.