Notes for owners · Business growth
The best advertising channels for B2B companies
Search, marketplaces, LinkedIn and trade media each work on a different buyer. The question that picks between them is whether your buyer can name what you sell.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
For most Indian B2B companies the argument is between four channels: search, marketplaces such as IndiaMART, LinkedIn, and trade media including exhibitions. One question sorts them. Can your buyer name what you sell? If a purchase manager can type "SS 316 laser cutting Peenya" then search is your first and cheapest rupee. If nobody has a word for your product yet, search has no volume, and the work is to be seen where those buyers already gather. Everything below follows from that.
Search, and the page a specification lands on
An industrial buyer with a drawing in front of him types the material, the process and the place. He is not browsing. He is looking for a supplier who does exactly this and is near enough.
Which is why the page matters more than the campaign. Take a page for laser cutting that names the machine, the bed size and the thickness range in mild steel and stainless. Add the tolerance, the usual lead time, and a person's name and number. It beats a "Services" page with eight bullet points, every time. Write one page per process, not one page for all of them.
Paid search fills the gap while the pages earn their position. Keep it to the terms that carry a specification, add the city, and build the negative keyword list in the first week. Otherwise you will pay for students, job seekers and people writing project reports.
Marketplaces: volume with a known defect
IndiaMART, TradeIndia and their equivalents work on a simple bargain. You get a steady flow of buyers, and the buyer gets your competitors in the same minute.
That makes reply speed the entire game. The supplier who calls in four minutes with a price band and a question about quantity wins enquiries that a better factory loses by replying at six o'clock. Before paying for a higher listing, check the last fifty enquiries and count how many were answered inside fifteen minutes.
It also suits some products and not others. Standard items with a describable specification do well. Custom engineering, long projects and anything needing a site visit do badly, because the buyer is price-shopping across five quotations.
LinkedIn, and exactly where it stops
LinkedIn is good at one thing that nothing else does cheaply: reaching a named role at a named company. A purchase head at a list of forty companies you already want is reachable there.
It stops at two boundaries. The first is ticket size, because the cost of reaching precise job titles only makes sense when an order is worth real money. The second is who is actually on it. In plants across Hosur, Peenya and Jamshedpur, the person who signs off a consumable is not on LinkedIn at all. The engineer who is on it does not decide.
Use it for account-based work: a list of target companies, the two roles that matter, a page worth landing on, and a salesperson who follows up. Not for broadcasting posts about industry trends.
Trade media and exhibitions: the slow, useful part
Trade magazines, association directories and exhibitions do not generate this quarter's enquiries. They make next quarter's cold call answerable, because the buyer has seen the name.
An exhibition stall is the most expensive way to collect visiting cards and the cheapest way to have twenty technical conversations in three days. The difference is decided before you book: who calls every visitor within a week, what is sent to the people who asked for drawings, and where those names live afterwards.
The four channels side by side
| Search | Marketplace | Trade media | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer must know the term | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Enquiry quality | Good | Mixed, shared with rivals | Good when targeted well | Slow, warm |
| Cost behaviour | Falls as pages rank | Fixed subscription | High per contact | High, lumpy |
| Suits which order size | Any | Small and standard | Large | Large and repeat |
| Reaches the plant buyer | Yes | Yes | Often not | Yes |
| Reaches a new category | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Shows in a dashboard | Fully | Partly | Fully | Not at all |
Read the last row honestly. The two channels that build a name are the two nobody can report on, and that is why they get cut first in a bad quarter.
The part that decides all of it
Most B2B companies do not have a channel problem. They have a follow-up problem wearing a channel problem's clothes.
For example, a fabrication unit in Peenya might collect 60 enquiries in a month across search and a marketplace, quote 31 of them, and follow up on 9. The figures are illustrative. What is not illustrative is the pattern: the quotations that went out and were never chased are usually worth more than the next month of advertising.
So before moving money between channels, count three numbers for last month. Enquiries received by source, quotations sent, and quotations followed up more than once. If the third number is small, no channel will fix it.
What to do next
Write down your five best orders from last year and trace how each buyer found you. That short list tells you which channel is already working and which one you merely pay for. Then fix the reply time before you raise the budget. Our free audit is a 45-minute call about how enquiries arrive and what happens to them, and the written report ranks the fixes in order.