What is the best marketing strategy for a web-based b2b and b2c platform? we have two options (described below)

Our main target group are researchers in life science & biomedical research. Right now we have been live (as a beta) for couple of months and relied purely on organic growth (google search traffic) and didn't invest a dime into marketing, because we wanted to make sure that platform is stable. Now, we want to turn into more aggressive marketing and not sure what strategy to embrace. We have two options (though, maybe not mutally exclusive). Option 1: Posting information about our platform (maybe in a form of QA session) on reddit Pros: get more visibility; speak to influencers in the field; get costractive criticism and opinions, get twitter re-twits (many reddit users are super active on twitter too); maybe get potetial customers contacts Cons: competitors may find out about us and copy some of our know-how/features before penetrate market enough; it may not add any sales, because buyers (less techsavvy people who are our potetial customers) are not on reddit and likely are not on twitter (so we would waste time and efforts on not directly selling) Option 2. Directly contact potential customers, do demo for them, get feedback and ask them for people they know who might find our platform useful. Pros: direct interaction with potential customers; get customer requirements; higher chances of sales; competitors don't know about us before we are strong on the market Cons: slow growth; slow market penetration; little awareness of our service What do you think guys? Anna