Do Pay-Per-Click and LinkedIn Ad Campaigns Still Work for Professional Services?

During business development calls and client strategy sessions, we hear the same underlying question again and again: “Is PPC still working for professional services, or are we just throwing budget at expensive clicks?”

The conversation around “moving beyond PPC” can sometimes imply that paid media no longer works. We don’t think that’s what’s happening. What’s becoming less effective is treating PPC as a standalone, bottom-of-funnel lead-generation engine. Paid search, paid social, display/demand generation, and video can all play meaningful roles across the professional services buyer journey. The opportunity now is to be much more intentional about the job we’re asking each of them to do. Paid media should capture demand when it exists, help create it when it doesn’t, and amplify the expertise and ideas that make a firm worth remembering in the first place.

Here is how we address the most pressing paid media questions facing professional services firms today, along with our approach to building an integrated marketing engine.

1. Where does PPC still work today, and where has it stopped delivering?

PPC still works for us across the funnel. What has changed is the expectation that every paid interaction should produce a lead immediately.

Search is powerful when someone is actively looking for a service or solution, but it can also reach buyers much earlier. Someone researching a problem, business challenge, or emerging issue may not be looking for a provider yet. The right search strategy and content can introduce a firm while that buyer is still defining what they need. Beyond search, paid social, display/demand generation, and Video let us reach relevant audiences even when they aren’t actively looking.

This is particularly important in professional services. The 95/5 principle suggests that at any given time, only about 5% of potential buyers are actively in-market, while the other 95% aren’t ready to buy yet. The exact percentage varies, but the implication matters: focusing on paid media exclusively on immediate intent means competing for a small pool of existing demand while largely ignoring future buyers.

Byron Sharp’s concepts of mental and physical availability capture what we should be doing with that larger audience: become easy to think of and easy to find when a buying situation arises. In professional services marketing, that means building familiarity with your expertise before a buyer is in-market, then being a visible firm and easy to engage when the need becomes real.

The problem isn’t PPC. It’s expecting every paid channel to behave like bottom-funnel search.

A LinkedIn ad introducing an executive to compelling original research shouldn’t be judged by the same standard as a Search ad for a specific service. Paid media can capture today’s demand while helping create and shape tomorrow’s.

2. What paid formats and approaches should we be testing or scaling?

We’re emphasizing paid formats that let professional services buyers experience our expertise before we ask them to convert. That includes LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads, LinkedIn Document Ads, and highly targeted YouTube campaigns, alongside more traditional paid search and social.

Thought Leader Ads are particularly interesting because they let us amplify the voices and perspectives of individual subject matter experts, rather than always advertising from a company page. In professional services, where buyers are ultimately hiring people and their expertise, that distinction matters. It also allows us to put paid support behind content that’s already proving valuable organically.

We’re also using LinkedIn Document Ads to bring substantive content directly into the feed, rather than requiring a click before someone gets value. Original research, proprietary data, and strong educational content are especially well suited to that format. And because these formats can amplify content firms are already producing, they allow us to extend the life and reach of strong assets rather than continually investing budget in net-new campaign content.

YouTube is especially interesting because it can serve multiple parts of the marketing strategy at once. Sophisticated targeting lets us put expert-led video in front of specific professional services audiences, while video is becoming increasingly important to how people search, learn, and discover brands across traditional search and AI-driven experiences. A strong video asset can support paid distribution, organic search, social content, and a firm’s broader AEO/GEO strategy rather than existing as a one-off ad.

The common thread isn’t chasing new ad formats. It’s getting more value from the content and expertise firms already have, then using paid media to make sure the right people actually see it.

3. What kind of results should we actually expect to see?

We’re seeing some of the strongest signals from formats that put expertise ahead of the traditional sales pitch. LinkedIn, for example, has reported Thought Leader Ads delivering up to 2.4x higher CTR than other single-image ads, reinforcing what we’re seeing directionally: professional services audiences are often more willing to engage with a useful perspective from a person than another polished brand message.

But clicks aren’t the only result we’re looking for. In one recent campaign, targeting a highly specific, hard-to-reach buying committee, we reached 57% of the key decision-makers and internal influencers, outperforming standard enterprise professional services ABM benchmarks by almost double. Across that high-value executive audience, we generated a 79% landing page engagement rate and saw ad-level engagement peak at 7.79%, over 6x the B2B industry average. When you put substantive expertise in front of the right executive audience, they don’t just click – they stay.

That gives us a much richer picture of whether we’re actually earning attention among the people we want to influence.

Paid Ads also give us something less obvious but incredibly useful: content intelligence. We can see which research findings, topics, and expert perspectives earn attention and generate leads, then feed those insights back into organic content, video, sales enablement, and future campaigns.

The key is not lowering the bar for paid media because attribution is difficult. It’s matching the measurement to the job the campaign was designed to do. A high-intent search campaign should generate qualified leads and pipeline. A mid-funnel campaign might be measured against meaningful conversions like a research download, webinar registration, or assessment completion. A campaign focused on the 95% who aren’t ready to buy yet should show that we’re reaching the right audience, earning attention, and building familiarity over time. Different objectives require different measures of success, but every campaign must clearly define what success looks like.

4. How do you integrate paid media into a broader content strategy alongside earned and owned media?

Paid media shouldn’t be the last step in the content process – “we published something, now let’s put some budget behind it.” We think about paid, owned, and earned as parts of the same content ecosystem, with each channel extending the reach and credibility of the others.

Hinge’s original research is a great example. We invest heavily in studying how high-growth professional services firms market, grow, and compete. One research study can fuel a flagship report, articles, webinars, executive commentary, PR and earned media, organic social, video, and sales conversations. Paid media then lets us take the strongest findings and perspectives from that research and deliberately put them in front of the audiences who will find them most relevant.

That approach also makes the content investment work much harder. Instead of continually creating net-new assets for paid campaigns, we can turn one strong research piece into dozens of touchpoints across channels and formats. A single research finding might become a LinkedIn Thought Leader Ad, a short-form video for YouTube Shorts, a Document Ad, an article, and a talking point for an SME – all reinforcing the same idea.

And the relationship goes both ways. Paid media isn’t just a distribution channel; it’s a feedback loop. Search data can tell us what buyers are asking, social engagement can reveal which research findings or perspectives resonate with specific audiences, and campaign behavior can help identify which topics deserve deeper investment across owned and earned content.

The goal is consistency without repetition. Buyers may encounter a firm through search, an expert’s LinkedIn post, a research study, a podcast, or an industry publication, but those experiences should build on one another. That’s when paid stops operating as a campaign silo and starts working as part of an integrated marketing engine.

5. How should we measure these efforts?

Measurement starts before a campaign ever goes live. We define the campaign’s role in the buyer journey, the action or behavior we’re trying to influence, and the KPIs that tell us whether it’s working. A high-intent search campaign, a gated resource, and a thought leadership ad shouldn’t have the same definition of success.

For campaigns designed to generate demand, we look well beyond leads and cost per lead. A campaign can produce an efficient cost per lead and still have very little business impact. We want to understand what happens after the conversion: Are those leads becoming MQLs and SQLs? Are they turning into opportunities? How much pipeline did the campaign source or influence? What does lead quality look like by channel, audience, and campaign?

To make that possible, we build integrated dashboards that bring paid media, website analytics, and CRM data together. That gives us a view from the initial ad interaction through conversions, qualified leads, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue. It also helps us identify the real constraint. Sometimes the issue isn’t generating more leads; it’s lead quality, the offer, the landing page, the handoff to sales, or what happens further into the customer journey.

At the same time, we don’t pretend every valuable marketing interaction can be tied neatly to revenue. Brand building and demand creation are inherently harder to attribute, particularly in long professional services buying cycles. Still, they’re essential to reaching the much larger group of buyers who aren’t in-market today. For those efforts, we define appropriate leading indicators such as reach within priority audiences, content engagement and consumption, branded search, direct traffic, and target-account activity, then look at those alongside long-term pipeline and revenue trends.

Attribution tells us what we can trace. It doesn’t necessarily tell us everything that influenced the buyer. The goal is to define success upfront, measure what matters at each stage of the buyer journey, and understand how those efforts work together to capture demand today while building the conditions for future growth.