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.

The post Do Pay-Per-Click and LinkedIn Ad Campaigns Still Work for Professional Services? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Hinge’s annual High Growth Study uncovers what techniques the most successful professional services firms use to outperform their peers. As valuable as those insights are, they aren’t enough.

Every firm’s clientele is different. As a result, their behavior may be different, too. They may respond to different marketing strategies, read different publications or online resources, attend different conferences or be more or less inclined to search for new service providers using Google and AI than other firms in your industry.

Until you understand how your buyers behave, you can’t really build a marketing program with confidence.

Now, you may think you understand your buyers. After all, you work with them every single day. But chances are, you don’t. Their habits and preferences change. And our research shows that you know less—a lot less—about them than you think.

Consider the chart below, which represents interviews with hundreds of firms and thousands of their clients. When we ask firm staff who their competitors are, then ask their clients who they consider competitors of the firm, there is just a 25% overlap on average between the lists!

Buyers’ and Sellers’ Competitor Lists Show Minimal Overlap

Source: Hinge Inside the Buyer’s Brain study

So what do you do about this situation? The answer is to conduct research on your target audience. Audience research is the best way to learn about how your clients and companies like them find, assess and select a firm like yours. It is also the only way to find out why they selected you over the competition—and why, in many instances, they continue to use your firm.

Research provides a wealth of insights that touch every aspect of your organization. And the way it can help marketing make smarter decisions is pretty remarkable. When you can get a handle, however imperfect, on the way your buyers think and behave, you are able to evaluate where you invest your limited dollars and time. Having this information can be such a revelation, and a lucrative one at that.

Beyond formal audience research, tools like SEMRush, Sparktoro and Meltwater (to name just a few) can help you understand where your audiences spend their time online, what they read, what topics they are interested in and what events they attend. This data can not only validate your traditional research findings, but also provide new ideas to test.

Most firms today don’t have access to accurate information like this. Instead, they rely on anecdotal evidence, gut instinct and memories of what seemed to work in the past, though they often lack the hard data to know for sure.

How well do you know your audience (and how certain are you that you are right)? And is your marketing program based on the way your buyers behave rather than the biases you bring to it?

Your success may depend on how you answer the tough questions.

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Each year, they inch closer to a standard modeled by the market leaders in their industries: to become truly “full-service”—offering every conceivable relevant service to buyers across the nation or the world.

The thinking goes like this: “If we can be our clients’ one-stop shop, they will never need to go elsewhere. Prospects want to know that we can handle any challenge that comes their way.” At the same time, firm leaders carry an underlying belief that the key to growth is to expand the pool of potential buyers by adding services and entering new markets.

Our research shows that some buyers are indeed looking for a full-service experience. They appreciate the convenience of working with a familiar partner as new challenges arise.

But that isn’t the way most buyers’ minds work. The majority of professional service buyers are tasked with solving a specific problem rather than a range of possible future problems. As a result, they seek out the firm most likely to be able to solve their immediate issue in the shortest amount of time.

In this scenario, what kinds of firms do most buyers perceive as most qualified?

Specialists.

Because specialists focus on one thing (or, sometimes, a related group of things), they get really good at solving those problems. I won’t go into more detail on the advantages of specialization here because I’ve written about it before.

Instead, I want to provide a few examples of large, successful firms in different industries that have thrived by specializing. My goal is not only to demonstrate that large firms can specialize, but also that they pay no penalties for their narrower focus. In fact, it helps them attract and win exactly the kinds of clients they are best suited to serve.

Legal Industry

Quinn Emanuel
This firm focuses exclusively on litigation law, almost unheard of for a firm of its size. With more than 1,300 employees in 33 offices across four continents, they have built a reputation as one of the most feared law firms in the corporate world.

Consulting Industry

Health Management Associates (HMA)
With over 700 consultants working in all 50 states, HMA has grown to become the leader in its category. By focusing exclusively on solving the operational challenges of healthcare organizations—and with its deep insider expertise in Medicare and Medicaid regulations—it has grown quickly into the leading consultancy for public and private healthcare organizations across the nation.

Altman Solon
By focusing on a specific sector (telecommunications, media, and technology), Altman Solon has become the largest strategy consulting firm in its category. With 18 offices worldwide and over 600 professionals, they demonstrate that specialization is no barrier to growth.

Cornerstone Research
This research firm concentrates on just one thing: delivering economic and financial analysis for commercial litigation and regulatory proceedings. They have over 1,000 employees across the US and Europe.

Architecture Industry

Populous
This architecture firm went all-in on stadium and entertainment venue design, and it paid off. Since their inception in 2009, they have grown to 1,600 employees in 34 offices on four continents. They have designed some of the most iconic structures in sports and entertainment, including Wembley Stadium in London and the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Technology & Software Industry

Bishop Fox
This cyber security firm has built a reputation for exposing IT system weaknesses by simulating attacks on them. Their tenacious, offense-is-the-best defense approach sets them apart from other competitors in their category. Despite their signature approach to IT security—and in fact, because of it—they are a fast-growing firm with almost 400 employees and plenty of venture capital interest.

Epic
This software company has not only remained privately held (and employee owned) but has stuck stubbornly to its mission of helping the healthcare industry be more productive and connecting healthcare providers with their patients (if you have used MyChart, you have used their software). With revenues of $5.7 billion, Epic has grown to become the dominant player in the industry—thanks to its powerful focus.

Accounting Industry

Highly specialized large accounting firms are harder to come by. There are, however, at least a few specialized mid-sized accounting firms. Here are three representative examples:

Pinion focuses on serving the agricultural industry. With roughly 700 employees in 26 offices in the US and Australia, they have been serving the industry since 1932.

Stambaugh Ness specializes in the AEC industry, generating over 80 percent of its business from that segment. They serve over 1,400 AEC firms in all 50 states.

Your Part-Time Controller (YPTC) offers outsourced accounting services exclusively to non-profits. Today, they are a top-100 accounting firm.

There is no reason that these, or firms with similar focus, couldn’t continue to grow and challenge the industry giants.

As you can see, focus has helped firms in many industries achieve leadership status. While generalist firms also make it to the highest levels of success, they must constantly battle people’s natural inclination to seek out specialists.

Specialization may not be for everyone, but don’t operate on the faulty assumption that it limits your growth opportunities. Unless your niche is simply too narrow to support significant growth (this is rarer than you think), it will be easier to attract and close new business if your firm is closely aligned with the needs of your prospective clients. All it takes is focus.

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As buyers become more skeptical, simply relying on strong relationships, referrals, and polished proposals isn’t enough. Today’s buyers conduct extensive research long before they contact a firm, using search engines, AI tools, peer recommendations, and digital content to validate every claim. By the time an RFP is released, many buyers have already decided which firms belong on the short list.

The firms that consistently win work understand that business development begins long before the proposal phase.

The Modern AEC Buying Journey Has Changed

Historically, referrals were the cornerstone of new business development in the AEC industry. While they’re are still valuable, they no longer operate the way they once did.

According to Hinge’s research, buyers increasingly verify referrals through online searches, articles, videos, websites, and even AI platforms before ever reaching out. Rather than accepting a recommendation at face value, prospects seek independent confirmation that a firm’s expertise and reputation match what they’ve heard. This mean firms are constantly being evaluated, even when they don’t know they’re under consideration. If your firm’s online presence doesn’t reinforce what a referral promises, you’ll be out of the running before your business development team ever gets involved.

Why Firms Never Reach the Short List

Today’s buyers aren’t looking for reasons to consider specific firms; they’re looking for reasons to eliminate them. Once, technical expertise was enough to get a foot in the door. Now, it’s only one consideration of many. Besides lack of relevant experience, other disqualifiers include:

• Poor collaboration or communication
• Budget overruns
• Quality concerns
• Schedule delays
• Regulatory or legal risks
• Reputational red flags
• Technology implementation failures

Selecting an engineering consultant, architect, or contractor is a high-risk decision. Buyers aren’t simply looking for the most qualified firm—they’re looking for the firm that gives them the greatest confidence. That confidence must be established before interviews ever begin.

The Trust Deficit

Today’s buyers face an overwhelming number of choices. Nearly every firm claims technical excellence, exceptional service, and proven experience. As those messages become increasingly similar, trust becomes harder to earn. Marketing teams often respond by producing more proposal content or polishing boilerplate language. But buyers aren’t looking for spin; they’re looking for proof that firms understand their needs and can solve their specific problems.

Combating the trust deficit requires giving buyers proof that firms can do what they say they can. Being featured in reputable publications, earning independent media mentions, providing educational content and data-driven case stories, engaging in visible thought leadership, and sharing verifiable client testimonials help reduce buyer uncertainty.

Winning After You’ve Made the Short List

Making the short list is only half the battle. Once firms reach the interview stage, buyers evaluate a different set of criteria.

The factors most likely to tip the scale include:

1. Expertise and technical skills
2. Prior relationships
3. Quality of the project team
4. Understanding client needs
5. Trust and integrity
6. Reputation
7. Proven results
8. Communication and responsiveness

After technical expertise, every item on the list is rooted in trust building.

Visibility Is the New Business Development

One of the biggest findings from our latest research is that the most successful firms don’t just have strong reputations; they’re also highly visible. A firm may have an excellent reputation among existing clients, but if prospective buyers can’t easily discover or verify that expertise, business growth stagnates. Conversely, visibility without credibility creates awareness, but not confidence.

High-growth firms invest in both. They publish articles, participate in industry events, speak at conferences, contribute original research, optimize their websites for search, and create educational resources that answer buyers’ questions before they ask them. When buyers begin researching potential firms, those organizations are already on their radar.

Moving Beyond Proposal-Centric Marketing

Many AEC marketing departments remain heavily focused on proposal production. The firms that consistently outperform competitors leverage the strengths of marketing and business development in cooperation. Instead of simply responding to opportunities, they’re actively creating them.

That includes:

• Building recognizable experts within the firm
• Publishing educational content regularly
• Investing in search visibility
• Developing strong client success stories
• Creating research that addresses buyer challenges
• Aligning marketing and business development around long-term visibility

Rather than asking, “How do we win this RFP?” they’re asking, “How do we become the obvious choice before the RFP is written?”

The Future Belongs to Verifiable Experts

Today’s AEC buyers conduct far more independent research than ever before. They consult peers, search Google, read articles, watch videos, attend webinars, and increasingly rely on AI-generated summaries to narrow their options. That means firms are no longer competing solely in interviews or proposal evaluations. They’re competing every day online. The firms that consistently make the short list—and ultimately win more work—are those that invest in building trust long before a proposal is submitted.

Relationships still matter. Technical excellence still matters. But in today’s marketplace, neither can remain invisible.

By combining expertise with visibility, strong trust signals, and consistent thought leadership, AEC firms can reduce buyer uncertainty, strengthen their reputation, and improve their win rates in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

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Yet, it appears nowhere in the top-10 list of most impactful techniques used by high-growth firms. What are we to make of this discrepancy? And what does it mean for your own marketing program?

First, let me define my terms. In our study, we differentiate between social media advertising (on, say, LinkedIn or YouTube, for instance) and pay-per-click/digital display advertising (such as Google Ads). In professional services, social media advertising usually takes place on LinkedIn, though different industries may favor various social channels, too.

Next, I want to make a point: data alone doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes, it helps to have a bit of context or familiarity with the situation to understand what is likely going on. And that’s what I’d like to explore briefly today.

In our experience, many firms that do digital advertising—whether on social media, Google or elsewhere—get poor results for a wide range of reasons. Often, they see their competition doing advertising and they feel like they need to get in on the action. This, in part, explains the popularity of this marketing technique.

What many firms lack, unfortunately, is a true strategy, which may explain why impact scores lag. Digital advertising, whether on social media or elsewhere, requires several things be in place in order for it to deliver any kind of respectable return:

1. Clear goals
2. Well-defined audiences
3. Compelling calls to action
4. Willingness to experiment with different messages and visuals
5. Strong conversion pages
6. An eye on analytics
7. Readiness to follow up quickly
8. Plenty of patience

Digital advertising also requires a significant financial and time investment. A small one-week experiment isn’t likely to get enough traction to produce results. Many firms dip their toe in the water, see no results and get out. That’s not a plan for success.

While high-growth firms have lower impact scores for this technique, theirs are significantly higher than the rest of the field. They use the technique because it works for them and because they know how to deliver with greater sophistication than average firms.

We have also found that social media advertising, particularly on LinkedIn, offers firms a precision tool to target very specific audiences. Because you can target job functions and even specific job titles in specific industries and company sizes, you can reach exactly the people you want. You can even target specific companies, which is a critical function of account-based marketing (also known as ABM).

While advertising is a big part of some firms’ marketing programs, others use it as yet another channel to reach and nurture their audience. As Google and AI search upend traditional SEO, firms use social media advertising to bridge the gap. It can be used in a variety of ways, from promoting important pieces of content you have produced to promoting events to building brand awareness.

Today’s marketing mantra is “be everywhere your prospects are.” Social media advertising can be an effective part of that strategy. If, and how much, you should invest in it will depend on your industry, your audience, and what you want advertising to accomplish.

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That means most firms choose not to differentiate themselves visually. They choose to blend in.

And that’s just not smart marketing.

We are highly visual creatures. The picture superiority effect, a well-studied psychological phenomenon, demonstrates that people are more likely to recognize and recall pictures than words. And they do it faster.

But if the pictures you associate with your firm are little different from those your competitors use, there is more room for confusion—and forgetting.

The fault isn’t all on the firms. Finding photos that are both differentiated and relevant isn’t easy. And stock photo services sometimes compound the problem. As a proxy for whatever business problem you may solve, I searched our Getty Images account for the term “business performance.” Here’s a representative sample of what I got:

The first thing I noticed is that most of the images are blue. Blue-toned imagery is endemic on business websites. There is also a lot of Minority Report-style projection magic going on, with fingers, hands and styluses hocus-pocusing fantastical charts. In one image, two people high-five at a conference table. Almost every image feels stale, awkward or cliché.

This is not to say that stock agencies like Getty don’t have great images. They do. But you sometimes have to use a little imagination to find something that will capture attention (more on this in a moment).

Capture attention. That’s the primary goal of imagery. It’s really that simple.

But many marketers have a different idea. They approach image search with a set of fuzzy, unstated goals. Often, they hope to find an image that will literally represent the topic or theme. If that doesn’t work, it should at least convey the vibe of the topic. But it can’t be too “out there” or it might invite uncomfortable questions from leadership. They find themselves on a quest for the perfect image with only the vaguest understanding of what they are looking for and a lot of uncertainty. That’s a tough mission. And what they end up with often feels like a disappointing compromise.

Now, I have no problem with images that address a topic directly or express a vibe. But keep in mind the main objective is to capture people’s attention so you can pull them into the text on the page.

That means your imagery has to be different from what’s on your competitors’ websites and marketing materials. Like all branding decisions, image direction rolls down from the top. Leadership needs to understand that to stand out means to be a little unconventional or uncomfortable. You don’t have to be weird or controversial. You just have to be different enough.

Here are a few tips to pick better imagery:

• Seek out colorful photos. Color is the key to successful photography. Look for vibrant hues and rich, saturated images, if that look fits your brand. You can even search for images that contain your brand colors to create a cohesive look.
• Refine your search terms. To get past the most cliché images, try adding one or more of these terms to your search queries: “candid,” “natural light,” “reportage,” “shadow play,” “high contrast,” “mid-action,” “shallow depth of field,” “high angle,” “low angle,” “dramatic,” “motion blur,” “lens flare.” Be creative. Think up your own.
• Think conceptually. There are times when literally showing what you do just makes sense. If you design buildings, for instance, you want to show off your work. But if what you do is a bit abstract, you may be better served by looking for a metaphor that expresses some aspect of your business or positioning. For example, instead of showing a globe to represent your international reach, you might depict a closeup of a transaction in foreign currency at a street market.
• Go abstract. Avoid the headache of finding the perfect image for each situation and develop a library of complementary abstract images. As long as they are colorful and interesting, they will draw people’s eyes. (Bain & Company takes this approach.)
• Spend more on premium images. If you have a subscription to a stock agency you may not have free access to the entire collection. Budget for a few premium images and expand your search (or search on other stock sites) to get access to higher quality photos and illustrations.
• Try AI. In our experience, AI images are a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes they produce exciting results, while other times you spin your wheels—and burn a lot of credits—and never get what you want. You can also use AI to modify existing images (check your image license first). Keep in mind that you can’t own the copyright to most AI-generated images.
• Use illustration. Illustration, once a common approach to brand imagery, has largely gone out of fashion. That means it represents an opportunity to do something different. The gold standard is to work with an illustrator who can carry a consistent style through your pieces, but a great deal of strong stock illustration is available online, too.
• Invest in custom photography. If you want to feature your people and locations, nothing beats hiring a professional photographer. If you have multiple locations, the investment can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. But the value of beautifully showcasing real employees in their workplace is incalculable in industries where trust and personal connections matter.
• Don’t use images at all. A handful of professional services brands avoid images altogether, which certainly simplifies the issue. (See an example here.) Instead, they rely heavily on typography and color to define their brand identities. This approach is rare, so it is a real opportunity to differentiate your firm. The tradeoff, of course, is that you lose the psychological advantages of imagery.

With apologies to the Beatles, in the end, the images you choose are equal to the brand image you make.

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Whoa! Where do these prices come from?

It depends. If pricing is not available on your website, chatbots will preface their answer with a caveat that your firm does not publish a standard price list. But do they stop there? No, of course not.*

Dutifully, cheerfully, the chatbot will churn out a set of prices for some of the services you offer, or perhaps hourly rates for various employee tiers. These prices may or may not be in the ballpark. But unless you publish your prices on your website, one thing is for certain: the prices don’t reflect your actual fees.

Where the information actually comes from depends. The chatbots check your website first. Because most firms keep their pricing secret—or because every engagement is unique and every proposal is custom, so what’s the point?—the bots are forced to look elsewhere.

In our experiments, they seem to look first for any pricing information on the web that is connected to your firm. That might be a “Starting at” price that you listed (probably years ago) on a public directory or certification site. As you can imagine, these prices can be wildly misleading.

In the case of global consultants McKinsey & Company, they submitted a full Covid-response proposal to the state of New Jersey. Journalists investigating the contract got access to the proposal through a public records request and published it online. AI chatbots use that information to make broad assumptions about McKinsey’s pricing.

If a chatbot can’t find any pricing information for your firm, it may search for general pricing information from other firms in your industry. Often it presents these prices with little or no explanation of their source.

Let’s look at a real-world example generated from ChatGPT, which is by far the most commonly used AI chatbot. Below, I ask what a leading accounting firm charges for its services:

The first thing to note is that ChatGPT offers few links to identify its sources. (Perplexity, by contrast, is less stingy and likes to provide links to sources). Are these prices based on actual pricing data from this firm? No. Where do they come from? Your guess is as good as mine.

Is it, however, easy for a buyer to assume that these prices are generally correct (even if they aren’t)? Oh, yes.

Even though the ChatGPT response says that the firm “does not publish a standard, one-size-fits-all price sheet,” it nevertheless serves up specific price ranges and hourly rates.

Note how the bot uses language that is confident and authoritative: “They typically structure their fees through hourly billing, fixed project fees, or monthly subscription retainers.” And “[Firm name] organizes its fees based on the technical expertise required for each service line.” It then goes on to describe the services and quote fees for each.

None of this information is real, but it feels real. Which can be a big problem if the prices are unrealistic or don’t reflect the way you price engagements.

Maybe it’s chatbots’ conversational style. Or maybe it’s the fact that they can access seemingly anything on the internet. Whatever the reason, buyers feel like they can ask these robots questions that they can’t possibly reliably answer. And at least some of them are asking about pricing as they research prospective firms.

The problem, of course, is that if the pricing seems too high or lacks context, a buyer may rule you out. Or if the prices are too low, they may reach out to you with unrealistic expectations, putting you at a disadvantage from the start.

It’s not clear yet whether AI pricing hallucination is a big or small problem. Today, it is very difficult to even know what proportion of professional services buyers are using AI to research and select firms. But based on what we hear from our clients, and based on our experience at our own firm, more than a handful of prospects are using AI chatbots to evaluate firms.

This evidence is supported by consumer data from Similarweb, whose 2026 Brand Visibility Index indicates that 30% of buyers are using AI tools to research and compare tools. This study also indicates that a quarter of buyers are using AI to compare pricing.

What Can You Do About AI Pricing Misinformation?

If you are worried about AI delivering inaccurate pricing information, first determine if you have a problem. Sign up for free accounts with all five of the most popular AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Perplexity). Then type in a query like, “How much does [Your Firm Name] charge for its services.” If your firm is small or if there are other companies with names similar to yours, you may also want to include your URL so that the bot knows who you are.

If all of the bots return no pricing information, you are probably okay. If any of them do provide pricing, however, you will need to decide whether or not the generated information poses a problem. Many firm leaders may decide that what is presented is broad or generic enough that it poses no harm.

But what do you do if what you see completely misrepresents your pricing model?

One possible solution is to address pricing directly on your website. You don’t necessarily have to publish a detailed list of fees for every service you offer. Instead, you can describe in broad strokes what a typical engagement costs and what factors might affect that number or range. If you want to call attention to it, this information could go on a dedicated pricing page. Or if you prefer to make your pricing less prominent, you could make it an item in an FAQs section. As long as the page can be crawled by the bots, they should find it.

Firms keep their pricing hidden for many reasons, but as people increasingly turn to AI to find and vet firms, executives may need to rethink how secretive they are about fees. For now, we’re keeping an eye on this fascinating—some would say scary—possibility.

The post Uh Oh. Buyers Are Asking AI What You Charge. appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Even the newspaper that first reported that incident is not immune: a reader noticed that a New York Times Modern Love column seemed to have the telltale signs of “AI slop.” The writer of the column confirmed to The Atlantic that she had used a variety of AI tools to produce the piece, though she denied simply copying and pasting prompt results into her article. Instead, she used the tools for “inspiration and guidance and correction.”

Like the rest of us, major news outlets wrestle with how to integrate AI into their writing workflows. Some readers of mainstream news organizations like The Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal revel in the opportunity to call out (usually in comments) editorials or articles that appear to have some AI content.

Ironically, a small portion—4%—of the Pope’s recent encyclical on AI may have been written by AI. While 4% may sound insignificant, it raises inconvenient questions that distract from the message.

In many, if not all, of these cases, the text was passed through the AI detector Pangram. Pangram claims an accuracy rate of 99.98%. At first, I was skeptical of this claim. The last time I looked into tools like these, they were almost as likely to produce a false positive as not.

But with time, technology gets better. In this case, a lot better.

Pangram has been rigorously tested by third parties and found to be superior to the rest of the field. That’s not to say it’s infallible. Even Pangram’s CEO says that a piece that contains a large amount of mixed AI- and human-generated text could be flagged as 100% AI content.

I’m bringing all of this up to make a point. If you are an expert who is building a reputation for thought leadership, you need to be careful how you use AI. AI can be a powerful tool, but it also has the potential to destroy your reputation.

Consider 2018 Nobel Prize winner for Literature Olga Tokarczuk. In an interview she explained how she had used AI as a research tool to help her write her latest novel. The backlash was swift. She has now decided that her current project will be her last. While Tokarczuk hasn’t admitted her chipped reputation is the reason for her decision, it is not difficult to imagine that her publisher and her readers feel deep disappointment and resentment. Much of the trust that she built up over decades has vanished in the blink of an AI.

Of course, Visible Experts^® in the professional services aren’t necessarily held to the same standards as Nobel laureates. People understand that most of us are both practitioners and thought leaders. We aren’t full-time writers or speakers. That gives us, perhaps, a little more flexibility to experiment with modern technologies.

Yet with tools like Pangram readily available—a functional version is available for free—the potential for reputational damage from an agitator is higher than ever. A single post in a prominent industry forum “exposing” your “lack of original thinking” and “dependence on AI” could severely damage your credibility in an instant.

And, honestly, if you are leaning on AI to write your content, you aren’t helping your cause, anyway. As I’ve explained before, if you are letting the robots think for you, you aren’t exercising your own mental muscles. You aren’t learning in the way that writing forces you to. Nor are you producing the original, insightful stuff that readers are looking for.

In addition, because your content is machine generated, it is less likely to be considered original and authoritative by Google—making it more difficult to achieve the visibility you are seeking.

Then there’s the indelicate matter of AI-generated writing itself. It’s a mess.

As Eve Fairbanks, a professional editor, writes in a piece for The Atlantic, “AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”

So what is an expert’s best move? Should you completely avoid AI when you write?

I would not go that far.

I still believe AI can be an invaluable research and proofing tool. But be very careful when using it to generate text or to smooth out what you have written yourself. That’s when you enter the danger zone. If you include some AI-generated text, I suggest you revise it to sound more like you. You might even want to use a tool like Pangram to see how your piece scores before hitting the publish button.

How you use AI in writing is not a black and white issue. There is no clear line between right and wrong. Different experts are going to have different levels of AI risk. And some—those in the AI industry for instance—may actually benefit from not only using AI to write but speaking openly about how and why they do it.

But most experts are going to be far better off writing in their own, distinctive voice. If writing isn’t your jam, try pivoting to video and public speaking. Plenty of experts have built their reputations on video or in front of live audiences. Or you can simply hire a professional writer to get your ideas down on paper.

Just as the technology landscape is changing, so are the risks that come with it. I hope that now, if you’ve made it through this article, you are a little more aware of some of those risks and the decisions you need to make as you build your expert profile.

The post Should an Expert Write with AI? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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According to new research, in 2026, 80% of B2B Google searches result in no clicks to a website. That’s an absolutely staggering statistic.

What the heck happened to all those clicks?

As you probably suspect, most of those Google queries are being answered by AI overviews. And increasingly, people are bypassing Google altogether and using their favorite chatbot to ask questions and conduct research.

At the same time, social media companies, including LinkedIn, have made it difficult or impractical to link out to external websites. As a result, referral traffic from social media to firms’ websites has largely dried up.

For firms that have invested in content, the implications are real. Not only are fewer people visiting their website, but fewer are reading their blog, downloading their high-value content and being added to their prospect list.

Faced with this reality, it’s easy to get discouraged. Marketing is changing—but don’t throw out the blog posts with the bath water just yet.

Expert content is still relevant. In fact, it always will be. The way people find your content may evolve, but without content you will never have a chance to be cited in AI search or reap the benefits of Visible Expertise^®.

Most serious-minded people searching for serious answers to complex business problems are not going to trust an AI-generated answer. These are the folks who click links to check the accuracy of AI-generated answers and to access information produced by true human experts.

They also are more likely to scroll down the search results page and click on the blue links to websites, to do real research and once they find you, to read or watch everything relevant on their topic.

So while overall your traffic may be way down, the quality of that traffic may very well be up. This is especially likely if you have a strong, systematic content marketing program in place.

Content supplies the foundation for high quality AI search results. While there is much legitimate debate about the ethics of LLMs scraping copyrighted material from the web, this is the marketing world we find ourselves in today. Ever since Google became a commercial success, marketers have had to play by its rules—however unfair we believed they were. Today is no different.

Of course, optimizing your content to rank well in search engines isn’t the only way to build your reputation and visibility. You can invest in paid advertising on Google, LinkedIn or other platforms. To be successful at advertising, you need a healthy budget, a dedicated team that isn’t afraid to experiment and plenty of patience.

Another approach is to find out what your audience reads and where it watches video, then build a presence in those places. In a zero-click world, you need not only to publish content on your website, but on the sites and platforms that attract your audience’s attention. This means thinking beyond the blog post and creating short- and long-form video content, as well, that you post on YouTube, LinkedIn or other social platforms.

To find these opportunities requires audience research. It also requires active participation on those platforms—posting, answering questions and linking to your content where allowed.

Many of the most successful firms I work with use a combination of these strategies. They continue to produce valuable educational content. They use GEO and SEO optimization techniques to give it visibility to AI and traditional search engines. Many do online advertising. They shoot and post videos. And they publish and interact on the platforms where their clients are. In addition, these firms speak in public and do traditional networking, facing their people in-person to convey their expertise.

There is no question that content’s role in marketing is undergoing a fundamental change. But its shining value—its ability to capture the thinking of your experts like lightning bugs—will continue to attract qualified prospects forever.

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Too often, firms fall into a “fire, ready, aim” trap—moving quickly, prioritizing visible activity and the appearance of productivity without building a strategic foundation that actually drives performance. Leadership teams and stakeholders may feel energized by a new visual identity or a bold messaging campaign. But if those efforts aren’t grounded in a clear understanding of what their audiences actually value, the ROI will fall short.

The good news? Strategic marketing doesn’t have to be slow and rigid. The highest-performing professional services firms are learning how to move with both speed and precision. They coordinate research, technology, and creative execution to create momentum without sacrificing focus.
Here are seven ways professional services firms can balance speed and marketing performance more effectively.

1. Use Existing Benchmarking Data to Accelerate Insights

You don’t have to wait until your custom research is finished to begin generating impact. Some of the fastest-moving firms start with high-quality secondary and benchmarking data to uncover actionable intelligence immediately.

Using third-party research can give you reasonably accurate insights into buyer behavior, industry trends, positioning gaps, and competitive opportunities long before your custom research project is complete. This allows you to begin refining your strategy and messaging as you gather deeper, more perfectly tuned intelligence. The key is recognizing that research is not a one-time event—it’s an ongoing exercise.

2. Think “Strategy,” not “Activity”

In professional services marketing, there’s often intense pressure to “do something: launch the campaign, redesign the website, post more content, increase visibility—often on a tight budget and with limited team support. Without strategic alignment, speed just creates waste.

The most successful firms take time to clarify their positioning, messaging, audience priorities, and go-to-market focus before executing. Develop a coherent strategy and focus before launching your campaign. That will reduce rework and give the marketing and business development teams time to coordinate their plan of attack.

3. Translate Expertise into Language Buyers Understand

Professional services firms often assume expertise speaks for itself. But deep technical knowledge won’t drive growth if your audiences can’t understand you.

The firms gaining traction today are the ones that can translate complex ideas into clear, engaging, easy-to-understand language. When they write and speak, they give their audience a peek at their expertise and what it might be like to work with them. They focus on real-world problems and practical outcomes that buyers can immediately connect with.

For example, a CEO for a technical consulting firm, worked with a dedicated writer to explain the company’s expertise in finite element analysis by explaining how refrigerators work. While the approach may seem simplistic to an expert in his field, it resonated with decision-makers at Fortune 50 firms—and was a key factor in landing a handful of lucrative contracts.

That’s a powerful lesson for professional services marketers. Buyers often disregard industry jargon. The most important target audiences are typically not the peers of a subject matter expert. Firms that explain complex ideas in accessible ways often outperform competitors with equally strong expertise, but less effective communication.

4. Build Adaptive, Non-Linear Marketing Workflows

Many organizations still approach marketing strategy as a rigid sequence of steps. But modern growth strategies are increasingly iterative, and they take advantage of systems that allow them to test, refine, optimize, and scale continuously.

By using data early in the process to understand your audience, you can launch marketing initiatives that are more focused and relevant.

The result is a more responsive marketing engine that can integrate online and offline marketing activities and connect them to business performance.

5. Use Advanced Tools to Understand Audiences Faster

Today’s firms have access to more market intelligence than ever before—but extracting meaningful insights still requires the right tools and expertise.

Advanced research platforms, AI-assisted analysis, digital scraping technologies, and licensed data resources can help firms uncover audience behaviors, market conversations, and buying patterns at remarkable speed. The challenge is not getting access to information, it’s making sense of it all.

The most successful professional services firms are combining advanced tools with the expert insight to separate useful signals from the noise. That includes understanding how AI-generated summaries, search behavior, and secondary research influence how buyers evaluate service providers long before they ever contact a firm directly.

6. Adopt a Growth-Oriented Mindset

Historically, professional services firms have operated with conservative growth models and limited marketing budgets. Driven in part by private equity investment, this mindset is changing. Firms that operate this way are more focused on measurable outcomes, operational efficiency, and speed-to-performance.

This doesn’t mean firms should abandon thoughtful strategy in favor of short-term tactics. But it does mean that marketing and business development efforts must demonstrate quantifiable impact. It means acknowledging the difference between subject matter expertise and business expertise and leveraging the strengths of both.

The firms best positioned for this new environment are those that adapt to these changing expectations, embracing the need for more sophisticated tools, a clear strategy, and operational agility.

7. Create Early Wins That Build Internal Momentum

Not every leadership team will embrace a research-driven or systematic marketing approach right off the bat. Skepticism is common, especially when organizations are under pressure to grow quickly.
One of the most effective ways to build buy-in is to set up small pilot initiatives that generate visible early wins.

A tangible success story—a measurable improvement in visibility, lead quality, engagement, or business development outcomes—can quickly shift leadership’s perceptions. Former skeptics become strong advocates. Small strategic wins can create the organizational confidence to propel broader transformation initiatives.

The Bottom Line: Strategic Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Slow

Professional services firms no longer have to choose between speed and strategy. The most effective organizations are learning how to combine thoughtful positioning, audience intelligence, adaptive execution, and performance measurement into a faster, smarter marketing and business development model.

While it’s possible to build this expertise in-house, firms don’t have to go it alone. Many organizations hire outside experts and agencies to provide the proven methodologies, advanced tools, and objective guidance they need to thrive—especially with the arrival of LLMs, agentic AI and the rapid, continual changes that come with these technologies. That external perspective can help firms avoid costly missteps, accelerate learning curves, and execute more confidently in rapidly changing markets. Finding a resource that knows your industry, too, is important, as they will already have a solid understanding of your marketplace.

What’s your firm’s growth strategy?

The post 7 Ways to Balance Speed and Performance in Professional Services Marketing appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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