Google & LinkedIn Ads for Consultants

By respecting the sales cycle instead of fighting it. The reliable structure is Google Search against problem-intent keywords for the minority of buyers actively looking, LinkedIn targeting your exact decision-maker profile with substantial content for everyone earlier in the journey, and retargeting to stay present across a months-long decision. The ask is matched to intent: a discovery call for hot searches, a genuinely useful asset for colder audiences. Consultants who run ads like an emergency-service business, all direct booking and instant-ROI expectations, usually conclude ads do not work. The setup was wrong, not the channel.

Yes, with a narrower aperture than most industries. Generic title keywords like business consultant are mostly noise: students, job seekers, tire kickers. What works is problem-language and specialty-language: reduce manufacturing downtime, HubSpot implementation consultant, private equity due diligence support. Volume on those terms is small, but the intent is real and the engagement values justify expensive clicks. A consultant's Google account done well looks strange by normal standards: few keywords, low traffic, aggressive negatives, and a cost per lead that would terrify a plumber while being a bargain against a six-figure engagement.

Plan on clicks costing several times more than Google or Meta, often in the high single digits to well past ten dollars depending on how senior and narrow your audience is, and on a workable minimum of roughly $2,000 to $4,000 per month in media spend to get past statistical noise. Whether that is expensive depends entirely on your engagement size: for a practice closing five and six-figure work, one client a quarter sourced from LinkedIn typically pays for the year. The mistake is funding it at hobby levels and judging it in three weeks.

They are ads that promote posts published by an individual person's profile rather than a company page, so your promoted content shows up as a human sharing a viewpoint instead of a brand running a campaign. For consultants this format is close to purpose-built: prospective clients are evaluating a person's judgment, and these ads put that judgment directly in the feed of your target titles. They tend to earn stronger engagement than standard sponsored content in B2B. They work best promoting genuinely opinionated, useful posts, not thinly disguised sales copy with a personal byline.

Both, assigned by intent. Put the discovery call ask in front of high-intent Google searches where someone has named their problem and is evaluating help. Offer a substantive asset, a benchmark, an assessment, a framework, to LinkedIn audiences and colder traffic who are months from a decision. The magnet must be genuinely valuable or it attracts collectors who never buy, and it needs follow-up infrastructure behind it or the list just decays. The real error is picking one ask and forcing every audience through it regardless of readiness.

Expect the first signed engagement to take three to six months from launch, sometimes longer for enterprise-sized work, because the ads inherit your sales cycle: committee decisions, budget windows, competing priorities. Leads and conversations come much sooner, usually within weeks, and those are the early signals worth reading. This is also exactly why we work on a performance basis: we benchmark your current cost per qualified opportunity and only get paid for improving it, which keeps our incentives aligned through the months where pipeline is building but revenue has not landed yet.