The channel comes last.
We plan and run paid advertising for established B2B companies, with a focus on manufacturing and industrial companies, and we choose the channels after we understand your buyers. A lot of paid media proposals arrive with the answer already written: a Google Ads account, a LinkedIn budget, a retainer to run both. We start with what you're trying to grow and how your buyers actually find and choose a company like yours. Sometimes that points to search. Sometimes LinkedIn. Sometimes no prospecting ads at all, only retargeting the people who already know you.
The fastest way to run paid media for a new client is to use whatever you already know how to launch. Pick the platform, build the campaigns you always build, and start reporting. It gets an account live quickly and it makes the monthly report easy to write. It's also built around what's convenient for the agency, not around how that client's buyers behave.
Paid channels aren't interchangeable, and even one platform can do very different jobs. Cold Meta ads shown to people who've never heard of you and retargeting on Meta aimed at people who already visited your site run from the same ad account. They're not the same tool. In plenty of industrial markets the first is unlikely to produce much. The second can be a cheap way to stay in front of someone during a decision that takes months, which is the job Meta tends to do best for B2B companies.
So the first conversation is about the business: which work you want more of, which customers, where the company is headed, and how a buyer in your market goes from having a need to having a shortlist. That path is different for a contract manufacturer than for an equipment builder, and the B2B buying process behind each one decides which channels are worth paying for.
Four answers the same question can produce.
What the plan can end up being once we know how your buyers buy.
LinkedIn ads.
When you know exactly who decides, by title, company and industry, but they aren't searching for you yet. It suits markets small enough to name, where reaching the right people matters more than reaching a lot of them.
Google Ads.
When buyers search for what you do in their own words: a process, a material, a part, a spec. Search is where someone states what they need, so the terms have to match that need, and so does the page they land on.
Retargeting only.
For a company that wins most of its work through trade shows and referrals, the job may not be finding new people at all. It's staying visible to the ones who already met you and went to look you up afterward.
Ads around a trade show.
Localized campaigns that run while you're exhibiting, so the people at the show keep seeing your name during the days they're deciding who to follow up with. Timed to your show calendar.
How we decide what to run.
Most of what decides the plan is knowledge only you have.
We learn the business first.
What you sell, which of it you want more of, which customers you'd happily clone, and where the company's headed in the next few years.
We map how your buyers actually buy.
Who specifies and who signs off. Where they look first. How long a decision takes. What part referrals, distributors and trade shows already play. That picture, more than the industry you're in, is what tells us which channels have a real chance.
Then we build the plan and measure what matters.
The channels, the targeting and the budget follow from the first two steps. Results are tracked past the click to what came of it: the call, the quote request, the deal. And if the honest answer is that ads aren't where your money should go yet, we'll say that instead.
We focus on manufacturing and industrial companies. That's where we start, and it's still too broad to plan from, because the way buyers behave inside that world varies far more than the label suggests.
A contract manufacturer quoting custom parts is often found by an engineer with a drawing and a deadline, searching for a process. A component maker that sells through distributors and reps may rarely meet the end buyer at all. An equipment builder selling a large capital purchase usually deals with a group of people over months, where a single click means little and staying present through the whole decision means a lot. A company that does most of its selling at two shows a year has a calendar the advertising should follow, and what happens between those shows is its own problem.
Each of those needs different channels, different targeting and a different definition of a good result. A plan built for one would waste money on the others, and in this category waste adds up quickly, because industrial clicks aren't cheap. That's the practical case against a one-size-fits-all plan.
It's also why the page an ad lands on matters as much as the ad. Paying for a precise click and sending it to a general landing page throws away much of what the targeting earned. When the site itself is what's letting the ads down, that's a different job: see manufacturing website design. When the ads need something specific to point at, that's ongoing content.
We're a certified Google Partner and a Meta Business Partner, and the tracking is built to follow a click through to the quote request and, where your CRM records it, the deal. That way a plan gets judged on the business it produced.
What does a PPC agency do?
It plans and runs paid advertising for a company: choosing the channels, setting up targeting and campaigns, managing budgets and bids, and reporting on what the spend produced. The step that varies most between agencies is the first one. Some start from the platform they know best. The better starting point is how your buyers find and choose a supplier, because that decides which channels are worth paying for in the first place.
How much is PPC with a marketing agency?
There are two costs. The media itself, which goes to Google, LinkedIn or Meta, and the agency's fee for planning and running it. We don't publish a rate, because both depend on which channels make sense for you, and we don't know that until we've looked at your market. Be cautious of any proposal that sets a budget before anyone has asked how your buyers buy.
What does PPC stand for?
Pay-per-click: advertising where you're charged when someone clicks your ad, most commonly on search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing. The term also gets used loosely for paid digital advertising in general, including platforms like LinkedIn and Meta that often bill per impression instead. In manufacturing, PPC can mean production planning and control, which is why a search for PPC for manufacturers can return scheduling software alongside ad agencies.
Do Facebook and Instagram ads work for manufacturers?
It depends on the job you give them. As a way to reach people who've never heard of you, they're often a poor fit for industrial buyers. As retargeting, showing your name again to people who already visited your site, they can be an inexpensive way to stay visible through a long decision. Same platform, different tool, and it's worth knowing which one a proposal means.
Will you tell us if we shouldn't be running ads?
Yes. Sometimes the budget does more somewhere else first, like a landing page that doesn't match what people searched for, or tracking that can't tell a real quote request from a spam form. Sometimes the right plan is smaller than expected, like retargeting behind the trade shows you already do. We'd rather start with the plan that fits than the one that's easiest to sell.
Can you take over an ad account we already run?
Yes, or work alongside whoever runs it now. Either way, the first step is looking at what the account has been measuring, because tracking that counts the wrong thing makes every past result hard to trust. After that it's the same question as a new plan: whether the channels in it fit how your buyers buy.
Do you set up the tracking as well?
Yes: conversion tracking, Google Analytics 4, Meta's Conversions API, and connecting ad clicks to what happened next in your CRM. Optimizing a campaign against form fills that never became business teaches it the wrong lesson.
Everything else we handle.
The ads only work as well as what they point at. Here's what else we take off your plate.
Marketing Websites
Positioning sites, product launches, and brand refreshes for companies whose current site has fallen behind.
Explore Marketing SitesSEO
B2B SEO that gets your capabilities found by buyers and AI search, not just your company name.
Explore SEOAI SEO
Get cited by Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI search when buyers ask a machine to shortlist vendors.
Explore AI SEOWeb Applications
Custom product interfaces, internal tools, and customer portals built to scale.
Explore Web AppsE-commerce
E-commerce stores for merchants who've outgrown off-the-shelf templates.
Explore E-commerceBusiness Automation
Workflow automation, systems integration, and AI implementation that cuts the repetitive work.
Explore AutomationSomething else in mind? Most of our work starts with a conversation.
Book an intro call and tell us what you’re trying to build.
Find the channels your buyers use.
A 30-minute call. We'll ask how your buyers find and choose a company like yours, and tell you whether paid media looks like the right lever and what we'd need to learn to choose the channels.
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