B2B Paid Media strategy: When Google Ads, LinkedIn & Programmatic work together

Too often, brands look for a single channel to solve their growth challenges, leading to a fragmented approach that leaves revenue on the table. At Hallam, we’ve seen that the most resilient growth doesn’t come from a single platform, but from a holistic B2B paid media strategy that considers the long customer journey of a B2B buyer.

By integrating high-intent search, precise professional targeting and broad-reach programmatic display, you can nurture a prospect from their first touchpoints online to their final point of purchase. As an experienced paid media agency, we understand that B2B buying cycles are long, complex and involve multiple stakeholders.

Here is how to align your channels to match the modern B2B customer journey.

Why a holistic strategy is key

A holistic strategy moves away from random acts of marketing and towards a synchronised funnel. Instead of Google Ads and LinkedIn working in silos, they should share data and insights to improve overall performance.

Awareness: building the foundation with Programmatic

Many B2B brands skip the awareness phase, diving straight into Lead Gen. However, programmatic advertising allows you to reach a vast audience of potential buyers before they even know they have a problem. By using first-party data and niche industry targeting, programmatic ads place your brand on the trade publications and news sites your prospects trust most.

Consideration: precision targeting via LinkedIn

Once a prospect is aware of the category, LinkedIn becomes the primary tool for credibility. It allows for unmatched precision targeting by job title, company size and even specific accounts (ABM). This is where you trade value for attention, offering whitepapers or webinars that solve specific pain points.

Conversion: capturing intent with Google Ads

When a prospect is ready to buy, they head to Google. If you’ve done your job in the Awareness and Consideration phases, your brand will already be familiar. Google Ads acts as the closer, capturing high-intent searches for your B2B paid media strategy keywords, meaning users are more likely to dwell on your website and convert.

Case Study: full funnel strategy for growth

To illustrate this, let’s look at a recent project where we helped a mid-market Healthcare brand increase enquiries by 109% year on year. Mobility in Motion initially relied heavily on Google Ads but, as a healthcare brand, there were significant limitations such as the inability to leverage first-party data or target people with disabilities.

We shifted them to a multi-channel approach:

• Paid social ads were used as a secondary phase of the paid strategy, leveraging interest-based, lookalike and demographic segments to expand reach and engage potential customers
• Programmatic ads ensured further customer touchpoints were covered, allowing the brand to stay top of mind whilst the target audience considered their purchase over a longer period of time
• Organic Search was also key in capturing brand-specific searches that resulted from the overall increased visibility

The result? As well as the impressive impact on enquiries, the brand also saw a 400% increase in overall branded searches year on year. This unified approach set the brand up for success in subsequent years.

Why LinkedIn is the B2B backbone

While Google captures existing demand, LinkedIn creates it. For a successful B2B paid media strategy, LinkedIn can be used to build a retargeting pool of qualified professionals.

• Thought leadership ads: Use these to promote posts from your company’s subject matter experts. It feels less like an ad and more like a peer-to-peer recommendation.
• Lead gen forms: These reduce friction by allowing users to download content without leaving the platform, which typically leads to higher conversion rates on mobile.
• Account-based marketing (ABM)*: You can upload a list of target gold-list accounts and ensure your ads only show to employees at those specific firms.

*We work with partners such as 6Sense who do personalised, individualised advertising to specific businesses for ‘true’ ABM.

As an integrated paid media agency, we recommend using LinkedIn data to inform your other channels. For instance, if a specific industry is engaging heavily on LinkedIn, you can create dedicated landing pages and Google Ads campaigns specifically for that sector.

Maximising reach with programmatic

Programmatic is often the lesser-used entity in B2B. However it allows you to move beyond the walled gardens of social media and search. By using programmatic, you can reach your audience on 98% of the internet, including premium publishers like The Financial Times or Forbes.

The key benefit here is frequency without fatigue. By seeing your brand in different contexts (professional social media, search results and high-authority news sites) the prospect begins to view your business as a market leader. This builds the mental availability required to win long-term B2B contracts. Of course, quality is absolutely key, and programmatic ads can really range from complete spam through to precisely targeted, scroll-stopping visuals. 

Measuring success beyond the last click

One of the biggest hurdles in a holistic strategy is measurement. If you only look at last-click attribution, Google Ads will often look like the only channel working. However, this ignores the months of nurturing done by LinkedIn and Programmatic.

To truly understand your ROI, you must look at:

1. Assisted conversions: How many times did a LinkedIn ad lead to a search later?
2. Brand lift: Is there an increase in direct traffic and branded search volume?
3. Pipeline velocity: Are leads from multi-channel touches closing faster than those from single-channel touches?

Our Data & Insights team layers these nuances into reporting processes, giving a better understanding of how all marketing efforts are working together to achieve business outcomes.

Choosing the right paid media agency

Executing a multi-platform strategy requires a high level of technical expertise and a deep understanding of B2B buyer psychology. It’s not just about turning on ads; it’s about constant optimisation, creative testing and data analysis.

At Hallam, we pride ourselves on being a paid media agency that doesn’t just report on clicks, but on business outcomes. We help our clients navigate the complexities of modern advertising to ensure every pound spent contributes to sustainable growth.

Key takeaways for your strategy:

• Don’t rely on one channel: Balance intent-based search with audience-based social and programmatic.
• Focus on the full funnel: Ensure you have creative and messaging for every stage of the journey.
• Measure what matters: Move beyond vanity metrics to track how channels influence each other.

By treating your paid media as a unified ecosystem, you can stop chasing leads and start building predictable revenue. Are you looking to grow through a solid Paid Media strategy? Get in touch today.