How much does it cost to reach MSP and IT operations buyers on LinkedIn?

IT System Operations and Maintenance delivers landing page clicks at $16.64, which is below the $17.54 median across our whole panel of 1,000+ advertiser accounts, on a $34.85 CPM and a 0.24% click through rate. That makes it one of the better value professional audiences on the platform, and it is not the facet most MSPs default to.

Should an MSP use vendor market development funds for marketing?

Use the money, but not the campaign kit that comes with it. Vendor supplied creative is built to sell the vendor's product and it makes every MSP in the channel look identical to a buyer comparing three quotes. Take the funding, rewrite the positioning around your own delivery and response times, and keep the vendor logos as proof rather than as the message.

What should an MSP measure in month one of a LinkedIn programme?

Delivery, cost per landing page click against the $16.64 to $18.37 range on this page, and booked assessments. Not cost per lead, not engagement rate, and not pipeline. Engagement rate is actively misleading in this sector because IT System facets engage at 3.73% to 4.44% while clicking through at a quarter of a percent.

Is LinkedIn or Google better for MSP lead generation?

Both, for different jobs. Managed services has genuine search demand, so Google captures the buyers already looking and usually produces the cheaper cost per lead. LinkedIn creates the demand and reaches the far larger group who are not searching yet. Run them as one programme with one budget owner, because if they are judged separately the cheaper cost per lead column wins the budget every quarter and the demand that search was harvesting quietly disappears.

How big should an MSP audience be on LinkedIn?

Tighter than LinkedIn recommends, and defined by an account list rather than by broad filters. An MSP selling to 200 mid market companies in one region does not need a 400,000 person audience. The goal is enough frequency to be familiar when the incident happens, which means a smaller audience seen often rather than a large one seen once.

Which is better for an MSP, a channel specialist or a paid media specialist?

It depends on what is missing. If your positioning, website and sales process are undifferentiated, a channel specialist who understands MSP economics will fix the bigger problem first. If your positioning is already sharp and your media is not delivering, a paid media specialist will move faster. Very few firms are genuinely strong at both, so decide which half you can supply yourself.

What does an MSP marketing agency typically cost?

Most quote on request. Kiin publishes $2,500 to $9,500 a month with no media mark up. Channel specialists more often bundle marketing with sales enablement, appointment setting and peer group membership, which makes the fee harder to compare and sometimes better value. Ask for the fee, whether it is a percentage of spend, the contract length and the notice period, in writing, in the first conversation.

Powered by Search Alternatives: 9 B2B SaaS Agencies Compared (2026)

Disclosure and methodology

Kiin is a B2B paid media agency, we compete with Powered by Search on part of their offer, and we are first on this list. We are also a much narrower business than they are, which is the honest frame: this page is written by a single channel specialist about a full stack agency, and most of the comparison below turns on whether you want one thing done deeply or six things done together. Every fact about another agency was read from that agency’s own public material in September 2026, and where something is not stated the entry says so.

Scored on four things: whether the channels run as one programme with one budget owner, what gets measured, pricing transparency, and verifiable credentials. Not scored on size, awards or website design.

How to read any alternatives page, including this one. It was written by a competitor of the agency in the title. That is true of almost every page ranking for this search, and most of them do not say so. Check whether the incumbent is described accurately enough that you would recognise it, whether the page says where the incumbent is still the better choice, and whether the facts carry a date. If every line about the named agency is unflattering, you are reading an advert rather than a comparison.

Why people look for a Powered by Search alternative

Powered by Search is a well regarded B2B SaaS agency with a genuinely unusual span, and most people arriving at this page are not unhappy with the work. They are testing the shape of the engagement.

You are buying a stack, not a channel. SEO, AI and LLM search visibility, paid advertising, digital PR and link building, ABM, content, HubSpot RevOps, web design and marketing to developers all sit on the service list. That integration is the product. It is also the main reason to look elsewhere: if your SEO is working and the gap is paid social, a full stack engagement means paying for capability you already have.

No published pricing. Nothing on the site states a rate or a minimum. That is normal, but it means several calls before you can qualify yourself in or out.

The centre of gravity is search. The published proof leans organic, with $11.1M in SEO pipeline for a data privacy SaaS as the headline case, alongside 135% of a paid pipeline target for a cybersecurity SaaS. If paid social depth is what you are buying, ask to see the paid social cases specifically rather than the aggregate.

The 90 day promise. The positioning is 30% more sales ready opportunities in 90 days. That is a clear commitment and worth interrogating on its own terms: ask what counts as sales ready, who defines it, what the baseline is measured against and what happens if it is missed.

Powered by Search at a glance

	What Powered by Search states
Base	Toronto
Positioning	“The B2B Marketing Agency”, 200+ B2B companies helped
Headline promise	30% more sales ready opportunities in 90 days
Services	SEO, AI and LLM search visibility, paid advertising, digital PR and link building, ABM, content, demand generation, HubSpot MoPS and RevOps, SaaS web design, marketing to developers
Ideal client	B2B SaaS, enterprise and mid market, established product, low churn
Published results	$11.1M SEO pipeline for a data privacy SaaS, 135% of paid pipeline target for a cybersecurity SaaS, 2x MQL to SQL with ABM, 324% more demos in six months for TouchBistro
Pricing	Not published, no stated minimum

Read from poweredbysearch.com on 29 September 2026. All claims are the agency’s own and we have not independently verified them.

Nine alternatives

1. Kiin — best if the gap is paid social specifically

London, serving US, UK and EU. Eight people, three of them from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. $2,500 to $9,500 a month, published, no markup on media. We are the opposite trade to a full stack engagement and that is the reason to consider us: we do not sell SEO, digital PR or web development, so if your organic programme is already working and the weak link is paid social, you are not paying for capability you have. LinkedIn runs deep, Google captures the demand it creates, and engagement signals feed outbound from one dataset. Every benchmark we publish comes from a measured panel of 1,000+ advertiser accounts rather than from our own clients. Tradeoff: if you genuinely need SEO, AI search visibility, digital PR and paid run by one accountable team, we are the wrong shape and Powered by Search is the right one.

2. Directive — best for the same breadth at more scale

Irvine, California, since 2013. States 100+ marketing strategists, 420+ brands served and $1B+ revenue generated, across Performance, Commerce and Communications divisions covering content, paid media, performance creative, programmatic, RevOps, PR and social. Named clients include Amazon, Adobe, Cisco and Calendly. If Powered by Search was the right idea but you need more staffing behind it, including programmatic and marketplace advertising it does not offer, this is the scaled version of the same bet. Tradeoff: no published pricing, and at 100+ strategists a mid market account is a small one. The people in the pitch are unlikely to be the people on your weekly.

3. Refine Labs — best if the paid half is the half that is broken

Boston. B2B SaaS demand generation for Series B and beyond, and one of very few agencies at this level that publishes rates: paid media management from $14,000 a month on a six month minimum, full service with an embedded Director of Demand Generation from $26,000, creative only from $5,000, and a flat $35,000 six week Revenue Performance Assessment. Multi channel paid across LinkedIn, Google, Meta, YouTube, CTV and OOH, with an in house creative practice. Where Powered by Search leads with search, this leads with paid demand creation. Tradeoff: no organic practice to speak of. If SEO and answer engine visibility are part of why you are shopping, this replaces the wrong half.

4. SimpleTiger — best for SaaS search visibility as the whole job

Sarasota, Florida. B2B SaaS and AI companies only, covering SEO and answer engine optimisation, content, link building, digital PR and pipeline intelligence. The published results are unusually concrete for this category: Invoca at 41 to 1 ROI over ten months, Gainsight ranked first in AI search against 459 tracked competitors, Firecrawl at 9x ROAS, Segment at +127% organic traffic. Named clients include Gainsight, Segment, JotForm and Invoca. If what you wanted from Powered by Search was the search half done properly, this is the specialist version. Tradeoff: paid advertising is on the service list but every published case study is organic. Treat it as a search agency that can also buy media, and pair it with a paid specialist.

5. Understory — best for paid, GTM engineering and founder content as one team

US. LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit and X paid media, plus GTM engineering covering Clay enrichment, trigger based outbound and CRM integration, plus LinkedIn content for founders. 100+ B2B clients from seed to IPO including Clay, Zapier, Expensify, HockeyStack and RB2B. Flat retainers based on services selected, six month minimum for most engagements and four for smaller companies, with figures not published. The model is that a paid strategist, a go to market engineer and a content writer share one dataset, so the ads warm the accounts the outbound then works. Understory has said publicly that answer engine visibility became its largest lead source, which is a useful signal from a team selling into the same shift. Tradeoff: the outbound and content machinery is the centre of gravity. If you want classical SEO and technical site work, that is not the strength here.

6. Gripped — best for UK and European SaaS between £2M and £20M ARR

London. B2B digital marketing for SaaS, AI and technology, 160+ companies helped, running demand generation, ABM, paid search and paid social, SEO and GEO, explicitly judged on pipeline rather than lead volume. The stated client profile is £2M to £20M ARR, seed through Series B, and a published result of £1.3M of new pipeline in a quarter from paid search and social. The closest European equivalent to the Powered by Search stack, in your team’s timezone. Tradeoff: same breadth question as the incumbent. A company that wants only paid media run to a pipeline number is buying part of a wider offer.

7. TripleDart — best for SaaS scaleups wanting a lower cost full stack

Plano, Texas and Bangalore. SEO and AEO, GTM engineering, RevOps, paid media across search, social and PMax, ABM and content, for B2B SaaS. States 300+ companies served, $300M+ in ad spend managed and a client range of $10,000 to $500,000 in monthly spend, with SentinelOne, Freshworks, HubSpot and Zuora named and 4.8 on Trustpilot. Covers close to the same surface as Powered by Search at a delivery model built for a different price point. Tradeoff: paid media is one of six service lines and the centre of gravity is organic and GTM engineering. A US and India delivery model suits some buyers and not others.

8. Ironpaper — best for long, committee driven buying cycles

New York, founded 2003, around 70 people. Buyer research, demand generation, content, paid media and sales enablement built around enterprise purchases that move through a committee over six to eighteen months, reporting qualified pipeline and handing sales the intelligence to work an account. Where Powered by Search optimises the search surface for a SaaS buying motion, this is built for the procurement motion instead. Tradeoff: programme led and content heavy, with no published pricing. A product led company wanting velocity on paid social will find the shape too slow.

9. Walker Sands — best if you need earned media in the mix

Chicago, founded 2001. PR and influencer relations, strategy and original research, creative and content, paid media, SEO and GEO, and revenue operations including CRM and Clay integration, for growth stage and enterprise B2B across technology, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics. Named clients include John Deere, Paylocity, Semrush and Aspentech. Publishes its own B2B AI Search Visibility Benchmark, which puts real evidence behind the GEO claim rather than opinion. The one alternative here that adds earned media to the stack. Tradeoff: breadth over depth, and the cost structure of a large full service agency. Paid social is one practice among many.

Side by side

Agency	Best for	Publishes pricing	Organic and AI search	Paid social depth
Kiin	Paid social as the specialism	Yes, from $2,500 a month	No	Deep, LinkedIn led
Powered by Search	Full stack search and paid	No	Yes, core	Part of the stack
Directive	Breadth at enterprise scale	No	Yes	Yes, one of three divisions
Refine Labs	Series B+ paid demand creation	Yes, from $14,000 a month	No	Deep, multi channel
SimpleTiger	SaaS search visibility only	No	Yes, core	Limited, cases are organic
Understory	Paid, GTM engineering and founder content	No	Answer engines, not classic SEO	Deep, multi platform
Gripped	UK and EU mid market SaaS	No	Yes	Yes, with SEO and ABM
TripleDart	Lower cost SaaS full stack	No	Yes, core	Yes, one of six lines
Ironpaper	Long committee driven cycles	No	Content led	Moderate
Walker Sands	Earned media plus demand	No	Yes, with a published GEO benchmark	One practice among many

What the paid half actually costs

If you are weighing a full stack retainer against hiring two specialists, it helps to know what the paid side really costs to run. Every cost figure on this page comes from our own panel: 1,000+ advertiser accounts, 22,942 campaigns and $79 million of measured LinkedIn spend across 1.34 billion impressions in the twelve months to 7 September 2026. Medians across advertiser accounts, never pooled totals. LinkedIn Audience Network delivery excluded.

Measure	Median across advertiser accounts
Cost per landing page click	$14.83
Cost per lead form open	$18.21
Cost per completed lead form submission	$140.49
Lead form completion rate	11.6%
Median cost per demo request	$350

One finding from that panel is directly relevant to the full stack question. Across 119 accounts where we could measure the whole path from impression to booked meeting, the spread between best and worst cost per booking was 121x. Traffic price explained 1.5x of it. Landing page and form conversion explained 72x. That is an argument for an integrated agency, not against one, because the 72x sits in the handover between the ad, the page and the form, which is exactly where a channel specialist and a separate web team drop things. If you go the specialist route, somebody on your side has to own that seam. Be honest with yourself about whether anyone will.

Two supporting numbers: 88% of lead form opens are abandoned, and only 35.7% of advertisers run all three funnel layers at all.

When Powered by Search is still the right answer

If you need organic, answer engine visibility, digital PR and paid to move together, and you do not have a marketing leader with the time to coordinate three suppliers, this is the shape that solves your actual problem and very few agencies genuinely staff all of it. The AI and LLM search line is also not a bolt on here, which matters more each quarter. And if your product is established with low churn, which is the client profile they state, the compounding case for organic is strong and a paid only agency will keep charging you rent for traffic you could have owned. We would rather say that plainly than pretend the narrow option is always better. It is better when you have already built the other half.

How to choose

Audit what is already working before you shop. Write down your current organic traffic trend, your paid pipeline contribution and your conversion rate from click to booked meeting. The weakest of the three is what you are buying. Most companies skip this and buy the stack. Then decide who owns the seam. If you hire specialists, name the person on your team accountable for the ad to page to form path, because that is where the 72x lives. Then ask for paid social cases specifically, not aggregate results, from any full stack agency. Then get a number early. Of the agencies here, only Kiin and Refine Labs publish rates. Then check the measurement. Pipeline by account, landing page clicks rather than the default click field, and a self reported attribution question on the booking form. If the month three report is impressions and rankings, keep looking.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Powered by Search cost?

Not published, and no minimum is stated on the site. Of the agencies on this page only Kiin, from $2,500 a month, and Refine Labs, from $14,000 a month, publish rates, which makes those two the quickest way to calibrate the range before you start booking calls.

Is Powered by Search good for SEO?

On published evidence it is the strongest part of the offer. The headline case is $11.1M in SEO pipeline for a data privacy SaaS, and AI and LLM search visibility is now a named service line rather than an afterthought. If search is what you need, the alternatives worth comparing are SimpleTiger and Walker Sands.

Should I hire one full stack agency or two specialists?

Two specialists usually buy more depth per pound and always create a coordination job. The deciding question is whether anyone on your team will own the handover between the ad, the landing page and the form, because our panel shows that seam explains 72x of the variance in cost per booked meeting while traffic price explains 1.5x. If nobody will own it, buy the integrated option.

What is the best alternative if I only need paid social?

Kiin or Refine Labs, depending on budget. Kiin publishes from $2,500 a month and runs LinkedIn as the specialism. Refine Labs starts at $14,000 a month and covers more paid channels with an in house creative practice. Neither sells you SEO you do not need.

Which alternatives specialise in AI search visibility?

SimpleTiger, which tracks AI search rankings against competitor sets and publishes the results, Walker Sands, which publishes its own B2B AI Search Visibility Benchmark, and Understory, which has said publicly that answer engine visibility became its largest lead source. All three go deeper on this than a general agency.

How do I test the 30% in 90 days promise?

Ask four questions before signing. What counts as a sales ready opportunity, who adjudicates it, what baseline the 30% is measured against, and what specifically happens if it is missed. A confident answer to all four is a good sign. Vagueness on the baseline is the one to watch.

Powered by Search Alternatives: 9 B2B SaaS Agencies Compared [2026]