Expand Your Influence Across B2B Buying Groups with New Offerings

By Lindsey Edwards, Vice President, Product Management, @LinkedIn

After a challenging year of tighter budgets and heightened pressure to prove ROI, B2B marketers are optimistic about the future with nearly 9 in 10 feeling confident in their ability to drive revenue in the year ahead, according to our new 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark. To succeed, they’ll need to focus on building relationships and “collective confidence” among the buyer group, including decision makers and brand advocates who influence the purchase decisions for their products and services.

That’s why today we’re introducing new offerings to help you – the B2B marketer who knows relationships are critical to success – continue to build your brand, engage with our community of one billion professionals and reach all members of the buying group:

• The Wire Program: With 75% of US adults spending up to two hours a day watching short-form video content, and video uploads on LinkedIn increasing 45% year-over-year, we’re testing a new initiative that allows you to promote in-stream video ads alongside trusted publisher content. 

• Expanded AI capabilities: Last October, we began testing Accelerate, and our customers are seeing great results – with advertisers creating campaigns 15% more efficiently2 and driving a 52% lower cost per action3 than with Classic campaigns. As a result, we’re introducing new functionality, including the ability to draft engaging creatives with Microsoft Designer and refine your targeting by allowing you to exclude companies and third-party lists. You can also get guidance on your campaign creation from our new AI marketing assistant.

Building your brand with sponsored video content 

With only 5% of B2B buyers in market for a new purchase at any given time, staying top-of-mind is essential. We’re testing the Wire Program with a limited number of publishers, like Barron’s, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, LinkedIn News, MarketWatch, NBCUniversal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance to help you reach buyers who are consuming more-and-more digital video. 

Knowing that U.S. viewers will spend 55 minutes more each day with digital video than with traditional TV, aligning your brand’s message to publisher content in a format that resonates with buyers will support memory recall when it's time to buy. Once you identify and align with one of our participating publishers, you can log into Campaign Manager to run self-serve in-stream video ads on LinkedIn. Your ad will run ahead of the publisher’s video content on our feed, which is measuring 99% brand safe. 

Reaching B2B buying groups faster and driving ROI with AI-generated campaigns 

With 66% of B2B marketers already using generative AI in their work, AI is being woven into the workplace at an unexpected scale.1 According to the 2024 Work Trend Index, users say that AI helps them save time (90%), focus on their most important work (85%), and be more creative (84%). To help you create more efficiencies in your day-to-day and achieve your campaign goals, we’re introducing new functionalities in Accelerate, including:

• Telling your brand story with AI: We integrated Microsoft Designer into the Accelerate campaign experience to help you build and customize creatives. Designer allows you to customize creatives to fit your brand needs. To get started, just describe what you’d like to see or upload your own image. From there, Designer lets you choose from multiple options with varied imagery and text overlays, which you can further customize with your own logos and imagery.
• Helping you bring your data into Accelerate to enhance targeting: It's no easy task to reach your buyers. That's where AI comes in. With Accelerate you can bring together your data, like customer lists or conversions, with our platform data to find people who are more likely to take action with your ad campaign. To help you further refine campaign targeting, you can also layer in targeting exclusions, like company and third-party lists.
• Helping you build your best campaigns with conversational assistance: We're expanding the capabilities of our AI marketing assistant so you can ask questions, like "How do I build better ad creatives" to gain insights on how to improve your campaigns. The assistant can also provide recommendations, like adding a data source to help inform targeting, and perform tasks, like adjusting your budget.

Building on our momentum, we’re continuing to introduce Accelerate, which includes an option to leverage AI-drafted copy in English, to advertisers across the globe and it will be available to all customers in the coming months.

“Accelerate Campaigns far surpassed the lead conversion performance we saw from even our best performing manual audiences for Calendly. The Lead Form Completion rate increased over 3X and delivered a 66% cheaper cost per lead (CPL). The higher conversion rates and more efficient CPLs really convinced me this works.” — Sean Johnston, VP, Advertising, Closed Loop 

Helping you connect with buyers to build collective confidence

We know that advertising campaigns are only as good as the audience they reach and the conversations they inspire. It’s why this past year, we introduced LinkedIn CTV alongside new formats, like Live Event Ads and Thought Leader Ads, and innovative ways to efficiently create and optimize campaigns with Accelerate. Today’s news marks our next step in continuing to help you reach and engage with buyers on LinkedIn and across our network of publishers, and we look forward to sharing more in the months ahead. 

1 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark Methodology: LinkedIn commissioned Ipsos to survey 2,000 global B2B leaders including 448 CMOs in the US, UK, Germany, France, India, Australia, Singapore, and Brazil to examine the state of B2B, budgets and outlook, priorities, challenges faced by senior-level B2B marketers globally, what they're doing to drive growth, and how their roles are evolving. The research was conducted online between March 1 and March 29, 2024.

2 LinkedIn observational analysis, October 2023 to March 2024

3 LinkedIn analysis of 29 A/B tests, October 2023 to March 2024