Marketers in India are ready to embrace AI with over three-quarters (78%) feeling confident about using the technology, a new New research from LinkedIn, revealed. Furthermore, 83% of marketers in India say that artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way they work in the next year and 47% hope that it will help them to be more productive. The research also found that 93% believe AI will support their work and help create space for teams to think innovatively.
With this LinkedIn has rolled out Accelerate – its new product – which allows the automated creation of marketing campaigns and is powered by AI. Currently, this is being piloted to a limited number of customers in North America. In a conversation with BrandWagon Online, Abhishek Shrivastava, VP of product for marketing solutions, LinkedIn shared his insights on new generative AI tools for marketers. (Edited Excerpts)
This year is a prudent one in terms of ad spending, how is the narrative different in the US when compared with India?
I think the slight slowness in the advertising industry is global and that is what we are seeing in our businesses as well. If you look at the other platforms such as Meta or Google, both companies have communicated the same. So it is very similar whether it is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C). I think it’s across the board. However, a few categories or sectors seem to be doing well. For example, when it comes to B2C travel sites, it seems to be doing very well. Similar is the case with e-commerce. On the B2B site of business, security is doing well, besides AI. Our platform is focused on B2B and the reason for that is a professional network. When you are trying to reach a company, to influence them to buy apartments, litigation professionals within those, and that works very well for our platform.
How is AI expected to change the role of marketers?
AI is going to dramatically change how we work, which is already happening. It will play a crucial role going forward. But for the jobs that marketers have, there are several things that they need to do. First of all, finding the right set of audiences to reach in order to solve the problem. The second step includes engaging with those audiences with compelling pieces of content and messages, and then ultimately when a conversion happens, it is important to understand and interpret the result.
If you think about the B2B marketers, their job is even harder because when we talk about the audiences, it’s not just individuals who try to reach you or buying committees, but the decision makers within a company to come together to make a purchase decision on behalf of the company. Who has been on the buying committee, for example, by committee typically will have someone for finance, who will be looking at financial aspects of the product or service they’re trying to buy or they have someone from security, looking at the security aspects of the product. So, different messages and doing this sort of influence from the last six to nine months.
When the conversion happens it is not an online conversion that one can track easily because you may sign a deal with the company and that data may show up in the CRM system and revenue may be booked there. So, you have to do attribution against everything that’s showing up in the CRM system. What makes it even more difficult in terms of their jobs is that all of the tools that exist today are really built for B2C advertising because that’s the larger part of the market. So, they have a more complex job, but they have adequate tools, with which they are trying to make do with what they have. This will change radically in the next couple of years with the advent of AI.
From Meta to Google, everyone seems to chasing businesses to spend on their platforms. How is the process of creating a campaign on LinkedIn different from the rest?
The campaign creation process takes usually a couple of hours, and if you are an experienced marketer, it will take a few hours else a couple of days. What we tried to do while making a campaign is all the audiences that we need to reach, including the buying groups are always free to freeze. You can do that and can provide your feedback, and make edits. When it comes to creating creatives, we already do that for you based on all the data that we have, from your company page on LinkedIn, from the website, and from your past campaigns. Then, all the other aspects of campaigns such as scheduling, budgeting, and placements, among others, are taken care of by the system. One of the nuances that we have for this particular experience is that it is particularly built for B2B marketers. That’s the big differentiation that we have compared to other platforms.
We also take the approach where when we make a recommendation to you, we provide transparency, about how that recommendation was made to you, and what was the data which was used to power that recommendation. So, we understand what’s going on behind the scenes and overall it’s not a black box experience for you. Moreover, we ultimately leave it to you to make the final call. So, AI will do all the work for you including making recommendations. Ultimately, the marketer is in the driving seat to say yes or no, make edits and so forth.
Lastly, public insights for not just getting the job done and moving forward, but what happened after the campaign finished, what worked and what didn’t. These insights are critical for marketers and the system provides that.
What is the cost of creating a campaign on LinkedIn? How well are you placed against the competition?
First of all, we have an auction-based marketplace, so there are no fixed prices. It’s about how many campaigns there are in the auction and how many bits they’re placing. When it comes to the past, it has always been tied to the perception of value. The same piece of a watch or piece of cloth could be expensive for someone and cheap for someone, depending on how much value is attached to it.
When you look at some of the vanity metrics, such as CPM and CPC, the cost of leads seems liberal, and more expensive when compared to the platforms. But the value in terms of how those leads translate into an actual conversion and business is much higher. The reason for that is we have data of professionals. We know about the buying groups within the companies based on our platform data and then we also have a professional context, the mindset that we have come to LinkedIn is very different when compared to other platforms.
We have a product called revenue attribution report that we announced previously as well. We just finished the GA of that. The whole idea is that we will show you that illusion of the ad spend as reflected in the revenue in your CRM system so that you get a sense of how the business outcomes are being driven by the expenditure for a minute.
What is the advantage of LinkedIn when compared to other platforms? What are the AI-based products you have created?
We have nearly one billion members on the platform and have tremendous engagement. The average is growing year over year, even though our platform is 20 years old now. This allows us to have data that does the matching of the B2B proposals, products and services with the right numbers, to invest in a better function. The data that we have, the audience which are the professionals, and the context, are of high quality. So, those are the differentiators that we have as a platform. In terms of AI products, we are building, we are focussed on what others are not. In India, 68% of marketers are using the technology today, with nearly half (45%) experimenting with tools such as ChatGPT. LinkedIn’s latest ‘B2B Marketing Benchmark’ report also finds that 87% of B2B marketing leaders in India plan to increase their use of generative AI in the next year.
We have rolled out Accelerate – a new, automated marketing campaign creation experience powered by AI. In as little as five minutes, Accelerate will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimisations to reach the right B2B audience with engaging creatives, which marketers can adjust and fine-tune before they launch the campaign. Accelerate builds on LinkedIn’s other AI features, including automated placement, which is delivering a 47% improvement in cost-per-conversion, and Predictive Audiences, which is improving cost per lead by 21%. More marketers in North America, India, and Australia will have the option to try Accelerate in the coming weeks. We plan to make Accelerate available globally in 2024.
With the speeding up, marketers have to contend with using the tools that were built for b2c spaces and somehow make them fit for their own use cases. With LinkedIn, they don’t have to do that. It’s there for them, built for them, and it performs for them. One of the key aspects of this new experience is the improvement in results that people will find.