Helping Brands Engage and Influence Buyers with New Advertising Capabilities

By Lindsey Edwards, Vice President, Product Management, LinkedIn

With 81% of B2B ads failing to gain adequate attention or drive recall, B2B marketers need more compelling ways to connect and engage with their buying groups who are turning to video, events and expert voices for information. That’s why we're continuing to invest in Live Events with new B2B marketing capabilities and adding more customization options in Accelerate, our AI campaign creation experience, including video ads and new campaign objectives.

Why This Matters: Capturing attention and engaging with the 95% of buyers who are out-of-market is one of the biggest challenges facing B2B marketers today, especially when 81% of B2B buyers choose to purchase from brands they already know on day one. Understanding how buyers like to receive information and then developing your marketing campaign based on those insights and your business objectives is critical. 

What Buyers Need: Our new ‘Business of Influence’ research*, which surveyed over 1,700 B2B tech buyers in the US, UK, and India, reveals how buyers look to receive information about new products. Global research finds:

• Video is the most compelling form of content: 63% of B2B buyers say that short-form social video content helps inform buying decisions, with 80% of those who consume video content saying that video-focused influencer content is one of the most trusted forms of content in B2B.
• Influencer content is critical during consideration: 67% of buyers, who are aware of B2B influencer marketing, say that influencer content plays a critical role in the consideration stage of the IT buying process.
• B2B influencers must be subject matter experts: 53% of B2B buyers say that subject matter expertise is the most important trait for B2B influencers.
• Expert content helps build trust: 67% of buyers who consume B2B influencer content say that B2B expert content helps build brand trust and creates awareness of different products and solutions.

LinkedIn data shows that video is now the fastest-growing format on the platform, with uploads up 34% year-over-year, and according to the emarketer report, ‘B2B Video Marketing in 2024’, LinkedIn is one of the leading B2B video platforms for brands. Our new features for Live Event Ads and Accelerate help you connect and build influence with your buyers through multiple formats, including video. 

About the New Product Capabilities: 

• Live Event Ads: With Live Events on LinkedIn up by 14.4% in the past year and Thought Leader Ads generating 2.3x higher click-through-rate (CTR) compared to single image ads, we’re introducing new features to allow you to maximize registration and participation in your events.  Coming this quarter, you can:
• Promote a members' post about the Live Event your Company Page is hosting with a Thought Leader Ad that links directly to the event to drive more registrations, views and engagement
• Offer a ‘sneak peek” with a 30-second video appearing on LinkedIn to allow people to preview during and post-event to help drive registration and attendance
• Regionally target who you want to invite when setting up the event to promote a more personalized event experience

• Accelerate: With Accelerate campaigns showing up to a 42% lower cost per action** compared to advertisers who run a Classic Campaign with LinkedIn, we’re continuing to introduce new functionalities to help you tailor your campaign to achieve your marketing goals. This quarter, you will begin to have the option to include a video or document ad, like an eBook, whitepaper or customer testimonial, in addition to a single-image, when creating an advertising campaign with Accelerate. 

And, to help you better achieve your campaign goals, we’re also beginning to introduce new campaign objectives for Accelerate, including brand awareness, engagement, website conversions, and video views. All new formats and objectives will ramp slowly across the globe over the coming months, while the Accelerate beta is now available for lead generation and website visit objectives to all advertisers globally in all languages, with AI creative creation only available in English.

What Customers Are Saying:

Live Event Ads: “Reaching current and future customers through our events is critical for us to drive product awareness, adoption, and ultimately build the Salesforce brand. Over Dreamforce, we leveraged our Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud to identify CRM audiences to target within LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Live Event Ads, we were able to target AI-interested decision makers with relevant messaging, which resulted in an increase in quality viewerships and continued collaboration to grow our events pipeline."

Erin Oles, SVP, Strategic Events at Salesforce

Accelerate: "Accelerate has helped Advantive achieve astonishing success by helping drive significant leads to a number of our campaigns across our various verticals. By having the right team and tools at our disposal with LinkedIn, we have seen strong performance and are excited to only see that performance strengthen over time!"

Phillip Montalvo, Senior Manager, Demand Generation, Advantive

“With Accelerate, we’ve been able to not only improve top-line metrics, such as decreasing our CPCs by more than 50%, but also be more efficient with campaign management and creative optimizations.”

Veronica McGhee, VP, Paid Social Director, Cramer-Krasselt

“Thanks to LinkedIn's Accelerate campaign, we were able to reach a significant volume of potential clients with a cost-per-click that is competitive with other media and a click-through rate above average. Audience signal segmentation allowed us to expand the audience size without compromising click quality. Today, Accelerate is, for us, the most important format in terms of strategy and investment.”

José Manuel Campos Rey, Marketing Department Director and Partner at Femxa

"LinkedIn Accelerate has proven to be a valuable tool for piloting our campaigns. We have experienced 30% reduction in end-to-end campaign setup and launch time. Its user-friendly interface and scalability makes it an ideal solution for streamlining our campaign launches."

Soumyajit Dey Global Head of Digital Experience Optimization, Thoughtworks

Availability: All features will begin ramping globally this quarter.

Learn More: Check out this page for more info on Live Event Ads, Accelerate, and Thought Leader Ads.  

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*‘The Business of Influence’ research methodology

LinkedIn commissioned GWI to survey more than 1,700  B2B buyers and key business decision-makers responsible for purchasing IT, telecom, and technology products and services, in the US, UK, and India, on the impact of B2B influencers on the buying committee at various stages of the decision-making journey. Statistics cited are among respondents who use industry influencers in their purchase journey (91% of the overall sample). The research was conducted online for three weeks from May 22 to June 11, 2024.

B2B Marketing Benchmark methodology

LinkedIn commissioned Ipsos to survey 2,000+ global B2B marketing 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 and challenges, and how their roles are evolving. The research was conducted online between March 1 and March 29, 2024.

Methodology

Members on LinkedIn with the CEO title, of companies with more than 5k employees, between January-April 2024.

** Accelerate Methodology

LinkedIn analysis of 67 A/B tests, October 2023 - September 2024