With an intensely growing B2B marketplace, LinkedIn has now started testing AI integration into their tools and for members and customers. Along with these changes, LinkedIn has also set its sights on the growing power of India’s business. It is pushing its ways to expand its presence and innovations in the market.

On these topics and more, Ashutosh Gupta, Country Manager, LinkedIn and Abhishek Shrivastava, Vice President of Product at LinkedIn spoke to exchange4media at their B2Believe conference held in Bangalore on Wednesday.

Speaking about the AI innovations of LinkedIn for marketers, Shrivastava said, “We started the testing last week with a small set of agencies and customers and are expanding that to a larger beta. India is one of the three markets that we are testing it in. This uses the power of generative AI to really deliver better results for marketers. That's the key goal that we have. Some of the early results we are seeing are very encouraging in terms of the impact of lowering the cost per lead, impact on improving the ROI. The secondary goal that we have is to make marketers more productive. So instead of spending hours just fiddling with different aspects of the campaign, trying to test them, learning what's working and what's not, and getting AI to do the job.”

In another interesting development, LinkedIn is trying to move towards providing ads in Hindi. On this, Shrivastava says, “If you are a professional and Hindi is the preferred language, you would like to see content in Hindi, right? So it’s a better experience for the members who are getting value. And if you’re a customer, then I shared some stats as well. That is up to 30% lift in the engagement rate, which is massive. In the ads world 3% lift is a good one, 30% is through the roof. So that’s the value for businesses that we’re creating and ultimately, we see that will result in value for ourselves as well as our business.”

Speaking on India as a market, Gupta said, “We are the fastest when it comes to growing engagement globally. So the members are very much engaged on the platform. And then when it comes to the B2B side, I think India economically is positioned very strongly. So we are positive about the economy going forward and the demographic dividend we have in the country. When I shared the research earlier, there was optimism. 81% of marketers feel like their budgets will increase in the coming years, which is very different from all other markets where the same optimism doesn’t exist. So the market is very much primed for future growth.”

Shrivastava spoke about the challenges around education about B2B marketing and the inadequacy of tools. He then went on to explain the global challenges of privacy regulation, their impact on marketing and how LinkedIn is working on that. “The third challenge certainly is the data and privacy which is a global thing. The biggest impact we see on our shots is that this is an opportunity for B2B marketers to think about B2B professional identity being different from consumer or social identity.

"Social identity is what you see on platforms like Facebook and others who are connected to your friends and family. 

Ashutosh also gave insights on India’s B2B marketing space and said, “In India now, we are seeing a lot more innovation because of the startup ecosystem. And that’s where many, many B2B companies are coming in. In fact, the SAAS ecosystem is very, very strong in India, a building not only for India but building for the world. When you put all this together, India is at the cusp of a very bright future from a B2B perspective. And we feel like we are the company which should be helping the marketers really win that. That’s where we are very positive about the market going forward.”