• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 3, 2023

LinkedIn is reimagining how business-to-business (B2B) marketing should work. On Tuesday the company introduced a platform that will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automate the optimization strategy to reach B2B audiences with custom creatives.

Creating an audience means knowing and understanding how to target decision makers. It usually takes hours to create campaigns -- from developing creatives to determining targeting, placement and bidding strategies. 

The platform introduced by LinkedIn takes five minutes or less, and shares insights about why it chose a specific strategy.

“Creatives require the left and right brain to come together, but the platform solves all that for the user,” said Abhishek Shrivastava, vice president of project management at LinkedIn. “It goes beyond the creative to automate the placement, pacing, and scheduling.”

Accelerate, the product’s name, automates B2B marketing campaign creation. It is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and is available as a pilot in English to a small number of ad agencies in North America, before testing it with more advertisers in North America, India, and Australia. 

LinkedIn has used AI for years, but it worked behind the scenes like Auto Placement and Auto Bidding, Shrivastava said. “Now we’re bringing it to the forefront,” he said.

Automated Placement, for example, delivers a 47% improvement in cost per conversion; and Predictive Audiences improves cost per lead by 21%, the company said.

The ads will serve up across LinkedIn’s publisher network of sites.

Amanda Evans, president of Closed Loop, an early alpha tester, has used automation tools for years to optimize the way marketers work, but is looking forward to testing LinkedIn’s AI-powered campaign-creation platform to build more effective campaigns faster.

The objectives, audience, brand voice and tone are critical to success. When a marketer logs in to Campaign Manager, they can select a campaign objective and decide whether or not to use Accelerate or LinkedIn classic experience to build the campaign.

The marketer only needs to provide a URL for the product they are advertising, but also can upload additional data sources including contact lists, lead lists from past campaigns, and conversions from past campaigns.

The platform uses AI to analyze the website, the company’s LinkedIn Page and the account’s previous LinkedIn ads to recommend a campaign.

Using this data, the platform builds creatives and an audience and allows the marketer to adjust the copy, images and refine targeting parameters by adding inclusion and exclusions such as geography.

The campaign is usually built within seconds, based on the information shared by the marketer.

The platform creates the creative, and a function called Assist helps the marketer understand why it choose certain headlines and copy.

Accelerate’s Assist button provides recommendations to improve campaign performance. Marketers can ask the platform questions, such as “Why was this budget recommended?” or “What are some best practices for targeting?” to gain insights into how to improve your campaigns.

“Assist is a text-based feature today, but that may evolve in the future,” enabled by voice, Shrivastava said.