A new LinkedIn study highlights the growing pressure on India’s B2B marketers to justify their marketing budgets, with nearly half required to report their spending to C-suite executives every month. The ‘B2B ROI Impact’ research, which surveyed over 1,000 B2B marketers across the US, UK, France, and India, found that 84% of Indian B2B CMOs believe proving return on investment (ROI) has become more critical over the past two years.

Despite the growing importance of ROI measurement, B2B marketers face several challenges in demonstrating campaign effectiveness.

The study identifies three major barriers: lack of standardized industry benchmarks (42%), difficulty in attributing conversions to specific campaigns (39%), and integration issues between marketing and sales data platforms (39%). These challenges make it difficult for marketing teams to prove their contributions to business revenue.

Sachin Sharma, Director of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, India, points out that 9 in 10 B2B marketers are already using AI tools to improve campaign performance and measure ROI more accurately. He emphasizes the need for marketers to shift their focus from volume-based metrics, such as Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), to value-driven indicators like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), which provide a clearer picture of campaign success.

Looking ahead, the research finds that understanding buyer intent will be the biggest challenge for B2B marketers in 2025. As buying cycles become longer, 53% of Indian B2B marketers are shifting towards a buyer group marketing strategy, focusing on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to better influence purchase decisions and drive conversions.

The role of AI in B2B marketing continues to expand, with 94% of marketers reporting improved ROI when using AI for campaign optimization. AI is primarily being leveraged for audience segmentation and targeting (65%), predictive analytics for lead scoring (61%), personalized content creation (57%), and real-time optimization of ad spend and creative content (55%). Marketers believe AI will be most valuable in measuring ad effectiveness (62%), content personalization (60%), and predictive analytics (53%) over the next five years.

To support B2B marketers in better tracking campaign performance, LinkedIn is enhancing its measurement capabilities with Conversions API (CAPI) and the Revenue Attribution Report (RAR). CAPI enables marketers to connect first-party data to LinkedIn, improving audience targeting and ROI measurement. Meanwhile, RAR allows businesses to link marketing campaigns to actual sales outcomes by measuring revenue influenced, return on ad spend, and pipeline impact.