ROI is the key metric for 42% of SMB marketers in India: Abhishek Shrivastava, LinkedIn

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in India are in the middle of a major marketing reset. With rising costs across platforms, fragmented consumer attention, and increasing pressure to demonstrate credibility, SMBs today are being pushed to do more with far fewer resources. At a time when marketers must drive both brand affinity and measurable ROI, the biggest gap for SMBs lies in execution: multiple tools for multiple objectives, leading to siloed workflows, stretched teams, and inefficient outcomes.

This is where platforms offering an integrated ecosystem are stepping in. LinkedIn, in particular, is positioning itself as a full-funnel solution, helping SMBs create campaigns, target audiences, generate leads, measure ROI, and gain insights to course-correct in real time.

“For SMBs, performance and brand-building are no longer two separate lanes — they now feed each other,” said Abhishek Shrivastava, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn. “ROI remains a top success metric for 42% of SMB marketers in India, but brand awareness and customer trust follow closely at 37%.”

In an exclusive interaction with exchange4media, Shrivastava added that 51% of SMBs in India today use LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Their top desired outcomes reflect a sharpened performance mindset: improving conversion rates and sales impact, increasing engagement, and proving return on marketing investment. AI is emerging as a major enabler for these teams, with 44% of SMBs crediting AI for improved creativity and personalisation, 46% for better audience targeting, and 45% for more reliable measurement and cost efficiency.

But even with sharper priorities and access to better tools, the reality for most SMBs remains challenging. Budgets are tight, in-house marketing teams are small, and the pace of content consumption has accelerated dramatically. Today, SMB founders and lean marketing teams must juggle brand storytelling, pipeline generation, audience building, and performance measurement at once.

This pressure is amplified by the fact that buyers are consuming more content than ever but trusting far less, pushing SMBs to show authenticity rather than scale. According to LinkedIn’s internal research, nearly 7 in 10 B2B buyers in India say short-form video meaningfully informs their buying decisions. For SMBs, this shift is a leveller. Video allows them to communicate quickly, humanise their brand, and build trust through real voices — without needing the polish or budgets of enterprise advertisers.

Is Events The New High-Trust Touchpoint for SMBs?

As digital ad clutter increases and audiences become harder to persuade, small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly turning to events as a high-trust, high-impact marketing touchpoint, according to Shrivastava. This shift is happening at a time when the B2B landscape in India is becoming more complex: LinkedIn’s latest India B2B Marketing Benchmark report shows that 75% of Indian B2B marketers are navigating longer sales cycles, with more decision-makers involved and buyers demanding far more validation before committing. This makes credibility and deeper engagement essential, and events — whether virtual or in-person — offer something that traditional advertising cannot: real conversations, human presence, and content that builds trust over time.

At the recent B2Believe event, Shrivastava told exchange4media that LinkedIn is seeing a strong surge in event-led marketing. Company-hosted events promoted through LinkedIn’s Event Ads deliver 31X more viewers compared to events without promotion, and members who watch a brand’s LinkedIn Live are 3.6X more likely to accept that brand’s InMail, signalling stronger intent and affinity. Even a single encounter with an Event Ad makes members 28% more likely to engage with future campaigns, creating a compounding effect across the marketing funnel.

This is especially relevant in a high-cost, crowded digital environment where nearly 9 in 10 B2B marketers believe conversations drive their most effective brand moments, and 91% say the future belongs to brands that combine AI with human creativity.

For SMBs that often operate with limited resources, small teams, and multiple responsibilities, LinkedIn’s evolving Events ecosystem aims to remove friction across the entire workflow. Shrivastava explained that the platform’s new features, such as a dedicated Lead Generation objective for events, the ability to boost events at crucial moments, and integrations with Cvent, ON24, and Integrate, make planning, promoting, and measuring events significantly simpler.

These updates enable SMBs to capture leads directly from their event promotions, manage registrations and attendee journeys seamlessly, and track their impact from awareness to conversion, without relying on external tools. In a landscape where B2B buyers are more cautious, deal cycles are slower, and trust is now the strongest currency, events are helping SMBs cut through the noise with something more enduring than an ad impression: a human connection backed by data-driven delivery and full-funnel measurability.

The Biggest Challenges & The Road Ahead

Even as SMBs adopt more digital tools and embrace newer formats, the reality on the ground is far more complex. According to Shrivastava, most small and mid-sized businesses continue to operate with lean teams, limited budgets, and fragmented workflows that slow down execution. Their marketing funnels are stretched thin, founders are expected to drive brand storytelling, run campaigns, generate leads, close deals, and measure performance, often without specialist support or agency partnerships.

Rising ad costs across platforms have intensified this pressure, forcing SMBs to constantly balance performance goals with long-term brand building.

The challenge is made harder by India’s rapidly evolving buyer behaviour: shorter attention spans, multi-platform engagement, and longer decision cycles mean that SMBs must deliver messages that are not only memorable but also credible enough to influence an entire buying committee. Trust has become the core barrier, with buyers looking for reassurance through real voices, founders, employees, and experts, instead of polished ads. This shift demands consistent content creation, meaningful conversations, and community engagement, all of which require time and expertise that many SMBs struggle to spare.

The road ahead, however, is becoming clearer as platforms like LinkedIn begin to streamline these demands. With more than half of India’s SMBs already using LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the shift toward integrated, AI-enabled workflows is expected to accelerate.