The past few years and the coming years would be an interesting phase for B2B marketers. During this period marketers are transitioning from using traditional ways to learning tricks from new age tools.

This is the phase where we are talking about the importance of old age email marketing and virtual reality in the same breath. Fact is, like in previous years, email marketing proved to be one of the most effective tools (next only to website) that helped marketers meet their goals in 2015. And 61% of marketers in the Regalix study plan to increase their spend on email marketing in 2016.

Arun Pattabhiraman, VP and Head of Marketing at InMobi who thinks virtual reality will become big in the future, swears by the impact of email marketing. We got in touch with Pattabhiraman to understand new age tools and how marketers can put them to their use.

Q: Between digital and offline, what would be your priority? Our research says marketers will continue to prioritise digital marketing over offline channels.

The evolution of marketing has been happening since the last four to five years. But in the last couple of years the role that digital and mobile play in marketing has significantly improved. The marketing folks, be it B2B or B2C, are looking at digital and mobile as serious channels to focus on in their marketing strategy. Especially for the B2B marketer, content marketing has been the key to get customers.

As we are a mobile ad platform, many brands work with us and run video ad campaigns. For many marketers mobile has become an additional or a complementary channel to consider.

Q: In our survey, 82% of marketers said their digital and traditional marketing activities were either fully-integrated or partly-integrated. How eager are companies to make this integration happen?

People have begun to realise that you can’t look at your marketing channels as being different. You have to figure out the way to integrate your end customer’s marketing experience across multiple channels. Your customers are alive across online, offline and mobile. An effective marketing campaign should effectively be able to tie up these three. A lot of people are beginning to think about how to do this.

We do a lot of events. My worry is to make sure that every conversation I have with my clients at an offline event helps me connect with them later digitally and eventually turn them into customers. Another way consumer marketers are converting offline customers into digital consumers and be able to capture their information is by making them use QR codes.

Even a B2C advertisement on television can now be leveraged on digital platform by just putting a Twitter handle or putting a hashtag topic to make people talk about it. Efforts like, asking viewers to answer a question with a specific hashtag increases the traffic during those hours when the ad is airing.

Q: How much of the marketers’ experiments with new tools have resulted in anything substantial?

There are several tools that are becoming useful on a day-to-day basis. At InMobi, we use ‘HootSuite’. A platform that allows you to manage all your social media communications. Right from scheduling, posting and seeing reactions, you can do everything from there.

Another tool that is emerging and probably has a good chance to last long is ‘BuzzSumo’.

A very important tool for marketers in content marketing, it helps in trying to understand what kind of content will appeal to the customer. As a company in the mobile ad space, we have a bunch of keywords around which we create content. But everyone is creating content around the same topic. BuzzSumo finds out what type of content a specific user likes to read or know about.

‘Mention’, another tool, does the opposite of this. It tracks social media and finds out who all are talking about your brand and what is being said; thereby helping marketers to create content accordingly.

Q: Content marketing was pointed to as the most impactful tool by 63% of marketers we interviewed. Why is it so important?

For B2B marketers, credibility is built by showing your readiness in understanding customers’ problems and your ability to solve it. That has to be visible through your content marketing or other channels you use to communicate with your customers. As a company, InMobi wants to be a technology innovator. How do we tell this to our customers? If you see our blog, it’s full of white papers, info-graphics, case studies, etc. around it. It reinstates our customer’s faith in us. Content marketing plays a huge role.

Obviously there are other subtle aspects. Like what are people talking about you, what kind of PR coverage have you received? How many awards have you won as a company and product? When customers get to know you through these things they will automatically come to you.

Q: You launched MIIP last year. How is that doing?

It’s doing pretty well actually; we have some new announcements coming next month. The reason to launch MiiP was to reimagine advertising. We wanted to change the experience of the kind of ads that pop up on your mobile.

We built it on three tenets: Design—how does the ad look; second was data—how much time is the viewer spending on seeing it and if it’s relevant; and third was fulfillment—we said let’s not just show them ads but enable consumer and seller to complete a transaction, then and there. MiiP was our first attempt to enter into mobile commerce. Some of the biggest retailers, e-commerce players in India, China and the US are using MiiP as a platform to drive transactions for their products through mobile advertisements.

Q: How has been the performance of old multi-nationals in innovating and bringing new marketing tools in their marketing endeavours?

They have realised that they can’t anymore ignore new age marketing. A lot of them have invested heavily in building large digital marketing teams in-house and they are recruiting people who are well versed in new age technology.

Digital and mobile marketing have become such a sought after group in the market today that anyone who has these skill sets is wooed by both start-ups and multinational companies. Many companies have 20-25 member teams of digital marketers that work on experimenting with new tools.

Q: According to our research only 12% of the marketers were able to reduce their cost of operations through digital marketing

I would disagree with that. Today digital marketing has helped you run marketing programmes at zero dollars. If you look at content marketing, it is basically about getting some good writers who understand the field. With social media pages and your content you can get a lot of people to like your page and get talking about it. Of course there is paid social media marketing but you don’t have to do that. The only thing that is going to cost you is the man-power.

In email marketing, the trick is to know your customer and accordingly send content or announcements. Just sending an email reminder or mailing subscribers relevant content does the work for you.

You can do a lot of B2B marketing at a very low cost today. Now marketers want to take their video ads from television to where the customers are, that is online. Many of them who have already spent money on TV commercial are now bringing those commercials to web platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo.