December brings colder weather, performances of The Nutcracker and the last page of the calendar. The season also brings a slew of recaps of the past year and predictions for the next. This year is no exception.

Peter Isaacson, CMO at Demandbase Inc., recently pulled out his crystal ball and made these predictions for 2019 in the rapidly-evolving space of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, which we'll share in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

ABM will become a core platform for marketers. Account-based marketing (ABM) systems are quickly becoming the third part of B2B marketing technology. Along with customer relationship management (CRM) as a record for sales activity and marketing automation for strategically generating and closing leads, ABM is used for strategic sales targeting at the individual level without accounts.

Connected data will be king. Data is power, but often in companies this data resides in different systems that are not integrated. To get a true 360-degree view of customers, companies will be required to connect the data across their marketing platforms.

We'll stop talking about artificial intelligence. AI, or machine learning, has for many years been a buzzword that companies were striving to put into practice. Isaacson believes that 2019 will be the year that it will stop being a conversation and become a set of underlying technologies that are just there—like electricity. "We'll stop talking about it and just let it work its magic in 2019, such as anticipating which content or messages visitors to a website will find most useful at each stage of their buying journey," he says.

Next-Best-Action Marketing will become feasible at scale. This type of marketing uses customer attribute and behavioral signal data from individuals to determine what the next best action should be in moving them through the buying funnel. For example, should the customer receive a discount coupon or be directed to a series of testimonial videos? The emergence of AI will help make Next-Best-Action systems become a reality in 2019, according to Isaacson.

Source: Peter Isaacson is the chief marketing officer for Demandbase and has more than 25 years of marketing experience in both B2B and B2C marketing, ranging from branding and advertising to corporate communications and product marketing on a global scale.