What are your marketing predictions for the new year?

For us as an agency in the North of England (UK), we're predicting a rise in the awareness, understanding, and adoption of Marketing Automation! It's often said that there is a North/South divide in the UK and we've seen it clearly with MarTech. B2B manufacturing industries here can be very blinkered and slow to uptake digital marketing and nowhere is it more prevalent than with automation.

Recently it seems the rise in interest is on its way and we intend to be the ones ready to accelerate it. We're putting our money where our mouth is by instigating a 12-month program of events designed to educate C-level and spread the Marketo love in Lancashire.

I know most people will be predicting the rise of cutting-edge technologies - but this prediction is real and practical for us.

I'm predicting much more interest in VR. Being that we're in the entertainment industry we're seeing things change faster than ever and we have to keep our marketing strategies on pace.

In addition to VR, I'm anticipating a growing interest in IoT (Internet of Things) and smart devices. With these devices growing in popularity and adoption, they're giving marketers more avenues by which to communicate with target audiences. It'll be interesting to see this continue to evolve over the next year (and beyond).

"Predictive" hasn't become mainstream yet. Predictive scoring/content should continue to get traction into next year and see it cross the threshold from Early Adopters to Early Majority.

Additionally, account based marketing should also get a lot more focus for marketing teams as they focus on strategies with ABM as a centerpiece.

These are more of priorities for my particular company, but I'm sure lots of companies are facing the same challenges:

1. Expanded Nurtures. We're less than 9 months into our Marketo deployment, but have seen great success with the 20+ nurtures we have running. By mid-2017 our entire customer journey should be covered by nurtures.

2. ABM for selected segments. ABM doesn't make sense for our small segment (companies with <6 employees) but it certainly makes sense for our large segment. We're hoping to use Marketo ABM + RTP.

3. Predictive - starting with cross/upsell. Our average customer only owns 1 of 8 products they could use, and we've got great internal data around indicators the customer is ready for the next product. We're going to combine that with some external data, and really build out a predictive upsell model.