We’ve all seen the buzzwords in recent years. Big Data. Artificial Intelligence. Smart everything, from toilets to thermostats. Companies rush to keep up with the next fad without really understanding what the true advantages of this new technology are and how it can impact their business. The actual technology becomes overshadowed by the hype, unable to deliver on the many promises that businesses rush to peddle.

Spring has finally sprung and what better way to enjoy the warm weather than to soak up the sun and dive into a new book that will help you polish up your marketing strategies and get ahead in 2019?

Chatbots have become more commonplace in B2B, as buyers expect more conversational engagement with brands. In fact, it can feel rare nowadays to visit a webpage and not be immediately greeted by a chatbot, and industry research shows 15% of buyers have used chatbots to communicate with a business in the past 12 months.

An effective account-based marketing strategy requires targeting and engaging the right accounts. However, identifying these accounts has been a challenge for many organizations. Demand Gen Report’s 2018 Account-Based Marketing Benchmark Survey revealed that 28% of practitioners struggle with identifying/predicting accounts that are in market and ready to purchase, while 31% are challenged with developing target content for specific accounts or personas.

At its annual summit in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a new integration with LinkedIn, as well as a deeper partnership with Microsoft. The company stated that the partnerships with both companies better position B2B customers to deliver targeted account-based experiences to prospective buying teams.

Demandbase, an ABM solution provider, announced that a new book written by three of its executives will be released at the company’s ABM Innovation Summit, held March 14-15 in San Francisco. Event attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the book, which will then be released to the general public on March 19.

At Demand Gen Report, as well as at our sister publication ABM In Action, we have made it our mission to ensure that we’re providing the latest trends and best practices in the growing realm of account-based strategy. But during a recent webcast we produced with our friends at Engagio, I realized that there is always something to learn when it comes to one of the hottest trends in B2B business today.

The central tenet of ABM is that you choose your customers. It’s the flip side of inbound marketing where clients find and select you, drawn to your business by insightful, relevant content. While inbound marketing casts a wide net, catching everything that swims by, ABM is like spearfishing — you only aim at the fish you want.

Integrate, a demand orchestration platform, has acquired ListenLoop, an account-based programmatic advertising platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company also unveiled a new solution powered by ListenLoop that is designed to connect programmatic ABM and demand generation.

ABM Engagement Platform provider Folloze has released a new functionality designed to enable users to develop end-to-end personalized engagement strategies across marketing and sales through branded content microsites.