Every business is highly dependent on its marketing department, as marketing is the only way to connect the businesses with their target audience. This is essential to the existence of every business. So every business intends to improve their marketing strategies to strike the right audience with the right ads to advance their sales. To achieve this effect, businesses use various strategies of which, two emerging strategies are Content marketing and Account based marketing (ABM).
Content marketing
Believe it or not there is actually a institute dedicated to Content marketing, The Content marketing Institute in Cleveland USA. This institute defines Content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. “
There is a very thin line between Content marketing and regular advertising. Advertising is just putting up information about a specific business’ service or product to the public in a very generic way. But content marketing is a focused distribution of information, not just a broadcast to the public. This means that content marketing requires the identification of potential customers and the means of reaching out to them. This is a very concentrated marketing technique and as the customer base of the company grows the effects of this marketing technique will increase.
The advantage of this technique is that the content goes out to the audience that actually wants the information, giving high relevance to advertisement.
Account based marketing
In account based marketing (AMB) the company establishes a universe of accounts of both dealers and consumers. This enables the company to keep track of its customers and provide post-sale customer support right down to the grassroots level. This also serves the growth, retention and loyalty objectives of the company. Basically the company treats every customer account as a market of one, catering to their needs and providing additional support. This type of marketing enables increase of business within the existing customer base thereby increasing the sales and the relevance of marketing campaigns. New customers are required to create accounts enlarging the companies reach into the market.
The great advantage is that the business is able to connect to each customer individually and interact with them as needed.
The major difference between the above stated marketing types is that latter requires every customer to create an account thereby requiring addition infrastructure like a powerful servers etc., whereas the former needs just a database of prospective customers.