Providing an array of benefits like protecting consumer data privacy, advertising/ marketing transparency, and generating legitimate leads, blockchain technology has moved beyond its application to just the financial sector but is now being increasingly demanded by the digital marketing industry. Let’s understand how blockchain technology can help you change your marketing strategy
Blockchain technology has gained popularity over the past decade with a rise in bitcoin traders vouching on the tech for transactions. Grouping data together and taking a decentralized approach of allowing all the blockchain-based users to hold the data, the tech has been trustworthy in storing massive data in an electronic ledger. Trailing the financial industry, digital marketers have equally picked pace in using the tech to their benefit.
In the nascent stage of understanding the potential of the technology, the Digital Marketing space is still building prototype use cases when it comes to accommodating blockchain tech for its betterment. Though just behind the financial sector in adopting tech, marketing can benefit on many grounds from blockchain applications.
With the advent of Web 3.0, blockchain technology will go hand in hand with it, which will ease the data handling tasks for digital marketers. Let’s understand how blockchain technology will help digital marketers Blockchain will allow digital marketers to – have better results in marketing campaigns, avert frauds, and see an uptick in transparency for advertisers/ marketers.
To date, we have heard of how social media giants have been selling the personal data of consumers to big companies for their personalized marketing activities. This can be okay for someone, but invasive to others, wherein the recipient company of the data doesn’t have the consent of the person to use their data to bombard them with any of their marketing campaigns. In preventing data fraud, blockchain technology allows consumers a higher degree of control over the data that they share with brands. The consumer knows who they are sharing their data with and what data is the company holding with details about when they shared it with a particular brand, etc. Data privacy hence becomes transparent in marketing by using blockchain technology.
Marketers are constantly facing the heat wherein several suppliers engage in click fraud in the case of pay-per-click advertising campaigns. As blockchain is protected with a timestamp and asymmetric encryption, tracking clicks will be transparent hence ending the long-existing advertising fraud. Easing the marketers’ task of proving legitimate results to the client, blockchain technology also benefits the client by enabling them to keep a tab on every interaction and to understand their leads and customers better.
For better results in a marketing campaign, your data should be clean, appropriate, and trustworthy. Blockchain technology can again help one in garnering the right data. As blockchain transactions are decentralized in nature, marketers can directly go to the source, i.e. the consumer, for collecting their required data by incentivizing the process. By doing so, the marketer will by default get to know who are interested in your company and its products/ services by feeding in their data to be reached. This way the marketer will have legitimate data with increased engagement from these leads for any marketing campaign, hence better results. It sounds like a lethargic process, but once done, the results will only keep surprising you with an uptick in performance year after year.
Creating an authentic environment between the whole ecosystem of the production of a product and the consumer’s needs, blockchain technology can make marketers vouch on what they claim wholeheartedly. Say you are handling digital marketing services for a milk aggregator brand. Through blockchain technology being put in use, you get information about the soil in which the grass grows which is consumed by the cow for providing quality milk. With the information being updated at each touchpoint, from the farmer to the pasteurizing unit to the supply chain management to the convenience stores, you can align your marketing on the back of these authentic information pieces which are tamper-free with blockchain technology.
As the use cases in applying blockchain technology in the marketing sector are increasing, the adoption of the tech in the sector has much more to be explored by marketers which makes it a valid bet. As per its design, blockchain technology makes great grounds for marketing as it induces decentralization of power to consumers, upholds the security and privacy of consumer data, and ensures a just environment for marketing initiatives. A new-age marketing agency vouching on blockchain will focus on retrofitting the existing marketing strategies with these benefits put forth by blockchain technology.
Creating a win-win situation for all stakeholders in the marketing sector, be it the marketers or the consumers, blockchain technology creates a just environment for running businesses in a transparent way by giving the marketers legitimate data shared by the consumer directly and also protects the privacy of the consumer by allowing them to monitor the kind of data that they share with any brand in return of the incentive offered by the brand. Lashing the malpractice of advertising fraud could be furthermore possible as blockchain-based applications provide a transparent transactional history of information to all stakeholders be it the client or the consumer.
With that said, blockchain technology will certainly disrupt the way the digital marketing industry works with more and more use cases arising. It is about how you want to use the technology to your benefit, be it for battling ad frauds, protecting consumer data privacy, and/or sharing transparent operations and consumer data and activities with clients.
(The author is Mr. Arif Kazi, Founder and Managing Director of Dust Value and the views expressed in this article are his own)
