Companies across the world tend to gain insights from customer data that is majorly extracted from customers’ payment records. For example, a customer buys bread from a particular brand and makes payments using debit cards, credit cards, or other online payment methods. Many brands selling related products such as jam, butter, brown bread, etc. can use this customer’s data to pitch them to buy their products by sending discounts and sales messages.
This changes if a customer is making a payment via cryptocurrency as it’ll become harder for brands to extract the said customer data. The reason behind this is that cryptocurrency does not keep any record of the payment history thus bringing a new set of challenges to the digital marketing industry.
As we move forward in time, blockchain and cryptocurrency are penetrating the digital marketing industry proving their utility. Hence, understanding how cryptocurrency impacts digital marketing becomes crucial. This article brings you insights on the same. Let’s get started.
Digital Marketing Today
Currently, digital marketing thrives on the shotgun approach to reach large audiences. This includes pushing advertisements, promotions, etc., and hoping it’d bring in higher conversion rates (like 2% of the reach.) Everyone from local businesses to brands that offer international shipping relies on this approach.
Private companies collect and sell the information to digital marketing stakeholders to target specific demographics. Notably, the viewers have very less to no control over how or when they’re exposed to this advertising content. They’re also not financially compensated for the time they spend watching the ads.
Lastly, even for advertisers, it is difficult to find out which ads were effective and what members of the audience responded to which ads. Here’s how cryptocurrency and blockchain technology changes all of this.
9 Ways on How Blockchain Impacts Digital Marketing
1. Impact on Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
In the current digital marketing world, third-party authorities/hosting platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. connect advertisers and website owners (with a wide range of audiences) by taking a cut from their profits. They’re the middlemen that connect advertisers and website owners.
Source: SearchEngineLand
Blockchain eliminates the need for these platforms that host advertisements. Advertisers can simply upload their ads to the blockchain and the blockchain will make them available to its platform users.
Blockchain further verifies that every user is genuine and that the website is only charging the advertiser for genuine clicks.
Source: SearchEngineLand
2. Reinforces Authentication and Transparency
We live in an era where consumers care not just about the quality and pricing of products, but also about the integrity of the brand and its processes. In the past, people would shop for whatever was being advertised to them. This would leave them with multiple questions like:
- Was the item organic?
- Was it authentic?
- Is the product shipped from the said source?
- Was it made in a fair-pay environment?
Thanks to blockchain, buyers can finally know the answers to these questions. Blockchain allows companies to verify exactly where an item was made or produced, what kinds of soil the item was grown in, or how much the workers got paid to work there.
Example: Unilever teamed up with IBM on a blockchain project that would help them disclose information about their business footprint. Their goal also includes disclosing the way they collect and utilize information on customers, hence maintaining full transparency.
3. Impact on SEO: Better Keyword Research and Analysis
Did you know?
46% of all searches on Google have a local search intent. And that the first organic results boast a CTR of 39.6% while the first local pack result boasts a CTR of 17.8%. In 2022, it is crucial for small businesses to invest in SEO and have a strong organic presence in their local market.
Doing so is not possible without leveraging advanced search tools at your disposal. Trying to check up on keyword rankings may sometimes become taxing and frustrating for SEO professionals. Even with all the advanced analytics platforms, it can feel like an uphill battle.
Along with the location, login status, device type, browser type, and cookies — keyword positions dramatically affect users. Blockchain can come to the rescue here. Blockchains are incorruptible and easily accessible, and can thus provide fast results, accurate keyword rankings, and so on. It also ensures that the information that it gives out requires minimal analysis.
4. Tracking Digital Marketing Campaigns
Blockchain technology provides a modern approach to tracking digital campaigns. The current tracking methods rely on platforms’ proprietary technology and a black box of data that we cannot see within. Blockchain could lead to tracking information from impression to conversion even as we begin to move away from cookies, unlike the current tracking method.
Example: A digital advertising blockchain protocol named Lucidity aims at bringing complete transparency to the digital advertising world. It stores and verifies all marketing events using blockchain technology. The marketing teams would get real-time data about their campaigns and payments using smart contracts.
Industry Impact: A well-known brand, Toyota observed a 21% increase in its advertisement campaign performance using Lucidity’s platform. Toyota eliminated wasteful spending by blacklisting sites with higher discrepancies. They were able to achieve this simply by shifting their budget to higher-performing sites.
5. Middlemen Become Irrelevant
It would be fair to say that digital marketing has concentrated traffic to a few select sites and advertising networks. Traditional search engines (middlemen) decide what ads are most relevant for a particular user and bombard them with pop-ups against their permission.
Blockchain-powered networks have empowered the arbitrage shift from established middlemen to the users themselves. The users can enter into smart contracts directly with the advertisers and have full control over how much information they are willing to share.
Hence the advertisers will be able to pay the users directly for access to their personal information and get approvals to serve them the ads. Blockchain-based startups like RightMesh also reward users with blockchain tokens for sharing their data.
6. Consumers Get Rewarded
The platform users will be able to select what ads they want to view online. If they engage with the ad’s content, they will be rewarded with crypto tokens. They’ll also be paid crypto tokens for lending their personal data to advertisers. In short, it is the user that will be paid for their information and will have full control over their own data.
Example: A privacy-oriented software company, Brave uses blockchain to block unwanted ads. It uses rewards to enable users to reward frequented sites and content creators with its basic attention tokens (BATs.) Brave’s ad blocker uses blockchain to track harmful ad popups and neutralize them.
7. No More Click Fraud
The ad clicks made by bots are a major challenge for the advertising space — it ends up costing advertisers a lot of money. In a blockchain environment that uses decentralized servers for digital activity monitoring, click frauds are reduced if not eliminated altogether.
Blockchain being the unhackable distributed ledger can help reduce online fraud of this kind. It provides transparency for people involved in a transaction without giving away their personal details, along with proving they are real people. Most Ethereum and bitcoin wallets provide the utmost secrecy concerning the users’ confidential information.
Example: IBM uses a blockchain platform to verify its ads supply chain, and find fraudulent data.
8. Higher Lead Conversions
Collecting data from various sources, combining it, and running various campaigns based on it is the most common marketing approach. However, it isn’t an accurate one. There’s a clear lack of consistency and accuracy when campaigns are run based on this data.
Blockchain will help get access to precise data and insights as blockchain transactions are decentralized. It means that data collection will be possible directly from the consumer. The consumer will have the liberty to choose the types of ads they actually want to see rather than being bombarded with unnecessary ones.
In addition to that, they’ll be fairly compensated for the same. This ensures a higher ROI from the campaign run-off.
How? You’d ask!
The consumers who agree to give your brand the data are most likely already interested in your products or services. Hence, generating quality leads becomes easier. Imagine, having access to an entire database of customers who are ready to make a purchase.
This approach requires higher costs and efforts but, you’ll be able to collect far better leads using blockchain as compared to any other traditional method.
9. Enhancing Privacy Protection and Security
Data security is a huge issue for everyone involved in online transactions of products and services. At some point or another, everyone wonders if their identity or financial information has been compromised. With blockchain, each transaction is verified and publicly visible, but the people involved are anonymous. This ensures privacy and security.
The Verdict
As crypto-driven blockchain technology becomes more pervasive, digital marketers must have a plan to incorporate them into their marketing campaigns and overall strategies. They must take into account the benefits and drawbacks of engaging in crypto-driven advertising.
Cryptocurrency, sure, is a challenging concept for marketers but it is not a difficult one for those who’re looking forward to engaging in more transparent and authentic marketing practices.