How Blockchain Will Change Marketing

For those of you who know blockchain or have heard of it before, you likely know it primarily as part of the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. It’s where the term was coined and popularized to ensure secure, legitimate payments. However, the blockchain is widely used nowadays, and internet marketers could be the latest to capitalize on it.

In this article, we will look at how blockchain could change marketing forever, so let’s start with a quick layperson’s description of the blockchain.

What Is Blockchain?

We won’t go into the technical aspects of how blockchain works. That is an entire article unto itself.

Simply put, a blockchain system is a decentralized information system storing records in not just one server or database. Instead, the records are replicated and held across hundreds or thousands of devices.

It’s a list of transactions (stored in blocks) and doesn’t just mean cryptocurrency transactions, either. It can show a record of any kind of transaction, with the multiple individual versions of the blockchain verifying themselves against every other copy of the document on other systems.

There’s no way for one person to keep hold of all the blockchain records or to corrupt them and falsify records, as they are self-verifying.

It’s an invisible system that most consumers will never interact with, but it may drive the majority of online transactions all the same.

Goodbye Closed System, Hello Open Market

Blockchain is primed to be incredibly disruptive. Banks are already rushing to incorporate the technology to compete with the security and verification power it offers cryptocurrency providers.

The most disruptive part of it applies just easily to marketing, too. We’re talking about the idea of decentralized marketing data.

Right now, marketing data tends to be centralized in one place. An individual business can put together all the data they get from sources like Google. But large corporations like Facebook and Amazon are sitting on a goldmine of customer data, all in their central storage.

With blockchain, there is no centralized storage. Rather, information is kept between many individual systems without any middleman.

The different copies of the information verify and validate each other, ensuring they’re all legitimate and identical.

A blockchain business could quickly adapt its marketing strategies to a customer’s past records. They can tailor their marketing to marketing platforms they control and a range of media that can use the identical blockchain.

Better Ad Veracity

One of the biggest problems in Internet marketing is verifying that you are spending money without the assurance that your ads are being seen by humans as often as reported.

Programmatic marketing can see you relying on third parties, which may inflate the numbers for their own purposes or because their systems aren’t sophisticated enough to know when dealing with fake traffic and fake leads.

Ad fraud has fast become a severe concern of internet marketing.

Whether it’s a deliberate move by marketing companies and partners or simply a result of being on the internet where malicious bots and competitors are likely to try and waste your ad budget, it can be costly.

There have been different attempts to verify that ads are being seen by actual humans, and blockchain could be the best hope in combatting ad fraud. In particular, blockchain means spending history on ads becomes much more transparent.

You don’t necessarily have to rely on third-party marketing partners. It can offer verified ad delivery, assuring you that a natural person interacted with the ad, and allows anyone to verify exactly where those ads have been placed.

Fewer Redundant Marketing Costs

This means that, for instance, you will have fewer redundant ads.

Many consumers have experienced being marketed with advertisements for things recently purchased things. For instance, if they just bought a car, that website may adapt its marketing to ensure that they don’t have a vehicle advertised. But if they leave that site and go on another platform, they see the same ad or a different one but for the same brand and car.

Blockchain will allow each platform and system to stay updated with the customer’s journey.

If that customer bought a car through one online platform, others will have that information updated through the blockchain and won’t show those same advertisements when the customer comes around. This not only means that redundant ads annoy customers much less often. It also means that the one car manufacturer or dealing paying for those ads is no longer paying for them.

Marketers are constantly learning more about customer behavioral habits. For instance, you can know precisely how often an ad should be shown to a customer. If they see it less, it might not be as effective as lead-building strategy. If they see it more, it annoys them and makes them less likely to spend convert.

Blockchain offers better veracity, ensuring that your marketing isn’t cluttered by fake views while staying updated on the latest record of interactions with individual customer. This can help you find that sweet spot of ad exposure for every customer.

When will the future of blockchain marketing arrive?

With blockchain, tailoring your marketing strategies to individual customers will be more accessible than ever.

A moving, breathing record of any customer’s interaction with your marketing and more informed data targeting customers with a specific interest in your product will drastically cut the money spent on redundant advertising.

It will take time for marketers to fully figure out blockchain, but it may become one of the core disciplines of online marketing, just like SEO before it. There’s no standardization of blockchain just yet, so uptake is still relatively slow.

However, there’s a lot of incentive to standardize blockchain, no,t just marketing, but banking, voting systems, the IoT, and much more. The future may be here sooner than you might think.