Cryptocurrency and blockchain have become the hottest topics in the last few years, but most people still use these terms interchangeably. If you want to know how they influence the world around us, you need to distinguish between the two concepts first.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that forms a chain of information-rich blocks. Each block is validated and permanently recorded, forming a never-ending transaction record. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies represent a tool or resource on a blockchain network in charge of financial transactions such as buying, selling, investing, or trading.

Knowing that cryptocurrency is the future of money, many companies and even countries are preparing to launch their own version of digital currency. Facebook is already working on this project, while countries like Palestine, Ecuador, Iceland, and Singapore have also chosen to create their own cryptocurrencies rather soon.

However, Bitcoin and other virtual coins are not affecting the marketing industry so radically. On the contrary, it is blockchain that makes the biggest impact in this field. This article will show you how blockchain is going to influence digital marketing.

4 ways blockchain is changing marketing

Now that you’ve seen the basic mechanism behind cryptocurrency and blockchain, it is time to find out more about the ways this technology is changing marketing. There is the whole bunch of effects and possible outcomes, but we will show you 4 most important impacts. Let’s check them out:

More transparent transactions

According to the report, the number one quality people demand of big brands is to be honest about their products and services. This is why digital marketers focus mostly on confidence and trust building. It is also the reason why influencer marketing is so popular these days.

You might wonder now – what does blockchain have to do with consumer trust? Well, this technology provides users with a complete ledger of history related to any given item. In such circumstances, it is getting easier to ensure the transparency of products and transactions.

Here is a good example: You want to purchase a premium necklace, but you are not sure whether it’s fake or not. Using blockchain, you can go down the ledger and determine the authenticity. It’s as simple as that!

Elimination of ad fraud

A Forrester study revealed that almost 60% of all display ad dollars were lost to fraudulent or unviewable inventory in 2016. This is one of the biggest pain points of digital marketing as it’s getting harder to confirm that the media bought is the media delivered.

This is where blockchain steps in to improve the transparency and eliminate ad fraud. The system can analyse and validate each step of a consumer journey, thus proving that the targeted customer really saw your ads.

It’s a brand new solution that ensures advertising quality and makes it easier for a marketer to calculate return on investments (ROI). At the same time, it prevents ad bots and spamming by promoting engagement trackers to confirm the overall credibility of your marketing campaigns.

Unique customer identification

Although widely recognised for its commercial use, blockchain technology can also serve some other purposes such as customer identification. Using a combination of decentralised technology and ID verification, marketers can now design well-protected customer profiles.

This sort of methodology improves consumer privacy and enables users to control their digital identities. For instance, BlockVerify is a blockchain-based anti-counterfeit solution that already delivers superb results in the pharmaceutical and electronics industry.

Inaccessible customer data

As you probably know already, anonymity and decentralization are the most popular features of the blockchain technology. With the new system, it is impossible to use cookies and accumulate consumer-related data from multiple online sources.

As a consequence, it will be impossible to build a buyer persona and serve advertisements the way we do it today. But how can marketers search and find valuable information? The answer is simple – they will ask customers directly.

All you need to do is ask – or even pay – a consumer for his or her personal information, and you can find it all in one place upon receiving permission. This place is called the blockchain. Such a practice could cost marketers a lot, but they will at least acquire highly relevant data and provide prospects with tailored offers.

This means you won’t be bothering potential customers with irrelevant content, while you can also expect to increase ROI drastically.

Conclusion

With its data encoding promotion, blockchain has become a genuine marketing challenge. The system makes it difficult to access customer’s personal data, which has traditionally been an anchor of digital marketing. However, blockchain still provides numerous possibilities for better and faster transactions.

In this post, we showed you how the new technology is going to favour companies and marketers who are able to prove their value to the target customers. Blockchain technology is still on the rise, so don’t be afraid of posting comments and letting us know if you need more explanations about this interesting topic!