Here are three positive ways that blockchain technology will impact digital marketing without causing headaches:
1. Blockchain technology opens international markets
The first way that blockchain can benefit digital marketers takes us back to its most famous usage — cryptocurrency. If marketing efforts can incorporate and promote crypto use to buy products and services using
online bitcoin wallets, it opens up an
international market.
This occurs because crypto payments can be executed across borders with no additional fees and no exchange rates to navigate. This will motivate more people to buy from overseas companies and is something that marketers can use to their advantage.
2. Blockchain increases brand transparency and trust
Marketers will also need to zone in on companies using blockchains as service solutions. For example, if a business was using the blockchain to monitor the delivery of a purchase and allow both the parties to see where the parcel was on its journey, it improves the trust of the consumer in the business to deliver the item.
Marketers will need to use this type of transparency to promote a brand using blockchains. In the early days, this becomes a flagship USP for marketers to promote and a vehicle to attract more of the market share.
Blockchains could also be used within these companies as a way of storing data shared with them. As more people are concerned with how their data is being handled, this may also be something that marketers need to highlight when put in use by companies they are marketing for.
3. Blockchain helps to handle big data
The potential relationship between big data and blockchains has not been fully explored. It is predicted that big data could analyse the bitcoin blockchain to unearth trends and help understand price fluctuations, as well as
predict the future value of bitcoin.
Yet, another benefit is that mass amounts of data can be stored on blockchains to keep records safe and unaltered, preventing it from getting lost and help improve the accuracy of big data analysis between large teams.
There is
no reason why this cannot be the case for marketing departments as well. A large marketing team may want to analyse consumer trends from a data set, and by keeping that data within an internal blockchain, the team members can work more effectively without numerous versions of the same data set. This will overall increase the accuracy of the final result and prevent data from being lost.
Blockchain has a downside, however
There is also the chance that increased use of cryptocurrency across industries will make it harder for marketers to access consumer data. Consumers will often grant companies access to their data and share it with others for reciprocal benefits, such as newsletters with offers and such.
By switching processes to the blockchain, their data may not be as easy to access and it may cause some issues for digital marketers in the future. Some marketers may need to start paying customers to access their data and it may become a sellable asset that individuals can profit from.
Alternatively, digital marketing companies will need to find other ways to accurately target populations with relevant marketing materials. Nevertheless, tightening of data access should also be celebrated.