Organizations that adapted quickly to the Internet and leveraged it to increase their visibility massively benefitted from their early adoption. Amazon was among those, starting to leverage the Internet for Business- to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce purposes as early as 1995, barely four years after the Internet creation.
Blockchain is poised to take over the Internet, opening the way to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Business-to-Peer (B2P) new opportunities that are especially relevant to digital marketers.
For professional marketers, rethinking their digital marketing strategy to adapt to the nascent blockchain era is, or should be, an absolute must.
Blockchain Adoption Trends
According to Markets and Markets, “the global blockchain market size is expected to grow from USD 3.0 billion in 2020 to USD 39.7 billion by 2025, at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 67.3% during 2020–2025.”
As a more crypto-friendly Biden Administration takes hold, Gartner expects increased crypto-regulations clarity in the US towards the middle in 2021. This new development is likely to boost tokenized innovations, including the emerging blockchain digital marketing apps and SaaS.
The World Economic Forum sees the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure as a likely consequence of the “awareness of the power that centralized platforms and service providers wield over our lives is moving beyond the crypto and blockchain community to the mainstream. Take, for example, the recent mass exodus from WhatsApp to Signal following a (relatively minor) change in Facebook’s data-sharing policies.”
Understanding how this Affects your Digital Marketing Strategy
The global landscape may be getting primed for blockchain adoption across numerous industries, but how does that affect digital marketing?
Any digital marketing strategy relies heavily on digital media as their prime, if not only, channel to reach the eyes of their target audience. Media is one of the leading fields identified by Deloitte as garnering the highest percentage of investment in blockchain initiatives.
It is therefore not surprising that the last addition to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Advertisers is Blockchain for Advertisers.
When leading analysts indicate that blockchain is entering the realms of media and advertising, digital marketers need to get ready to get on board. Judging by Amazon’s success in e-commerce, it pays to be an early adopter.
Quick Recap of Today’s Main Digital Marketing Tools
Generally speaking, a digital marketing strategy framework today is based on three central axes:
- Ad Bidding
This requires the creation of eye-catching and hopefully converting ads that need to be brought in front of the target audience’s eyes, typically through:
- PPC - for this article, this includes any ad displayed on a digital real-estate according to the winning bid for the keyword-related keyword.
- Social Network Ads- for this article, this covers all paid ads on social media channels.
Due to growing market saturation, endemic fraudulent clicks, and diminishing trust in ads, the ROI on ad bidding is shrinking.
In addition, the upcoming loss of third-party cookies on Google - Safari and Firefox have already phased them out - and the changes to Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) will affect ad addressability, but also measurement and attribution, further complicating ROI measurement.
- Native Advertising
Interestingly, the quality of the content is not the only determining factor. The publishing platform is the one playing a critical role. So critical that UK Advocate for Quality Original Content reports that “a third of respondents (32%) accessing the native driver on a premium content website compared to 1% accessing the native driver via the social media stream.” Advertising revolves around creating engaging and informative content and inserting it on publishing platforms, tagging it with an indication enabling readers to identify it as sponsored content.
Native advertising is reputed to enjoy a CTR 40 times higher than classic display ads, which explains why native ad spend is expected to increase by 372% from 2020 to 2025.
To date, 33% of consumers are more likely to trust native ads than traditional advertising, and 59% claiming to find native advertising interesting.
In other words, it pays to pay attention to the content distribution channels when building your digital marketing strategy framework.
- Referrals
Refer-a-Friend campaigns work great for enrollment goals but have a limited range of applications and typically require relatively complex integration.
Typically, they generate a limited number of referrals per customer
- 61% of customers will make 1 referral
- 34% of customers will make 2–10 referrals
- 5% of customers will make 11+ referrals
Yet, fully organic word-of-mouth referrals are by far the best digital marketing tool, with a four to five times higher conversion rate and an incredibly longer Life Time Value (LVT) than any other customer acquisition sources, LVT is one of the most important measures you can use to gauge your impact on your customers, keeping in mind that the way you calculate LTV’s ROI is different from the way you calculate a typical conversion rate ROI, as it needs to factor in the extended usage from customers acquired through referral compared to the LTV of customers acquired by other methods such as those mentioned above.
Building a blockchain-adapted digital marketing strategy
So, how can you create a new Digital marketing strategy for 2021?
The first step is to understand that the blockchain digital marketing architecture is based on a P2P model or a B2P model. In practice, that means that the era of filling the pockets of media moguls, whether social media platforms or ad exchanges, is peaking and is destined to take a second seat to a more equitable architecture that rewards people for participating in your advertising efforts.
2key SmartLinks are one of the first tools that enact that P2P/B2P new architecture and provide a working live solution. Still, many others are in various degrees of development and will undoubtedly emerge in the coming years.
How can you integrate your existing digital marketing strategy with blockchain marketing solutions today?
All blockchain marketing solutions are linked with cryptocurrencies, as the technologically compatible currency to reward people for taking part in your marketing effort. As they rely on smart contracts that do the heavy lifting tracking and payment management, they typically require no time-consuming, man-hour heavy management and are provided as SaaS with minimal, if any, integration.
Then, you might want to stay ahead of the curve in terms of crypto-payment options.
There are two steps you can already take today:
- Add the Refer & Earn button
This effectively activates a referral program on every single one of your pages or posts that deserves a social sharing button.
Yet, unlike your regular social sharing button, the Refer & Earn button:
- Rewards those who share your content with crypto (at zero cost to you!), which, as an added benefit, increases your visitors’ loyalty.
- Generates an additional stream of income to your site (as a publisher, you are rewarded if your content is shared by your viewer)
- Keep track of upcoming crypto payment options evolution
As crypto adoption is making giant strides, major players are paying attention and already developing solutions to cater to the growing crypto users population.
A blatant confirmation of crypto payments increased popularity and adoption rate are:
Or, instead of waiting for them to launch their crypto-payment option, you could, and should, add a direct crypto-payment option to your site. That would save you the commission Paypal and Visa will undoubtedly charge on crypto-payments through their services.
Starting with these last two items should go a long way to put you on the right track to join the coming blockchain marketing trend and put you ahead of the curve.
