How Can Blockchain Improve Digital Marketing Transparency?
The digital marketing world is changing fast. Companies are looking to see if a blockchain can take their digital marketing to the next level. Accountability, trust, and traceability are the problems blockchain can help solve when it comes to digital marketing. For businesses that build brands and rely on data to do it, ensuring this data is accurate and untampered with is of utmost importance. Allowing blockchain to help solve these problems could lead to some interesting new developments concerning its use in digital marketing.
Understanding Digital Marketing Transparency
Referring to the clarity and openness surrounding marketing practices and performance, digital marketing transparency is. It is about furnishing customers with precise details concerning the expenditure of marketing budgets, the performance of campaigns, and the handling of consumer data. Nevertheless, conventional practices in digital marketing tend not to be very transparent. A report by Statista states that 62% of marketers believe that mistrust in digital advertising is caused by the presence of deception.
The lack of transparency is demonstrated in some common ways:
- Advertising platforms have hidden fees.
- Traffic is sometimes artificially generated by bots.
- Data is sometimes misused or mishandled.
As a result, advertising budgets may be squandered, and brand reputations can suffer.
How Can Blockchain Improve Digital Marketing Transparency?
Being a powerful tool, blockchain technology could enhance the transparency of digital marketing. It could create an immutable ledger of transactions, meaning data could be recorded in such a way that it could not be changed or deleted afterward. This could provide businesses with a more transparent view of their marketing activities. Here’s how:
- Improved Data Integrity: Blockchain relies on verification for data inputs, which means that only correct information gets recorded. This simple process has a huge effect and reduces the chances of any scams that inflate marketing numbers.
- Immediate Interaction Reporting: Marketers can now observe their campaigns as they happen. And with every passing second, there are more reports coming in. Taking it all in, and with it making some serious decisions, demands a very high level of concentration. At least that’s true if we’re talking about human concentration.
- Increased Trust: Transparency, by itself, is a trust-builder. And when it happens almost instantaneously, you’ve got a serious trust-building tool on your hands. And by improving the way returns are handled, marketers also have another way of making gains in trust.
Examples of Blockchain in Action
A few companies are using blockchain for transparency in digital marketing, and one of those is the media agency Omnicom. They’re actually doing something quite smart: They’re using blockchain to verify the accuracy of digital advertising. This platform allows clients to see the performance in real-time—that is, how well your digital ads are doing, down to exact numbers.
Moreover, IBM has a blockchain solution for advertisers. This innovation allows marketers to track ad impressions and interactions, offering real-time insights into campaign performance. In addition to that, brands like Unilever are exploring blockchain, too. They’re using it to make sure there’s transparency in their supply chains and advertising spend.
Challenges and Future Considerations
The appearance of blockchain technology in digital marketing holds great promise, but there are obstacles to overcome.
Blockchain has the potential to transform digital marketing, but significant hurdles remain. These are some of them:
- Integration Costs: Integrating blockchain solutions can be expensive and need committed resource effort.
- Scalability: The system must be capable of handling not just the initial user base but also a rapidly expanding ecosystem of partners, with no drop in user experience.
- Regulatory Compliance: Marketers must also ensure that anything they do in conjunction with blockchain meets the letter of the law.
Overcoming these obstacles to building a next-generation platform offers the promise of significant payoffs in trust and efficiency.
The Path Forward
The potential of blockchain to resolve current problems of digital marketing is beginning to excite some organizations and agencies. They are asking themselves a new set of questions: Could this be the answer we’ve been looking for? Where can we apply it? How can we ensure that our application of it will provide both us and our consumers with the trust and transparency that we all so desperately need?
Next, businesses can employ several strategies to use blockchain effectively. Here are a few:
- They can run small-scale tests of blockchain’s effectiveness—pilot programs, in tech lingo.
- They can provide their business partners and other stakeholders with clear information about why blockchain is good for business and how it works.
- They can team up with technology partners that have the know-how to integrate blockchain into an organization’s existing tech stack.
If a company does these things, it likely will find itself front-running the rest of the business world in using this new technology.
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