It is estimated that over 17% of companies invest more than half of the marketing budget over influencer marketing. On top of that, 89% of marketers say that the ROI generated by influencer marketing was comparable with other ways of marketing. We know that influencer marketing is the key element for customer-centric marketing and organizations are eyeing on the growing surge in this field.

 

Searches for influencer marketers on Google have been growing for the last 5 years and from small homegrown businesses to Fortune 500 brands, everyone is ready to invest and earn ROI from it. But, how can Blockchain evolve this pretty young industry and help it grow even better?

Influencer marketing, the how?

 

When a brand decides to run influencer marketing campaigns, they generally approach the influencers directly or deal with the influencer marketing management companies. Now, these companies assign influencers registered with them to the brand, often without matching their audience and brand’s requirements.

 

But, here is the catch. Everyone in the business is always providing positive numbers and counts for their products (read influencers here). So, when a brand finalize influencers for their campaigns, they might end up selecting the wrong influencer 

 

For normal brands, selecting an influencer or micro-influencer depends on the number of followers they have, engagement they get, the positive or negative impact they have. But, looking at numbers would not help unless the influencer really helps a brand with their spent money on influencer marketing campaigns.

 

Once, the influencers get selected, brands sign a deal with them. Mostly, brands sign contracts on spreading the content in digital forms like social media graphics & videos, brand endorsements in various forms, blogs and podcasts. Now, influencers can represent their number of followers or the number of impressions they gain from such posts and brands give them money in return.

But, the actual ROI do not get traced by brands who are investing a lot of money into it. Just like newspaper or radio advertisements, influencer marketing campaigns might fail and do not convert any customer for brands. Many times, brands fail to authenticate the data from influencers. What brands should measure is engagement rates, how much traffic or conversions gains they are getting after the campaign, is the influencer providing genuine stats or they are not real and more?

 

Middlemen might even end up presenting fake data and get the campaigns for their clients (read influencers here). So, there is a requirement for some automation and technologically driven thing in the market. Where human touchpoints would go down and the community would be able to drive things by itself.

 

Let’s see how Blockchain can come to rescue!

Why Blockchain for influencer marketing?

We know that blockchain is a digital ledger technology that provides transparency in the system for every stakeholder and influencer marketing is no different than this.

 

What Blockchain along with other technologies would do is to create a perfect influencer marketing community for both brands and influencers to work on.

 

With blockchain, a smart contract (virtual contract) can be created. Where the influencers would submit their promises to give impressions and engagement over their platforms and the brands or marketers would submit their payments on the platform. Once the influencer fulfils all the promises or the steps both ends have agreed on getting done, payments would automatically get credited to the influencer’s profiles. The payment would stay in the crypto wallet until the smart contract positively passes the checklist and transfers to the influencer. If the influencer does not meet the requirements, then money would get back to the brands.

Well, that is just the concept of how a blockchain-based influencer marketing platform or community would work. But, when we dig in deeper and implement Blcockahin with other technologies like artificial intelligence, RPA and machine learning, the picture gets bigger. Blockchain alone might not help to make the platform entirely transparent or usable even with proper implementation of smart contracts. For influencer marketing campaigns, data and scaling are what matters the most for both the ends. To validate the data if the influencer has done a satisfactory job or not, web crawlers and AI would come to help. They would ensure that the claims made by influencers are actually facts or not.

 

The blockchain-based platform would not only provide real data about how many impressions were made but also provide the actual engagement rates. Which are essential for every brand. Without that, digital influencer marketing campaigns would become just another advertisement in a newspaper.

 

Overall, Blockchains would provide power to the community and influencers with real influence would get contracts rather than self-proclaimed ones.

How does influencer marketing help?

Here are some key benefits of how such Blockchain-enabled platforms would help people.

For brands:

• Minimize the risk of fraud
• Can access realtime data for reach and branding
• Transparency for engagement rates and reach in the market
• Can set contract for actual reach to be paid
• Better targeting with proper data and analytics
• Checking the authenticity of the influencer (visibility of actual reach and engagement rates)

For influencers:

• Ease of getting payments without delays and cuts
• Easy to top the charts with their real data
• Read engagements could be shown for better exposure and earning capacity

More direct or indirect benefits can be availed by implementing Blockchain with supporting technologies to make brands better across the internet. Want to learn more? Contact us now!