The Impact of Web3 and Blockchain on Digital Marketing Strategies
From Web2 to Web3
The Web2 era belonged to smartphones, cloud computing, and social networks that enhanced user interaction while allowing millions to create and comment on each other’s activities. While the internet and its user communities have thrived on the centralized interface, technologies like Big Data and analytics, and AI have lent these Web2 corporations unprecedented access to our personal data. These corporations have dominated our digital lives for a long time, and have jeopardized our data privacy and security to their commercial advantage.
Who doesn’t remember the recent Facebook scandal in association with Cambridge Analytica?
Web3 solves this issue by distributing the center of power amongst users. It addresses issues of trust, transparency, and privacy via a user experience-based internet where the user is able to control and manage who views and uses their behavioral and personal data. A Forbes article nicely sums it up for us, “Web3 will bring us a fairer internet by enabling the individual to be a sovereign. True sovereignty implies owning and being able to control who profits from one’s time and information.”
The exodus of power from the corporations to the individual has already begun with technologies such as blockchain, NFTs, and virtual reality — the tripartite prologue of the next Web3 chapter waiting to take over our lives. In businesses, too, blockchain marketing is decentralizing the Web3 protocol where the users connect to an internet where they own and get properly compensated for their time and data.
Web3 and Digital Marketing
With Web3, digital marketing will go 3-dimensional and beyond the parameters of our mobile screens. AR/VR is blurring the boundaries of physical and digital activities while the internet is all around us. With decentralization, digital social marketing strategies will be centering around ‘Data for the people, not about the people.’
We can call Web3 marketing a gamified version of digital marketing strategies. Using IoT and smart devices, data would become actionable insights used to chisel digital marketing tools. AI/ML tech powered by decentralized computing power from supercomputers across the globe will replace human decision-making. This allows large amounts of data to be processed in real-time reducing reaction time and transmission delays.
Web3 marketing will comprise the onset of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Smart contract systems contain rules for the members on how to transact business and govern the platform. By realigning the interest of all stakeholders and removing intermediaries, DAOs will transform the dynamics of ownership and control across businesses.
Consequently, marketers will be able to rely on rich datastores recorded over a blockchain providing a panoramic view of consumers’ behavior. DApps and DAOs will lend more significant control over the marketing tools where one could create virtual events, mint and sell NFTs, and offer customer incentives, among others.
How is Blockchain Impacting Web3 Powered Digital Marketing?
Current digital marketing products rely on approved servers controlled centrally by a big corporation. Blockchain marketing is set to revolutionize digital marketing via trustless and permissionless access, allowing anyone to participate in a particular system while complying with its ruleset.
Since no central authority controls the internet infrastructure and no middlemen or gatekeepers are required on a DLT-powered platform, Web3 will allow anyone to advertise, participate in the campaign, or be an audience to one such advertisement while being rewarded for the same. For instance, any worthy artist can sell their artworks as NFTs or collect other NFTs at the NFT marketplaces gaining popularity these days.
Blockchain will be at the fore of Web3 transformations via the numerous decentralized apps that reward users for their attention, behavior, and consideration. The advertisers pay users for completing specific marketing tasks, such as viewing adverts, sharing opinions on products and services while letting them access their behavioral movements. As this vision might seem futuristic, some DAOs like xHashtag add their novelty factor to blockchain marketing in the upcoming Web3 era.
How is xHashtag Transforming Blockchain Marketing Space?
xHashtag, as a platform for #FutureOfWork, connects people requiring tasks done to the people willing to do these tasks, all in a decentralized Work 4.0 Interface. Users can earn crypto for completing different on-chain, off-chain and creative tasks on the platform. These tasks could be as simple as retweeting a given tweet, making an on-chain DEX transaction, or shooting something creative, like Youtube shorts.
Built on the Solana blockchain, xHashtag aims to be the driving force behind Web3 projects. It assists these projects in accelerating their community and token growth by leveraging its Liquid Super Teams — the flexible workforce housed on its platform. The platform is free for all. However, for users who stake the native token $XTAG, additional utilities will be available, such as faster access to tasks, taking on the role of a DAO governing member, and becoming a reviewer for assessing tasks done by other members.
In a nutshell, xHashtag envisions itself into a platform for a decentralized liquid workforce that is available on-demand without any commitments to any entrepreneur who seeks to market their product, service, or brand. It is ‘uberizing’ skill sets while becoming the go-to marketplace for getting any kind of work done.
The upcoming Work 4.0 will be built on the principle of a free economy and distributed workforce. Digital marketing is expected to become liquid and flexible instead of being location-bound. This means that marketers can access a global pool of capable individuals at lower costs. In the near future, marketing teams will be leaner and the office complex smaller or non-existent, thereby delivering maximum ROI. The future of marketing is digital, decentralized, and democratized — thanks to Web3 technologies and blockchain.
