Using Blockchain technology to improve location-based advertising

In the golden age of advertising, finding an audience was as easy as posting an ad in a widely publicized newspaper, playing on a radio or TV station, or putting billboards in relevant areas. But with the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of new types of media, tapping such a wide network is the least efficient way to attract customers. As attention spans are reduced in proportion to the number of competing ads on our periphery, advertisers should focus their messages on specific audiences more than ever.

For small businesses, segmentation is especially crucial. Ads must be adjusted on multiple levels: by demographic location, geography, used placements, and more. The goal is not just to have people walk in your store, but to be the right kind of people. In order to serve these companies, location based advertising (LBA) has emerged. Location-based advertising helps local physical stores by combining mobile advertising with geographic targeting technology. The success of this new brand of advertising justifies the rate at which the LBA industry is growing. It is expected that about $ 30 billion will go into this industry by 2020, an annual growth rate of 24.6 percent from $ 9.8 billion in 2015 according to BIA Kelsey.

However, despite the effectiveness of this marketing niche, it still faces many challenges. People have acknowledged their privacy concerns with GPS-based ad targeting and show they hesitate to opt in. In addition, some of the promotion services that have signed up in the LBA industry makes bringing customers who have become online customers a frustratingly inefficient process. However, Blockchain is already disrupting this status quo and threatening to break down the barriers that are already in place in this young industry.

Getting granular with the advertisement
Wholesalers and retailers in a specific location should take advantage of granular segmentation tools. This will prevent them from wasting precious advertising dollars on those who have no chance of becoming a customer. More important than achieving, however, is how a local company is able to effectively create an online community to support their off-line operations.

Determining the demographics of your target audience and adjusting the content of your message is important to that effort. Thus, it also creates attractive promotions that encourage customers to enter as they pass through the front door of the store. For this, most companies choose a location-based promotional platform, such as Groupon.

Reaching Specific Targets
The interactions that platforms such as Groupon encourage between businesses and customers are superficial and unproductive. Locations will be targeted with coupons for deals in your area and can purchase them instantly. This system reveals two fundamental problems: customers do not need to provide any additional value besides money, and they are only encouraged to go to the restaurant or shop if they have a discount. The coupons themselves are restricted to certain times of the day and to specific products or menu items as well. For businesses, hard work must be done to optimize these discounts so that the money is not lost when customers redeem them.

Other companies, such as FourSquare, offer companies and consumers a distorted view of the market. Companies must pay for user data that is cured by traders and have no real data on the efficiency with which the money was spent. Users, on the other hand, should go through hundreds of posts trying to discern whether what is being shown to them at their location is an actual user opinion or a sponsored post that was best inflated artificially. In this way, there is no real incentive to trust the system, or actively participate in it.

Where the status quo fails to create motivation to retain customers for the long term is where Blockchain comes in. New technology-based LBA platforms offer local businesses a way to nurture online communities where value always circulates between themselves and their most loyal advocates online.

How Blockchain can help
Being a decentralized bookkeeper technology, Blockchain is like a software platform that runs on a network of its own participants rather than a central server. Its unique infrastructure addresses itself naturally to overcome the security disadvantages of centralized content hosting and makes the storage of information and value on the network more secure than ever before. Blockchains typically use crypto-coins as a means of exchange for whatever is transferred between network users, such as space on a cloud storage platform, bandwidth in a decentralized VPN service, or money digitized in solutions such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Intermediaries have no place in Blockchain, as there are no barriers between users and content providers, and there is no place for the installation of fees or fees.

Cryptomoeda acts as a kind of monetary reward, but can be customized to encourage stakeholders only for activities that benefit others in the ecosystem. Location-based advertising is a relevant application for this technology because it can better align the interests of those being targeted and those who target, creating a mutually beneficial connection between them. Innovative companies are pursuing this concept with enthusiasm.

Enabling rewards through tokenization
By tokenizing their services, companies reward people in their local area who complete tasks that inherently create value, such as publishing to social networks, writing a brief review, and so on. LBA platform tokens can be spent on these retailers, such as money, with more freedom than a mere coupon. Consumers who work hard to contribute, participate, and spend their tokens are often tracked by the immutable major ledger and receive a score that allows them to bill more tokens to use in their favorite stores.

This self-sustaining system recycles value in a hermetic way, which means that marketers do not have to scramble to get loyal customers and can get tangible advertising results in return for a small discount.

More vital, Blockchain can give traders access to irrefutable data that can streamline their efforts. Because of the way technology is built - with transactions being recorded in an unchanging and open book-reason register - user data remains protected. It also gives companies the ability to fully rely on their results because there is no intermediary or filter that distorts the display. This gives marketers the ability to better hone their deals and deliver more relevant deals to customers based on transparent data.

Adoption is inevitable
The tokenization service helps drive transparency in location-based advertising, providing better reach for local businesses and offering customers a better deal in return. Mobile devices have the ability to be a gateway to the best local experiences, but not when the intermediaries set themselves up in toll booths in both directions. Fortunately Blockchain is helping build an expressway, where local customers can quickly find local establishments with the most enthusiasm to run their business.