Gemstra, Revolutionizing Social Selling Industry With Blockchain
There're over a hundreds way of marketing products with which influencer marketing is part. This type of marketing focuses on some influential people rather than the target market as a whole on social media. It first appeared in the 20th century where the fewer brands at that time created personas to trigger the purchase decisions of consumers emotionally.
Many influential people like Santa Claus, Tony the Tiger and even Micheal Jackson have contributed a lot in this industry. Numerous people who have a positive impact on their followers have joined the cause and helping make this sector as a whole better. Cutting through banner ad blindness and placing brands at a place where customers can see in a natural native content has been the main advantage.
Influencer Commerce is now a minted for this kind of marketing and its thriving very well in this era. It's said to be the evolution of referral programs. Social media, with its over 2.7 billion users of which 600 million are influencers, has been the platform that has given it the boost in these years. This industry is estimated to pay about $10 Billion to influencers this year alone. There is no doubt this industry can hit $100 billion in revenue in the next 10years due to its 20% annual growth rate and growing.
About Gemstra
Gemstra plays an active role in the Influencer Commerce. A token economy and blockchain enabled ecosystem, Gemstra powers the influencer commerce. It acts as the meeting place or the platform for both brands and influencers. Work for this project started in 2017 when the first market place was created for influencers. With its ability to gain 3,000 influencers promoting 8brands testifies the seriousness of the project and the team.
With the experience from the team in Influencer Commerce industry, identifying the industry's challenges was very easy. The lack of good and default platform for influencers and brands is one of the problems. Also, a lot of the influencers are left behind due to the small number of followers. Moreover, there are no systems put in place to track influencers performances and quantify their value. Gemstra has solutions to all these and even more.
Why Gemstra moved to the blockchain
The blockchain is gaining astronomical adoption since its first use case with bitcoin in 2009. Many business sectors have embraced it and are changing lives with this technology. Gemstra sees this as a huge opportunity to jump in with the Influencer commerce industry. This will bring equity to all the users (Influencers, Businesses and Brands) of the platform.
The blockchain has a distributed open source ledger which saves pieces of information securely and immutably. Brands will be able to keep a portable record and decide which businesses to access it. Businesses can host software for brands and influencers by integrating existing systems with ASTRA via SDK or deploying Gemstra's open source software. The GEMS tokens will be the native currency on the platform promoting the decentralization of the platform. It will be involved in all transactions on the platform.
The product (ASTRA Platform)
The ASTRA Platform is a smart contract platform that works as an infrastructure for influencer commerce transactions. Businesses can integrate and build an influencer/KOL commerce channel. Built on the blockchain, it hides all the complexity and presents an easy to use user interface attracting everyone to the platform. The easy-to-use API-based platform will facilitate the development of businesses so they can directly connect with influencers.
BOUTIQUES Marketplace - The already existing product of Gemstra is the BOUTIQUES Marketplace which allows businesses to interact directly with influencers and Known Opinion Leaders(KOLs). On this platform, influencers can launch independent boutiques and choose which businesses to promote. This eliminates the inconvenience where influencers have to chase brands or businesses for promotion. The platform makes it easier for Influencers and KOLs to know how much sales they've contributed and earn accordingly.
The customers are the fans of the influencers. Their earnings come from repeated sales from the fans and followers and in return, the influencer engages them with high-quality content on his or her social media platform. Businesses will also have the opportunity to reward Influencers based on quantitative sales data, instead of lump sump endorsements or campaigns.
The Knowy platform. This platform targets the traditional broken and untrusted review system. There are so many fake reviews on products. Review platform allows users to be incentivised with free products by businesses to leave a good review. This is not right and very deceptive. With Knowy review platform, users gain reputation when their reviews are judged honest and helpful by other users. Greater reputation means greater relevance. Businesses will pay per review in GEMS and amount will be distributed to all the authors.
My take
The products introduced here have the tendency to address all the issues faced in this industry. The success of this will depend largely on the team and the community behind this. Great project and I am really hoping for the best.
Useful likes to aid your quest to know about this project
Website Whitepaper Telegram Twitter Medium
Bounty0x: ibracks