5 challenges of influencer marketing and how the blockchain will solve them.

For many years, Influencer Marketing was used by entertainment and gaming industries for promotional campaigns done through influencers. The influencers usually are famous celebrities, journalists, industry experts, sportsmen and the like. Their role is to influence the buying decision of the customer for the particular products and services.
Many brands had begun using Influencer Marketing effectively in recent years. They were able to achieve credibility and attention in the market. Yet, Influencer Marketing became riddled with many problems that look difficult to solve and there are many challenges overshadowing its performance too. From chaotic pricing, complex partnership, complicated transactions, to fraud and management, Influencer Marketing is difficult for many businesses to handle efficiently.

Challenges faced with Influencer Marketing

1. Influencer marketing is cross-functional: The influencer marketing affects different parts of the company or organization. For example, an SEO strategy for a firm will leverage influencer to develop a higher ranking on Google’s search results. While you’re potential buyer’s journey will map influencers at each stage along the customer funnel.
   In short, you have to consider employees, influential customers and the investor relationships to map out a viable SEO strategy. This means that a firm has to juggle between various factors that lead to a chaotic landscape in terms of consistency, brand voice and collaboration. So much so that many companies have multiple brands in different regions that even include multiple product lines.

2. How to conduct Influencer Marketing; locally or globally?
   An influencer relations survey has shown that 42 percent organizations believe that their program is global, 52 percent belied that it is regional and 6 percent are unaware of the objective.
   Tech giants like Samsung and Coca-Cola believe that a local presence and market knowledge is required to achieve relationship building through influencer programs. There is no concept of an international influencer program yet, it has to be managed well locally. So, it is a challenge to manage effective campaigns across different territories.

3. Deliberation about outsourced or in-house Influencer Marketing program
   There exist advantages and disadvantages if influencer marketing is handled in-house when compared to it being managed by an external agency. If done in-house, a firm can develop its own expertise and nurture the influencer relationships. However, outsourcing will help in scaling business opportunities and bring flexibility in a ​certain area where the firm lacks the expertise.

When an external agency works with a mixed organization having different internal teams, then it becomes tough for the teams to collaborate over one strategy that gets overlapped by the influencer for a particular category as each have different touch points in the organization.

1. Influencer Marketing has to be handled through Governance
   The Influence programs require one central point of governance to create collaboration and coordination among the internal teams in the organization. Since it is a company-wide initiative. Often, factors like operational efficiency, cultural fit, brand voice and the legality of the program become a hurdle as each is not considered individually.

2. Choosing a technology or tool to solve issues
   Since Influencer Marketing has many problems to address, companies are finding it tough to make a choice between a few tools or technologies. One of them is Blockchain and the other is Influencer Relationship management platform as each is structured on a different model.

How Blockchain will solve marketing and advertising issues for Influencer marketing program?

A blockchain technology is an electronic ledger that is open and shared database and it operates in a decentralized network format. It can benefit in four ways;

1. Management of Consumer data: The blockchain provides marketers to manipulate tons of data and still use it for brand building. Now, brands can seek direct connections with the customers and do not require a middleman to analyze data. Blockchain helps to maintain transaction data in a decentralized manner which is massive and secure at all times.

2. Ad-delivery verification: Blockchain will help to address the problem of the delivery and placement of the ads in the right manner and at the right time. The major issue seen was that it is expensive to audit ad deliveries in a centralized system. Through a decentralized auditing when done through block chain, a brand get access to ad deliveries from an ad server where the blockchain will analyze them through the mining machines. It can detect if the ads are fake and scrub them a fraud.

3. Marketing: A blockchain platform like ‘VeChain’ will help marketers in the fashion industry. Using this platform, popular fashion ‘Babyghost’ allowed customers to verify a collection of handbags to prove product authenticity. Moreover, customers got the chance to scan the tags through their Smartphones to know about the details about the product relative to its origin and the designer as well. This helps to create personalized connection between the customers with the products unlike before.

4. Corporate Social Responsibility: Blockchain holds the promise to combine CSR with accountability. It can be used successfully by the brands to develop digitized contracts that be signed when CSR is taken into consideration for sustainable practices. Blockchain will ensure that CSR will be accountable and public.

SocialMedia.Market Tool and Blockchain

A good example of Blockchain can be seen with SocialMedia.Market tool which is a decentralized ecosystem. It helps marketers to create, analyze and perform advertising campaigns in a secured and transparent manner.

Advantages of SocialMedia.Market

• Escrow transactions are 100 percent safe secured by smart contracts.
• The built-in resources like smart templates and tips enables users to create smart contracts according to their requirements.
• Advertisers can get engaged to multiple influencers across popular social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Diverse and broader audience can be targeted by the brands.
• Fair dispute resolution is made possible independent platform experts.
• Competitive and transparent marketplace.
• New influencers and small businesses can easily use the simple interface.
• The operational costs and transaction fees are quite low.