Blockchain Technology allows for proper recording of documents, content, and other digital assets. In this vein, digital content for content marketing purposes can harness the power of Blockchain for security and ownership reasons.

Decentralization, an essential quality of Blockchain, removes the aspect of a central authority. This allows for more control over digital content and assets alike for content marketing purposes.

The reliability of Blockchain in other fields also augments the content marketing process. Statistics used in content marketing can easily be proved using Blockchain-based data on the same.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the reasons why Blockchain and Content Marketing aren’t really an odd pair and why it’s likely that the two will merge in the near future. 

Let’s dive right in, shall we? 

Blockchain and Content Marketing

Content marketing mainly involves leveraging digital content to cultivate an interest in a particular product within a target audience. With the continued advancements in technology and technological devices alike, marketers, businesses, and other players are relying on content marketing to brew an interest in their target audiences in their respective products.

Blockchain Technology has been with us for quite some time, and most of its applications thus far have been in the field of finance. Increasingly, cryptocurrencies and other digital assets have, and continue to have the extensive most usage of the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). 

While the adoption of Blockchain on a global scale has been somewhat at a slower pace, it has been on an increasing or upward trend in overall terms. From protecting documents digitally to recording and processing payment transactions, Blockchain's use is irrefutably growing by the day.

Ownership Reasons

When it comes to content marketing, Blockchain Technology can find applicability in various scenarios, which are all to the benefit of content marketers. Blockchain is widely used today because of how secure it is in terms of ensuring and fostering ownership of digital assets. In today's age of ubiquity in smart devices and fast internet, theft of content is very easy. 

There are cases where individuals in the content marketing field have had their content stolen for reposting in some other site. Such are the cases that Blockchain can help to reduce and eventually eliminate. The Chinese government has already made the first steps towards eliminating plagiarized content via this technology. 

Since the Blockchain acts like a distributed decentralized ledger, content marketers can upload their content to the Blockchain, where it will be stored in blocks and decentralized across various users for security and control reasons. This way, it becomes easy to trace ownership and as well make it difficult for other parties to claim that content as theirs.

Combating frauds and fakes 

As a result, this will ensure the integrity of information presented in various sources and will act as a defense against fake news and fake ads. The issue behind paid ads is that this field has its fair share of fraud. There are plenty of websites on the web that misrepresent their traffic figures, which causes many businesses to lose money on inefficient advertisements. 

There are now many reputable news agencies that use Blockchain to combat fake news, considering how easy it is to stumble upon unverified or even fictitious data and figures. The New York Times, for instance, has recently stated that they’re now gradually tapping into Blockchain. NYT’s R&D team is now using the Hyperledger Fabric’s permissioned Blockchain to verify the veracity of the images and photos they use, partnered with IBM Garage.

This may well be among the most important contributions of this technology to news and content marketing in general, considering how widespread fake news has become in presidential elections around the world. The US elections have not been an exception.

Around half of the most read and popular pieces that reported on the elections ended up being fake news, while over 60% of American citizens use sites like Facebook and Twitter, and social media in general as their primary sources of information. Unfortunately, while there have been attempts of regulating and verifying the veracity of the articles published on social media, there’s still a “Wild West” element to it. 

Other facets of content marketing will probably have to deal with validation as well. Specialists will have to figure out a way to validate information that has been localized or translated. Although that does seem like a complicated task, specialists from The Word Point, a business offering localization solutions, mention that there are ways to tackle this situation. 

Decentralized Control

The aspect of decentralization also comes across as a crucial aspect here. Decentralization means that the content is not under a central authority but instead held with many individuals who are members of the network or the Blockchain. This way, the chances that there will be some disjoints in content retrieval are low, because even in the event of crashes; the info is across a battery of network members of the Blockchain.

Since Blockchain also acts as a hub for the storage of statistics in other areas; this could come through as a boon for the content creation process. As a result, these stats could be infused to help to back or prove stories in the content creation stage, which could all work for the benefit of the content marketer. More importantly, everybody will be able to benefit from the decentralized nature of this data, not just major newspapers like NYT. 

This is also an essential defense against authoritarian governments that might be prone to “poisoning the waters” with fake data, something that, unfortunately, is still a widespread phenomenon today. 

Eliminating the middlemen

Blockchain technology can also be used to make content marketing services less expensive. 

At this moment, content marketers have to reach out to intermediaries to take care of their ads. Let’s try to illustrate this:
Imagine you’re a business that is willing to rent some banner space on its corporate site, but, at the same time, you care about who you’re offering it to since you care about your readership.

Linking to low-authority sources can have an adverse effect on your reputation from an SEO perspective, harm the way your audience perceives you.

Typically, businesses will use Google Adsense to ensure that the banner space is provided for credible enterprises only.

While this does seem like a reasonable idea, by having an automated quality assessment tool in hand, this ends up costing more than it should. Blockchain can address this issue.

With a Blockchain quality validation in place, the middle-person becomes an obsolete role. Similarly, this could potentially bring a new accounting system. Today, if you’re advertising on other sites via Google AdSense, you also pay for clicks that aren’t necessarily genuine.  

This allows businesses and individuals to not only pay for the services they get, without any additional costs but also ensure that every single click is made by a person because a Blockchain ID validates it.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say that Blockchain and content marketing isn’t necessarily the most straightforward duo yet, but we’re confident that future developments will improve and revolutionize the field. 

Since the technology keeps on changing, new developments come into being as well. The emergence of Blockchain-based tools that eliminate intermediaries as well as continued advancements and progress in license management all herald essential steps and milestones for those involved in content marketing.