Crypto tokens have gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of years. What used to be a new and niche monetization service, it’s now a sown-after model to generate revenue and build up a community at the same time.
Tokens provide creators with a very valuable and unique way of reaching their market. You can engage your audience right away and make them feel part of something special and important.
Not only for influencers but even for brands and businesses, as it allows them to create a bond between themselves and their clients, removing, in a way, the front of a faceless corporation and also giving direct ownership of a little memento to the people who enjoy the product or service.
Audiences who benefit from the tokenization of their favorite services are more likely to share their enthusiasm with the people around them, which brings us to one of the main points of this article:
Word-of-Mouth marketing, fueled by crypto tokens!
One senior associate at Blockchain Capital said:
“Crypto networks facilitate stronger relationships between creators and users. These relationships will introduce economic rewards and incentives to strengthen network effects.”
People take ownership of the community surrounding the token, they want to see it get shared, grow, and, they want it to succeed because the success of the token and the brand literally represent their own.
A fully autonomous and decentralized organization that runs exclusively on tokens is not a far-fetched concept, as t and might replace many of the different monetization methods online communities utilize today.
Clients become part of a collective running or maintaining the price of the token rather than just a passive member of the audience.
On top of all of this, as with most of the things related to social media and technology in general, these technologies eventually grow and end up being part of the mainstream, becoming even more accessible to a broader range of people, lowering the barrier of entry for newcomers into the blockchain sphere, making it easier to everyone to go through the process or acquiring and owning these tokens.
The tokens get promoted and subsequently, the service which they represent, all of this while users build their own presence online through social media and word-of-mouth.
This type of influencer-focused marketing allows brands to develop a kind of “social proof” even if their product or service is still in its development phase and the possibility of reaching out to major celebrities is out of the question, brands still have the possibility of promoting their coin through micro-influencers, as they themselves would seem even more genuine to their clients especially if they share the same demographics.
It is also not only paying for a mere membership like we have seen so many services utilize nowadays but rather, it's paying to own a piece of the community and ecosystem that revolves around this social economy created by tokenization.
The rise of social tokens
Influencers and content creators used to be restricted and tied to the usual ways of monetizing their work. Platforms such as YouTube, in general, take 10 to 20 % chunk of the earnings, but now, the ecosystem for social tokens is blooming rapidly, including every aspect surrounding their distribution and the community tools and aggregators of these.
“Crypto enables communities to capture the value they create instead of being monetized by preexisting platforms”, said musician and creator of $RAC token: André Allen Anjos, regarding the tokenization of influencer-driven communities.
For brands, this is also a huge opportunity to engage with their customers. They could give utility to their tokens in the way of transacting (allowing users to send or receive tokens directly to the brand as a way of tipping or donating), earning (rewarding loyal customers with tokens to show appreciation for their continuous support), and holding (users might choose to hold a token as a collectible piece or asset, representing their loyalty alike to regular royalty point programs, being rewarded by the number of points/tokens they hold).
Whether for brands or for individuals, the use of tokens to boost the popularity of services/products is slowly becoming the new norm.
Isaac Vitales