Topic: 🌟🚀 [ANN] PRE-ICO + ICO RefToken Decentralised Marketing Platform 🚀🌟 - page 3. (Read 3269 times)

No worries 

Ah ok, my bad. Didn't really look closely whether that was the quoted one. It's all good then.

Here is the third part in this series of blog posts on the real world impact of the RefToken platform. You can view the original (with screenshots) here: https://reftoken.io/empowering-small-businesses-to-global-growth/


Last week’s update covered the way in which RefToken will democratise the ability for small businesses to compete head to head with global corporations by eliminating marketing inefficiencies that essentially price out small players. This week we’ll take a slightly more granular approach and analyse the mechanics of how RefToken’s marketing platform empowers small businesses to global growth.

For the sake of this exercise we’ll take a peer to peer lending start-up that has successfully raised funding via it’s ICO and is looking to on-board lenders and borrowers. There are several of these companies out there, and many of our readers have participated in ICOs of the sort so the use-case will be of interest.

The primary challenge facing such a company is the dichotomy between the target markets encompassing borrowers and lenders. Borrowers tend to be unbanked individuals in developing countries, whilst lenders tend to be located in developed countries boasting a service oriented economy with a population sophisticated enough to understand the financial and humanitarian aspects of peer to peer lending to unbanked individuals across the world. The company will need to reach out to two very different audiences, in two very different markets with separate propositions and messages, with a failure in one market failing the counterpart market. This would require a significant amount of human and financial resources to execute in-house.

Using RefToken’s pay-per-performance marketing platform the company would be able to publish a set of market specific deals which affiliates operating in their target market would be able to browse and sign up to. The company’s marketing team will also be able to browse the platform’s affiliate directory, filtering by country and sector to build up a list of potential partners they can message and propose a deal though, all within the platform, conveniently sidestepping the time-consuming tasks of hunting down staff members on LinkedIn and cold messaging them there, (or emailing the unmanned honey-pot email address in site footers).

The company’s marketing team understands that participation in peer to peer lending is not an impulse purchase, and has a solid lifecycle email strategy set up in their CRM tool, that converts 20% of registered lenders to eventually participate in a loan. It knows that its average revenue per user (ARPU) to be €1000, meaning that it can offer the below deal structure which is published on their merchant profile as well as on a central list of fintech related deals, allowing for easier discovery by potential affiliates. All deals are governed and executed by a smart contract.

• Goal 1 Requirements (pay-out €100)
   • Registered KYC/AML cleared lender
• Goal 2 Requirements (pay-out €200)
   • Lender participates in first loan
   • Loaned amount > €50

Affiliates get notified of the deal and sign up to it. The company can then review them if they so desire (by checking their feedback pages on the platform, vetting their websites and connected company social profiles) and approve their participation.

Once approved the affiliates are then free to browse the company’s media gallery for the material required for their campaign (or request new creative to the required specs) and begin promoting the deal.

The RefToken platform will report KPIs in real time, allowing the affiliate to see how their campaign is performing and is instantly issued payment by the smart contract governing the deal each time one of the goals is met, solving one of affiliate marketer’s greatest pain points which is cash flow and liquidity.

As more affiliates sign up to the deal their performance is aggregated, allowing prospective new affiliates to assess the attractiveness of participation and helping the company identify attrition points in its conversion funnel.

The above activity will be happening in concurrence with parallel deal recruiting affiliates to market to potential borrowers, fulfilling both ends of the company’s sales pipeline, however the borrower’s deal might have a revenue share structure:

• Goal 1 Requirements (pay-out €10)
   • Registered KYC/AML cleared borrower
• Goal 2 Requirements (pay-out 15% of lifetime revenue generated by this user)
   • Borrower takes out first loan

As the company is in total control of its user acquisition costs it is free to adjust it user acquisition strategy on the fly, increasing deal pay-outs to incentivise affiliates in certain markets to stimulate growth, or reducing them in more mature markets to increase its net revenue.

RefToken’s platform will empower small businesses to attain a global reach without beholding themselves to banks or VCs, democratising the global economy we are all part of.

Here is the second part in this series of blog posts on the real world impact of the RefToken platform. You can view the original here: https://reftoken.io/democratisation-of-marketing-from-the-large-corporations/


As brilliant engineers build the disruptive apps of tomorrow todays incumbents double down with vigour in order to protect their markets and their valuation. The centralised nature of traditional businesses holds true for all major product sectors where each is dominated by a handful of billion dollar companies. These companies have everything to lose and can deploy hundreds of millions in fiat currency to protect their market. Fortune 500 companies much like central banks regularly issue new shares, minutely diluting the value of existing ones, but allowing them to raise large amounts of funds.

The upcoming generation of blockchain application creators will be faced with the grisly task of marketing their products in an environment that has evolved to become an extension of their competitor’s protective moat. Marketing and user acquisition costs are exorbitant because the major players have priced all the smaller ones out of the market. Google AdWords cost per clicks (CPCs) for insurance, banking and health service related keywords are three figure ones (for a single click!), because the nature of the platform facilitates the exclusion of smaller players simply by out bidding them (often for their own brand name) long enough to cut them out of the game. Ad Platforms proactively encourage this activity as it generates greater revenues for them, with Google going as far as assuring corporations that “Google won’t investigate or restrict the selection of trademarks as keywords, even if we receive a trademark complaint.” in their knowledge base (https://[Suspicious link removed]/6yvww).

In its current state of play very little can be done by a new entrant to level the field and deploy large scale marketing campaigns, as invariably this will be drowned out by the noise of the wider market, with very little chance of positive ROI due to the high user acquisition costs brought about by inefficiencies in traditional marketing methodologies (https://[Suspicious link removed]/MY6Ydy). RefToken will fix this equilibrium by providing a platform for blockchain based applications to deploy global marketing campaigns easily and on a pay-per-performance basis. RefToken’s affiliate platform will allow brands of all sizes to cooperate with influencers, content creators and marketers to promote their products, paying them a pre-agreed amount for each user the successfully refer.


A practical user case would be a start-up with limited seed funding based in Spain looking to enter the lucrative Swedish market. The start-up forecasts that the average Swedish user’s life time value is €450 compared to €120 for their domestic market, however the costs of engaging a marketing agency to conceptualise a campaign, produce creative, deploy the campaign, as well as their ongoing fees are prohibitive and exposes the company to the possibility of a significant impact to their bottom-line. RefToken empowers the start-up to connect with bloggers, influencers and media outlets in their target market and offer them a bespoke deal that would assure them of a profit after they pay their affiliate the pre-agreed amount for each client they refer (limited to 100 clients as a test for the first month). Once the start-up assesses the profitability of the arrangement they are able to scale this month on month growing their company without risking profitability at any point. Should the deal not be profitable the company can re-negotiate the deal in order for it to be equitable to both parties.


RefToken will democratise the ability to deploy global marketing campaigns by breaking down barriers between merchants and content creators, eliminating the middle-men that facilitate the pricing out of smaller players by erecting artificial protocols that impede competition. Nascent blockchain applications utilising the RefToken platform will be able to leverage the knowledge and networks of thousands of affiliates from all markets to deploy truly effective international marketing campaigns without requiring weeks of market research, having to hire translators or write a single blog post.

Hi;

We removed the link in our post, however this does not get get updated in the quoted version. We have contacted that user to ask them to remove or update their quote, however there has been no response.

The link to your bounty thread still points to the thread of Insurex. You said you changed that, but obviously that is not the case.

Here is the first of the above mentioned posts. The original can be found here: https://reftoken.io/powering-the-blockchain-revolution


It is often said that a technology does not become mainstream until the average person uses it without being aware of it. The common analogy used is SMTP and email, however there is a crucial step in-between that this analogy misses out on, and that is the adoption of the products that use the underlying technology. Had Eudora (back in 1988!) not driven millions of users to its product to discover the benefits of email, and by extension the underlying technology email’s adoption cycle would have been slower and might not have spawned the webmail services that we know today as the user base to sustain them would not have existed.

Blockchain technology is approaching an inflection point as huge gains in valuations and record ICO raises make headlines and spur and ever-growing drive to deploy the technology to everything from land registries, to medical records, cloud computing and medical marijuana. The next 24 months will see an exponential increase in blockchain based applications being released, with the trend set to accelerate over the next 5 years.

In order for this new generation of applications to spawn the next blessing of unicorns (yes, the collective noun for a group of unicorns is a blessing, thank us on trivia night) a fundamental audience shift needs to occur in the blockchain space. App developers will need to collaborate with the influencers, marketers and mainstream media houses to promote the benefits that their products offer the man on the street.

Influencers, news sites and media houses possess some of the most under-utilised assets in the modern economy – high intent user traffic. They spend tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands a year to research and create content that is relevant to their audience, only for them to receive a pittance in return for displaying tangentially relevant display ads from CPM networks such as AdSense, Taboola and Outbrain (with these middle-men taking the lion’s share of the revenue). On the flip side the brands leveraging these networks have their budgets decimated by ad fraud worth billions of dollars a year (http://www.adweek.com/tag/Ad-Fraud/) with some studies putting the percentage of fraudulent US ad impressions at 35% (http://blog.pixalate.com/q1-2017-programmatic-ad-fraud-rates-pixalate-mobile-desktop-video).

RefToken will disrupt this model and fix the ecosystem by connecting merchants directly with content creators, allowing them to promote applications that they believe in and provide real value to their readers. RefToken will supercharge the efficacy of blockchain marketing by leveraging smart contracts to execute and enforce payments between content creators and brands, whilst brands will be protected from ad fraud by only paying for transactions that are verified on the blockchain.

The offshoot will be a perfect storm of user growth for the applications that market themselves through RefToken’s affiliate platform, as brands will see the benefit of paying €100,000K for 5,000 real verified users over €100,000 for 20,000 impressions that generated a handful of incidental users. On the flipside content creators will flock to the platform to strike deals with teams that are creating applications that solve their audience’s problems, will be under less pressure to churn out basic click-bait type content and incentivised to create high value content that builds a real user case for the technology underlying the products they promote.

This cycle will self-perpetuate as blockchain technology propagates outwards from the current niche of innovators towards the mainstream majorities and laggards, literally supercharging the adoption rate of blockchain based applications.

The RefToken platform allows both merchants and affiliates to discover each other through a directory segmented by product vertical or niche, eliminating the need for hours of prospecting work from the affiliate marketing team. Every merchant publishes one or more deals that they would like affiliates to promote, with these deals also featuring in a master listing segmented by niche. Affiliates are then able to review the requirements of each deal and sign up to the ones most relevant to their audiences and upcoming content plan. This rapid discovery and deployment rate will allow blockchain applications to reach massive audiences in a fraction of the time that it would take should the current model of research, prospecting, discovering contact details, cold emailing, proposal, negotiation, close.

Performance marketing is the ideal fit for a rapidly maturing sector such as blockchain technology, as it allows product creators to rapidly acquire new users on a pay-for-what-get basis, eliminating the risk associated with writing large up-front cheques to marketing agencies that may or may not deliver positive ROI on the spend. RefToken will be the platform that enables blockchain applications to leverage the channel.

We are indeed moving full steam ahead with this project. Our developers are working to release our POC which will be a fully functional version of our prototype (https://demo.reftoken.com) by November (so around the middle of our ICO). We update our blog weekly at https://reftoken.io/blog . We'll start cross-posting those posts here to keep you guys in the loop.

In the meantime here are answers to some questions that we have received from forum members:

• Who is auditing your smart contract? - Ambisafe is doing that
• What is the minimum to participate in the presale? - Theres no minimum apart from the wallet minimum (so 0.01ETH or thereabouts)
• Where are you guys based/Are you in Switzerland? - We're based on the crypto-island known as Malta in the EU, our address is in the footer of our website

Huh? Why is this thread completely dead by now? Is there a new thread or what? It looked like you were more or less serious about this...

Sounds convincing! I believe you, but it was a funny mistake to say the least.

Hi;

Jumping in here - I'm Jan, CEO of RefToken (this post was created by our community manager using my account, as we foresaw that I might need to intercede at some point).

I'd like to clarify that we are definitely not behind Insurex or affiliated with them in any way, with absolutely no common team members, investors or entities (we're a company based in Malta). It was a genuine copy/paste mistake which has mortified our community manager who thought he would be fired over this (he's not, everyone makes an occasional mistake). To elaborate further, the team was researching bounty programs and compiled a GAPP analysis of previous programs to assist us in the construction and validation of ours which included a list of all bounty thread urls. This is the point at which the Insurex URL was erroneously added to our draft thread.

You can verify our team by viewing https://reftoken.io/#team and messaging any of us on LinkedIn to verify our identities. Moreover, our ICO features the most robust form of investor protection possible, which is government licensed fiduciary agents holding the multi-sig keys. I'm also open to a organising a hangout with community members should you deem it necessary (we could set it up as AMA). Our time zone is CET +1.
 

 
 

Hi,

is it also possible that you are behind both ICOs? I mean, that is probably a valid concern now that you made that mistake with the link.

ICO everyday... how to find out the good one??

Hi, this has been fixed, it was simply a copy/paste error when doing research on bounty campaign structures. The link in the quote does not update, we have messaged that user to amend his quote.

You should fix the link of bounty thread it redirect to another topic of InsureX maybe you forgot to put the link at right place sorry for off topic question. This project has nice idea so it has chance to attract the investors when this will go for crowdfunding.

Why the heck is the bounty link pointing to Insurex? Could you explain that please? I mean, that is no coincidence. So, what's your explanation for that?

One of our core use-cases will in fact be ICO promotion and management, glad the greater community also sees its potential there!   

Some good potential here and nice low supply! I feel like many other coins could piggy back on this system.

Apologies for the formatting issue with images. We're fixing it as we speak.

Ok this seem interesting. I am going to keep my eye on this one closely. Glad I seen it before the pre-sale.  BTC