In the past three years, the cost of acquiring customers has surged across industries. A recent survey shows acquisition costs rose by nearly 35% between 2022 and 2025, while customer lifetime value has stagnated.
For venues in particular — restaurants, bars, clubs and corporate event spaces — the situation is especially challenging. Traditional advertising channels such as social media campaigns or influencer partnerships often demand significant upfront spend, yet provide little clarity about what truly drives results.
This uncertainty has been described as an “attribution black box.” Venues might know they invested in ads or promotional partnerships, but they cannot reliably connect those efforts to a diner booking a table, a guest attending an event or a company securing a conference space. In many cases, marketing teams are left presenting fragmented data to stakeholders without a clear link between campaign spend and revenue generated.
Beyond inefficiency, there is also risk. Traditional promotional arrangements often rely on self-reported metrics, where promoters or advertising partners may exaggerate reach or fabricate conversions to secure payment.
Without a system to verify whether a customer actually walked through the door or spent money, venues can end up funding campaigns that never deliver real value. Adding to this complexity is the reliance on word-of-mouth referrals, still one of the strongest drivers of new business but nearly impossible to measure with traditional tools.
The result is a high-risk environment. Venues are asked to pay more and more for marketing while operating in the dark about its effectiveness. For many, this combination of escalating costs and lack of reliable performance tracking makes customer acquisition feel like a gamble rather than an investment.
A zero-risk customer acquisition model
Belong, a Web3 community platform, has developed a direct response to these challenges. Its new product, CheckIn, is a blockchain-powered customer acquisition platform designed to help venues escape the attribution black box. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, venues only pay for verified customers who visit and spend money.
CheckIn uses a multi-verification system that connects QR codes, NFC technology and geo-location to confirm physical presence. Once a referred customer makes a purchase, smart contracts automatically calculate and distribute rewards.
Venues can configure a two-part reward structure: a flat visit bounty — typically ranging from $2 to $20 per customer — plus a percentage of the customer’s actual spending, typically 5% to 25%.
For example, if a restaurant sets a $10 bounty and 15% commission, and a referred customer spends $100, the promoter receives $25, automatically settled through the platform after fees. The venue, crucially, only pays for a verified and completed transaction.
This model eliminates common pitfalls of traditional affiliate arrangements, such as inflated traffic numbers or unverifiable claims. By requiring both a physical check-in and a confirmed purchase, CheckIn ensures venues only pay for actual value.
Extending geo-verification to customer acquisition
CheckIn’s architecture builds on Belong’s existing geo-rewards layer, which was originally developed for the Chain Atlas project. Deployed across 35 countries, Chain Atlas proved the viability of using blockchain verification for real-world interactions, such as rewarding participants for attending events or visiting specific locations.
CheckIn now extends this verification expertise to ongoing customer relationships while benefiting from Belong’s mature ecosystem, including an established user base, proven smart contract architecture and existing partnerships.
The system also integrates with Belong’s upcoming LONG token, which is set to launch in October. Customers who pay with LONG will receive an automatic 3% discount, while venues benefit from near-instant settlement compared to the typical 2-3 day delay of traditional payment processors.
Meanwhile, promoters can unlock higher commission rates by staking LONG tokens. Half of all platform fees are allocated toward LONG buybacks and burns, creating sustained demand.
A marketing model that delivers results
Explaining how the new marketing model benefits all parties involved, Jay Jideliov, CEO of Belong, said:
“We’re creating a win-win ecosystem where venues only pay for real customers, promoters earn fair rewards for successful referrals and customers get instant perks and discounts. It’s performance-based marketing that benefits everyone.”
Cointelegraph Accelerator participant Belong aims to change how businesses in the hospitality industry think about marketing ROI. In the near term, it plans to expand integrations with point-of-sale systems, hotel loyalty programs and large-scale event venues, creating a unified layer of verified performance-based marketing across hospitality.
As traditional industries embrace blockchain, CheckIn offers hospitality businesses a straightforward way to access Web3 without technical hurdles, while meeting the demand for accountability in marketing.
With Belong’s established infrastructure and a performance-based model, it has the potential to set a new benchmark for customer acquisition in the venue sector.
Find out more about Belong
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