Written by Levi Beam
What do you think is the future of marketing? Ask yourself this question and imagine the last 20 years of marketing while you do so. This might bring images of billboards, newspapers, infomercials, and YouTube ads. All of these methods of promotion take advantage of high density viewership—the basis of what successful advertising ‘should’ attract. Take now, the ideal ad: an appeal to a target audience through a hook, body, and call to action. If a marketing agency wants to appeal to these principles and target the right audience at a high-density, their ideal choice has traditionally been through the media channels on TV and website ads. Although, an alternative channel—having emerged within the past 10 years—is through social media. As far as logistics models go, an exemplar in seizing control over the social media marketing channels has been independent dropshippers.
In order to use dropshipping as an effective case study for the power of social media marketing, I need to explain how it works. Due to how accessible dropshipping is, you can imagine anyone as a dropshipper—from an everyday person to a group of professionals. An important point to note is that dropshipping involves finding a popular product, and selling it to others for a profit (J. T, 2021). Dropshippers want to choose the media channel that will reach the widest audience. Which media channel is that? Social media. Meta (who owns Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok have their own software for people who want to advertise on their platform. This software is for companies that sell t-shirts, services, or virtually any product. What dropshippers do is take advantage of this software. Within this software, they have the ability to make slide decks, run ad campaigns, marketing materials, and look at all their analytics. Dropshippers go on this software, make a company, make a shop, and make posts with the product that they are selling. Once this is complete, they leave it to the algorithms to promote their product—essentially saying, “run my campaign for me,” to the algorithm. The groundbreaking part of this process is the ease at which the algorithm can instantly react to buyer interest in the advertised product. If the algorithm sees large numbers of people interested, it will snowball your product to hundreds of thousands of potential buyers. This has the potential to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in only a week. Although, one crux of this process is that you get out what you put in. The more money you give Meta’s or TikTok’s campaign algorithms, the wider audience you capture. This is called scaling, and is typically done only with successful products. This idea of scaling applies to every product in the world; when a product is doing well, you invest more money into it. Additionally, not every product will be the next big thing. Dropshippers can spend thousands of dollars in testing products before finding a product that catches the attention of the masses.
How can this be applied to other businesses? Well, what dropshippers are doing is taking an unproven product (one that they do not know will sell) and seeing if there is demand for it by advertising it to the masses. Dropshippers do this to maximize profit, but not every company that has access to social media advertising wants to maximize profit. In fact, marketing a presidential campaign on social media would drive phenomenal numbers—especially if their campaign had an existing following. And importantly, this is already happening. In 2022, YouTube earned over $29.2 billion in advertising revenue. Better yet, Facebook earned over $113 Billion in advertising revenue in 2022. We already knew that the day of the newspaper was over—but these numbers put many other mediums to shame. Cable TV, the next largest advertising competitor to social media, is facing struggles as their revenues are dropping down to $22.4 Billion, from $93 Billion in 2000 (Revenue, 2023). This is lower than even YouTube’s advertising revenue.
Despite dropshipping being a fairly new get-rich-quick scheme, it serves as a great example to showcase the future of advertising on social media. Keep in mind that their calculated approach to garnering massive attention for their products is not isolated to only dropshipping, but is highly compatible with selling any conceivable product. In terms of where social media is going in the near future, “There are 4.9 billion social media users globally, meaning 60.49% of the global population use social media. The global social media users are forecasted to reach 5.85 billion by 2027.” (Ruby, 2023). Penetrating the interests of more than half of the population of the world, advertising through social media offers the potential of larger audience pools than ever recorded in history. Therefore if you are a small, medium, or large business, it is vital to tap into the best source of public exposure in history. What we see now is the dominance of social media as a marketing channel—unlikely to fade away any time soon.
Works Cited
Adgate, B. (n.d.). With Cord-Cutting, Cable TV Industry Is Facing Financial Challenges. Forbes. Retrieved November 8, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/10/10/with-cord-cutting-cable-tv-industry-is-facing-financial-challenges/?sh=1ee0b77e756c
Revenue of U.S. cable and pay TV providers 2005-2021. (n.d.). Statista. Retrieved November 8, 2023, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/184187/revenue-of-cable-and-pay-tv-providers-since-2005
Ruby, D. (2023, January 4). Social Media Users — How Many People Use Social Media In 2022. Demand Sage. https://www.demandsage.com/social-media-users/
J, T. (2021, November 24). How to Start Dropshipping Business in 2023 – A Comprehensive Guide. Hostinger Tutorials. https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-start-dropshipping-business