Did you know that retail e-commerce is a $220 billion industry in the United States?
Not only that, but the market is growing by 17% each year.
As a dropshipper, that kind of knowledge should be very exciting to you. After all, dropshipping stores are a part of that massive multi-billion-dollar industry.
But figuring out how to actually profit from the expanding ecommerce marketing agency is another matter altogether. If you’ve tried to market or advertise dropshipping stores before, you may have found it an uphill battle. There may be billions of dollars being spent online, but that doesn’t help you if you can’t get some of the action.
There’s no single secret to dropshipping marketing that can transform your business. But successful dropshippers often find that digital advertising is the key to both increasing their profits and automating their SMS marketing.
The question is, what are the best ways to advertise your dropshipping store?
While every business owner has their own way of achieving success, you should consider the following five ad platforms. They’ve proven to be effective for promoting drop shipped products in the past.
To discover everything you need to know about the basics of dropshipping advertising, keep reading.
Facebook Ads
Although organic Facebook posts don’t tend to get much attention from people interested in e-commerce marketing, Facebook Ads has never been more popular.
The reason Facebook ads are talked about so often is that it’s quite easy to target specific audiences with them. If you think about old-fashioned newspaper advertisements, there was no way to determine exactly who would see specific ads. The newspapers went out into entire cities, and advertisers could only hope they got noticed by their target customers.
In the digital age, an Amazon advertising platform’s worth is determined by the number of people it reaches and the amount of detail it has about each person. Newspaper publishers didn’t know much about their audience other than that they lived in the same town, but Facebook is the polar opposite.
Facebook collects data on every user’s interests, beliefs, lifestyle, shopping, web browsing, and app usage. Then they allow advertisers to take advantage of this information but targeting people who exhibit specific qualities or share certain interests.
What does this mean for dropshippers?
Simply put, if you can describe your ideal customer in detail, then you can use Facebook to easily send them targeted ads. It may be the single best way to advertise e-commerce stores that there is.
How Facebook Ads Works
Anyone can create Facebook ads, but you’ll need a Facebook page for your store to make the most of them.
When you go to create a new ad, you’ll find that Facebook Ads is divided into three categories: campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads. A single ad campaign can have many ad sets, and likewise, one ad set can have many ads.
You’ll want to walk through various processes for setting up Facebook ads a few times to get the hang of it. It can feel overwhelming at first, but it becomes simpler once you’ve done it a few times. Then you’ll be able to focus on the quality of your advertisements themselves.
Pay-Per-Click
When it comes to dropshipping advertisements, Facebook Ads is probably the most-used platform. But another popular solution is pay-per-click ads from search engines like Google.
Pay-per-click, also known as PPC, is a method that displays ads next to search results, then charges you a small fee every time a searcher clicks on one.
Facebook ads target specific audiences and display ads to them while they’re spending time on the platform. But PPC lets you target dropshipping customers based on what they’re searching for at that exact moment.
Social media ads have to distract users from what they’re doing long enough to click through to your site. But Google ads try to offer users solutions they’re already actively searching for. This makes the ad feels less like an interruption.
This unique advertising approach can be more effective for certain businesses and products. This is especially true for those that solve a specific problem that people often search for.
How PPC Works
As we’ve already pointed out, when you place a PPC ad, you only get charged when someone clicks your ad. But to get your ads in front of people, you have to bid for certain keywords that you want to target. The more money you bid, the more people will see your ad, but you’ll also be charged more for clicks.
A successful PPC campaign isn’t simply a matter of throwing a lot of money at it, however. You need to choose highly relevant keywords, create a high-quality landing page, and use compelling and captivating ad copy. This can help you outbid your competitors without breaking the bank.
The good news is, unlike social media ads, you don’t need fancy video or graphics for PPC ads. That means you can invest more money and time into ad copy, without bothering with expensive visuals.
Instagram Ads
Since Instagram was acquired by Facebook, it’s been fully integrated into Facebook’s own advertising platform. If you like, you can set up ads to be displayed on Facebook and Instagram at the same time, all on the same platform.
You may be familiar with Facebook Ads already, but perhaps you haven’t given Instagram advertising much thought. If so, you should consider that Instagram’s active user base includes more than 1 billion people—many of whom would be your ideal customers.
Since Instagram is so popular, it’s worth including in your dropshipping marketing strategy.
How Instagram Ads Works
If you know how to use Facebook’s advertising platform, then you’re just a step away from advertising on Instagram. All you need to do is choose to display ads you create on Instagram, as well as (or instead of) on Facebook.
Instagram has its own advertising portal you can use if you just want to create sponsored posts. But Facebook Ads gives you more advanced features you can use.
Facebook ads work well for selling low-cost products to cold audiences. Meanwhile, Instagram ads are best used for boosting brand awareness and expanding your community. However, thanks to new features like product tagging and a dedicated Shop tab, Instagram users can go from clicking an ad to placing an order in just a couple of steps.
There are five types of ads you can use to promote dropshipped products on Instagram:
- Photo ads, consisting of ad copy and a single landscape, portrait, or square photo
- Video ads, which feature a single video up to 60 seconds long
- Carousel ads, consisting of 2-10 images or videos users can swipe through
- Sideshow ads, which consist of several still images but perform just like video ads for the user
- Story ads—the newest type of Instagram ad—which can be either photos or videos, and appear occasionally when users flip between stories from profiles they follow
When you’re ready to boost your marketing for dropshipping, Instagram Ads is a creative and exciting platform to try.
YouTube Advertising
You’ve probably heard that YouTube is the second-most popular search engine after its parent company, Google. But did you know it’s also the second-most popular social network, just following Facebook?
YouTube ads require the most money and expertise to utilize effectively. But they can be a powerful way to advertise e-commerce stores.
Ads on YouTube aren’t unlike traditional television ads. Likewise, YouTube users expect a similar level of production quality and entertainment value from them.
How YouTube Advertising Works
Like the PPC system used by its big brother, Google, YouTube Advertising uses a bidding process. However, you’re allowed to pay for each view (known as CPV, or cost-per-view) or for each acquisition (CPA).
When you pay the cost-per-acquisition, YouTube takes the traffic and revenue generated by the ad into account. You can create different types of campaigns depending on your advertising objectives:
- Leads campaigns – you pay when someone joins your mailing list or subscribes to your service
- Traffic campaigns – you pay when a viewer visits your website
- Brand awareness and product consideration campaigns – you pay when someone sees the ad
Once you determine your campaign’s objective and choose the right bidding system, you’ll have five different types of ads you can run.
Bumper, pre-roll, and TrueView ads all play before, during, or after a YouTube video. Bumper and pre-roll ads are usually short and unskippable, while TrueView ads tend to be longer.
Overlay ads are small text-only banners that display at the bottom of YouTube videos. Sponsored cards appear when YouTube users click the “i” icon in the top-right corner of a video, and they’re usually for products mentioned in the video.
YouTuber Advertising is a complex platform for e-commerce marketing, but it can create huge results when used correctly. If this may seem a bit hard to manage, you may opt to hiring a virtual assistant who can do these tedious tasks for you.
Twitter Ads
There are 500 million tweets published each day. But besides being a place to voice your feelings on the current political and social climate, Twitter is a powerful platform for dropshipping advertisements.
Although it’s not usually the first platform people think to use, Twitter Ads is similar to Instagram in that it works well for building brand awareness and community. Unlike Instagram, it doesn’t share Facebook’s Ad Manager, so its advertising system is unique.
How Twitter Ads Works
There are a few different ways to reach dropshipping customers with ads on Twitter. They include the following:
- Sponsored tweets, which let you pay popular Twitter accounts to tweet about your product or store and link back to you
- Twitter cards, which look like tweets featuring an image and call-to-action, but which automatically collect users’ names and email addresses when they click on them
- Campaigns, which are basically collections of ads that use images and videos and run for a predetermined amount of time
- Advanced search, which lets businesses discover topics people are tweeting about so they can join the conversation for organic brand recognition and visibility
For sponsored tweets, you can use platforms like SponsoredTweets.com and PaidPerTweet.com. This helps by increasing your following and boosting brand awareness.
To create entire campaigns to promote your business or products, you’ll use the platform at ads.twitter.com. You can use this system to create powerful Twitter cards, which can dramatically boost your email marketing by automatically gathering contact information from target buyers.
Advanced search works by letting you find specific Twitter conversations based on certain criteria. When you find a conversation that’s getting a lot of attention and relevant to what you sell, you can add value to the conversation and get your name in front of users.
Finally, you can target specific influencer marketing or get Twitter users with large followers and request endorsements in exchange for payment. If your store uses affiliate marketing, this can be an effective method for e-commerce promotion.
Advertise Dropshipping Stores: Where to Go From Here
If there’s one thing you should have learned from this article, it’s that marketing for dropshipping can take many forms. There are dozens of ways to advertise dropshipping stores—we just examined the most popular ones.
Hopefully reading this has given you the confidence on how to start ecommerce business. The most important thing is to identify your target audience carefully. From there, any advertising avenue can be your secret to success.
But above all, don’t give up if your first campaign isn’t profitable. Advertising success takes time, but you’ll get there if you keep trying.
