Is Drive Social Media a Pyramid Scheme or MLM? Are Its Promises Legit?

If you run a business and need assistance to boost your ROI, you may be searching for a digital marketing company. In that situation, you may have come across Drive Social Media and noticed a mix of good and bad reviews. You might also be asking yourself — is Drive Social Media a pyramid scheme or an MLM?

At Business2Community, we have a team of business experts who have done the research and created this guide to Drive Social, including whether or not it’s a pyramid scheme. Keep reading to learn how the company works and if they can actually help you grow your business.

The Drive Social Business Model

You can find plenty of results if you search “Drive Social Media pyramid scheme”, but the reality is that Drive Social is not a pyramid scheme.

It’s a pretty typical digital marketing company, and while some marketing companies may seem like it, digital marketing companies are not usually pyramid schemes. In fact, digital marketing can be a very efficient way for businesses to grow their client base.

Drive Social Media has made its way into the market as a digital ma rketing agency that focuses on data-driven insights to help companies with social media advertising. By creating ads and compelling content they help to maximize their clients’ ROIs with paid social media campaigns on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Their mission is by no means lofty and vague — it’s direct and to the point: To bring at least three times ROI to all of their partners “by any means necessary”.

The founder and CEO is Josh Sample, and the Chairman is Drew Foley. Their team also includes a large swath of executives and staff – all working as regular contracted employees.

Drive Social Services

The services they offer to companies for business growth include:

• Social media: Using a company’s customers’ data, it builds a marketing campaign that targets potential customers and keeps track of the revenue earned from social media.
• Website building: Drive uses a program called Marketing Milk to quickly create attractive websites for its clients.
• Search engine optimization: It has SEO specialists on the team to ensure its clients’ websites appear at the top of search engine results.
• Pay per click: Drive tests top keywords and longtail keywords to help your customers find you on Google.
• Branding: It has a team of brand strategy specialists who figure out the best way for a company’s brand to reflect the values they care about.
• Video marketers: It uses video marketing for a diverse range of social media content.
• Email marketing: It creates comprehensive emailing lists so that companies can keep their customers engaged long after they’ve purchased products or services.

Working for Drive Social

On Glassdoor, Drive Social Media has a rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars. 57% of reviews were 5 stars, 6% were 4 stars, 9% were 3 stars, 8% were 2 stars, and 20% were 1 star.

On Indeed.com, Drive Social has a 4.5-star rating, with 4.4 stars for work-life balance, and many employees stated that there were plenty of opportunities to grow, learn, and advance their careers.

What It’s Like to Partner with Drive Social

What can you expect if you choose to hire the digital marketing services of Drive Social?

There is a wide range of customer reviews online, some of them ecstatic with the results it helped them achieve, while others are left feeling scammed.

The following review from iTRate shows a happy client’s 5-star review, highlighting good communication and quality media.

However, there are also various complaints from people who say they receive incessant calls from the company, one such review saying they are “scammy and over-represent their affiliations”.

The following news report also calls into question whether this digital marketing company does have some scam-like qualities. It details how various local businesses in St. Louis, Missouri, wanted to grow their brands and trusted Drive Social to help them do it.

Business owner Thomas Bledsoe hired the digital marketing company, saying that it had a good sales pitch, and then signed a contract with it. He said Drive Social made all sorts of promises, but he ended up with just one lead from working with it. In the end, he was paying Drive more than he was making.

Another local business owner, Barbara Chappuis, was not able to make all of her payments to Drive per the contract she signed. That’s because there was no return on her investment, so her funds ran out while she was still trying to pay for the company’s help. Drive then sued Barbara’s company, settling out of court.

Is Drive Social an MLM?

We’ve analyzed the business model of Drive social and we’ve checked with the Better Business Bureau. After doing so, we can safely conclude that the Drive Social digital marketing agency is not a multi-level marketing business.

The reason why some people get the feeling Drive Social is a pyramid scheme or an MLM is because of their sometimes aggressive approach to getting new clients and recruiting new employees.

It is a legitimate digital marketing agency that offers its services to customers to help grow their business. Unlike pyramid schemes and MLMs, it makes its money through the costs of these services, and the people who work there are regular contracted employees.

This is not to say that social media pyramid schemes don’t exist. Some things to keep an eye out for when trying to decide if a social media digital marketing company is a pyramid scheme or not include:

• Fast money: If a company promises quick, easy money, you should ALWAYS question whether they are legitimate or not and avoid clicking unknown links. Phrases like “get rich quick” are definite red flags.
• Big earnings: Similarly, if you are promised extremely high returns, proceed with caution. Pyramid schemes are notorious for exaggerating how much they earn, whereas legitimate businesses will be realistic about income expectations.

Why Drive Social isn’t an MLM

Drive isn’t a pyramid scheme, as they make their money selling actual products and services. A pyramid scheme involves making money by recruiting new members who have to pay a fee to join. Drive is also not an MLM; let’s take a closer look at how the Drive Social business model compares to a typical MLM.

What is Multilevel Marketing?

This is a marketing strategy that direct sales companies use to sell products and services. A direct sales company uses its members to sell and promote products directly to the consumer. Another crucial part of a member’s job in an MLM is to recruit new members to work under them. The person who recruits new members then benefits by earning a percentage on the sales made by their recruits. These recruits form what is known as a downline.

Some examples of companies using the multilevel marketing model include Primerica and Mary Kay.

The Drive Social Business Model vs an MLM

To verify that Drive Social is not an MLM, let’s directly compare their business models.

MLM Business Model

The MLM business model is held up by the following pillars:

• Revenue generation: An MLM focuses on the direct selling of products or services. However, this isn’t usually the primary income source for sellers. The primary income is from recruiting new members into the organization to become part of their downline. When a recruit sells products, the person who recruited them earns a commission from the sales, creating a structure that looks like that of a pyramid scheme (because it’s very similar to one), but that in many cases is technically legal.
• Earnings structure: In an MLM, your position in the hierarchy of the company dictates how much you earn. If you are higher up — meaning you joined earlier (and were successful at recruiting) — then you’ll have more levels of recruits below you and you can earn more from the sales of those recruits. That’s why members of MLMs focus so much on recruitment.
• Not customer-centric: In a typical business, the customer is the focus. All marketing efforts are directed towards reaching, engaging and retaining customers, so the business can continue to grow. However, in an MLM, the emphasis is on recruiting members instead of keeping customers happy. The focus is on recruiting members, again, because the more recruits you have; the greater your income potential.
• High risk: MLMs often have high turnover rates, with members disengaging because they don’t earn enough for the work they put in. Sellers find themselves in a situation where, thanks to the emphasis put on recruitment, the market is saturated with other sellers just like them, so there is low demand for the product. Sellers also are strongly encouraged to buy large amounts of inventory from the company, and in the end are not able to sell it. This means that a vast majority of MLM sellers end up losing money and some even end up in debt.

Drive Social Business Model

In contrast, Drive Social functions as a typical digital marketing company:

• Revenue generation: Drive Social earns money by providing digital marketing services to their clients. These services include content creation, AI-driven data analysis, social media strategy, and ROI tracking. Thus their primary earnings (if not all) come from an exchange of actual services, whereas with an MLM the primary income source is recruitment.
• Earnings structure: Drive’s income comes from the content and services that they provide to their clients. Their business model, like most businesses, is client-centric. If it doesn’t deliver the measurable results it promises, such as ROI, brand visibility, and growth, its clients aren’t happy. Since Drive gets money from clients, this would mean a collapse of the business.
• Customer focus: Unlike an MLM, where recruitment is the focus, instead of the customer, with Drive the focus is keeping their customers happy with the services they provide. The success of the company depends entirely on client satisfaction and retention.
• Sustainability and scalability: The model of Drive Social is sustainable because it provides value to its clients in the form of services clients need. When clients are satisfied, this creates the opportunity for stability for the company as well as business growth.

The main difference between Drive Social and an MLM are the primary sources of revenue and the focus of each type of business. MLMs emphasize recruitment over customer satisfaction while Drive must keep its customers satisfied to be sustainable and grow.

The value proposition with Drive is the same as other traditional service-based business models – it offers professional, specialized services. Drive’s earnings do not depend on recruitment or a hierarchical earnings structure.

Is Drive Social Safe and Legit?

While Drive Social does appear to be a legitimate company, there are some red flags you may want to consider before hiring them to boost your company’s ROI.

The primary concern is their promise to “bring a minimum of three times return on investment to every single partner, by any means necessary” which sounds a lot like the overpromising made by pyramid schemes and MLMs.

It is important to keep in mind that social media marketing isn’t a sure thing, and it’s probably not very responsible for Drive to claim that they will go to any means possible to get you a 3-time return on your investment. It calls into question whether the company uses black- or grey-hat SEO or social media techniques that could get your business into trouble with the platforms you use.

Smaller local businesses should beware of over-confident sales pitches from large digital marketing firms like Drive Social. These businesses often make unrealistic promises, especially to companies that don’t have big name recognition.

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