My brother in law works in direct marketing (direct mailing particularly) and has done for fifteen years.
He is an expert in this and can tell you the ins and outs of data purchasing, sifting and organising names for mail outs, telephone contact, emails; all sorts of contacts to sell medical products through direct marketing.
The essence of direct marketing is scale. It is all a numbers game because they work on something like a 0.2% conversion rate. That means that 98.8 of every 100 letters sent gets put in the bin and is of no value.
That's ok if you're fine with that, if you're fine with wastage and fine with the problems that creates dealing with the lowest common denominator. That is the truth about direct marketing.
This can be extrapolated out to social media: if you take David Beckham's Facebook page it has approximately 33 million likes. Adding the 0.2% conversion for direct marketing, each time people see a new pair of David Beckham Adidas trainers on his Facebook page it probably sells 66,000 pairs of trainers. He also has 55 million Twitter followers (many of those are the same people obviously)
The scalability in David Beckham direct marketing is clearly different to the scalability in Colin Campbell direct marketing on a Facebook page with a couple of hundred. If you're a dental practice working on a 250 or even 1000 you might get a contact from 2 people every time you post on Facebook. The work involved in getting 1000 Facebook likes and maintaining those likes by the provision of decent content and attracting attention is enormous. It is important to figure out whether that is worth the 2 contacts and if they are good enough.
Continually in dentistry we pretend to ourselves that we're like a corporate "apple does it like this" or "adidas does it like that". We are nowhere near this and in fact, when corporates come to dentistry it doesn't look like that.
The next time you're planning to spend hours on your 'social media campaign' for your practice make sure that you are clear on the return on investment. The amount of time and money you spend vs the amount of patients who return.
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