Marketing Your Business: Website or Yellow Pages?
Marketing your Business: Should you invest in your website or the Yellow Pages?
How much do you spend on Yellow Pages advertising each year? More important, are you getting your money?s worth?
If
you are not reviewing your Yellow Pages ad results on a regular basis,
you may be tossing hard-earned dollars down the drain. Yellow Pages ads
have a number of built-in limitations that may reduce the effectiveness
of your advertising dollar and restrict your ability to reach new
patients.
These limitations include:
- High cost. Depending on its size and location, a
Yellow Pages ad can cost up to $20,000 per year. And you can easily
spend another $5,000 designing a customized ad. At those rates, it
takes a lot of customers just to break even on the cost of the ad.
Plus, studies show that the phone directory companies continue to raise
their fees far beyond current inflation rates.
- Cluttered media. You spend a lot of money to
design and place your ad, and where do you end up? Depending on the
size of your market, right next to dozens, perhaps even hundreds of
companies all competing for your next customer.
- Lack of flexibility. In today?s mass-media world,
it takes a variety of messages to reach your audience and motivate them
to contact you. Yet, once your Yellow Pages ad goes into the directory,
that?s it. You can?t make any changes for a full 12 months.
- Difficult to test. Because of their inflexibility,
Yellow Pages ads don?t allow you to test different marketing
approaches. Once you place an ad, you have to wait a year to test a new
headline or message. And unless a patient says they found you through
the phone directory, you have no way of knowing the effectiveness of
your ad.
- Reach the wrong market. Yellow Pages ads tend to
attract only elderly and non-internet savvy. While these people can
augment your regular clientele, they?re not the kind of customers upon
which you can build a healthy, growing business.
With the Yellow Pages, it depends entirely on what you?re
advertising. If I owned a shoe store that specialized in orthopedics, I
would take out a large full page ad. The elderly who are in need of
orthopedics still use this directory. It?s all about your demographic.
There are several good reasons to advertise in the Yellow Pages, but
it?s nowhere near as valuable as it once was. All advertising
(especially print) is undergoing a major revolution.
Search engines
have taken over as the method of finding products and services. That
aside, there is also a tangible SEO benefit to having your website
linked in directories like this. However, the cost of the link is most
often not worth the investment. If you wish to use Yellow Pages, then
try it once. Use a unique phone number and a unique website. Negotiate
very hard with the sales representative. They often charge ten times
more than the fair market price on print advertising.
Don?t get
scammed! And carefully monitor the responses you receive.
Otherwise you
are best to utilize the current major marketing method of SEO and
Social Media. Even late adopters such as the elderly are catching on to
this. The simplicity of looking things up via Google and Bing have
replaced the cumbersome task of thumbing through a yellow pages book.
And more and more people are becoming aware of what directories really
are. A place to pay for advertising. And people want to know what?s
fair information, not what some company has paid to make you believe!
Improve your marketing and advertising
Contact us at 206.384.4909 or through our web contact form here
if you would like to learn more about the advantages of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Leave the yellow dinosaur (yellow
pages) in the past.