The Yellow Pages works amazingly well for some industries and others wonder why they bother.
When we first started out in business, the advice we received was to take out the smallest ad possible. We did and it more than paid for itself, which was great.But the Yellow Pages falls short in the following areas:
- unless you take out an ad in every region (bank account says ouch), you’re only exposed to the local market
- you are limited to a certain size ad
- once your ad is printed you can’t change it
- you have to pay for a new ad every year
- and your ad is usually surrounded by about 50 ads for your competitors!
You get much more ‘Bang for your Buck’ out of websites:
- your target market becomes global
- your whole website is an ad, promotion, feature
- you can update a content managed website whenever you like at no extra cost
- if it’s built well it will grow with your business and last for many years.
Get smart about how you spend your marketing dollar and invest in a website.
That’s right. It is way better to invest time and energy on getting the first position in Google for your chosen keywords. This is because of what people said (in our latest survey) about where they go if they are looking for information:
Q1. How often do you use the print version of the Yellow Pages?
7.69% use it regularly
23.08% once a month
15.38% once a year
53.85% never use it
Q2. How do you search for products and services you’re looking for?
92.86% use Google.com
7.14% use Yellow Pages
That leaves Google as the winner. What do you think these Yellow Pages guys can do to win their advertisers back?
Hi David. Thanks for the great feedback. Where did you conduct the survey? Can you post a link to the full results?
Cheers
Matt
Hi Mogul,
Here’s the link:
http://www.melbourneseoservices.com/google-vs-yellow-pages/
We had it in Melbourne. You can check out the video that we made to document that survey.
Cheers,
Dave