subject: Is Yellow Page Advertising A Waste Of Money? [print this page] For the past 100 years, yellow page advertising has been the first - and sometimes the only - thought when a small business owner considered his or her marketing plan. After all, the yellow pages are everywhere, and consumers have been trained to let their fingers do the walking when they are in need of nearly any product or service.
Now that 75% of Americans have access to the Internet, and more than 80% of them turn to the Internet first when researching a purchase, it's no surprise that the print yellow pages are seeing a decline in sales.
According to a recent report by Borrell Associates, the yellow pages industry can be expected to lose nearly $5 billion in revenue in the next few years. So where does that leave small business owners who rely on the yellow pages as their primary marketing tool?
Yellow page publishers would have you believe the choice is as simple as moving your display ad to their online partner, but what they did right in print might not translate well to the digital world.
Simply trying to recreate print ads on web servers - without any thought of how the American public actually uses the Internet - is like taking a picture of a billboard and using it as a television commercial. They may both be forms of advertising, but they are not interchangeable.
What to Look for when Buying Online Yellow Page Advertising
So should you dis your yellow page provider and rely solely on Google and the strength of your own website? No, but you do need to know how your provider is going to help your business get noticed on the world wide web.
* Make sure your provider allows you to test different ads. What works in print won't necessarily work on the screen, and being locked into an ad for a whole year doesn't make much sense when pixels are so easily rearranged.
* Make sure you are allowed a good link back to your own site. A link with text that says "click here to visit our site" is nearly worthless in terms of improving your site's performance. Ideally you want to have keywords in your link, but barring that you should at least get your company name.
* Find out how your provider advertises their site. It's not enough for them to say they are the biggest and the best. Remaining on top of the Internet search results is a constant battle, and if your yellow page partner isn't doing everything they can to keep their listings at the top, then someone else will. Things like social bookmarking, Twitter, and good SEO mean more than a big name.
* Don't let your provider charge extravagant fees for things like color and larger ad space. Unlike print space, pixels are cheap, typesetting no longer is an issue, and colors are unlimited online.
* Don't let your provider simply scan your print ad and display it online. Better to have no ad at all than to be perceived as having poor quality in everything you do.
The yellow pages aren't dead, but they are changing. Make sure your advertising campaign changes, too, or you'll be left behind.
