In St. Louis, every March and October the Yellow Pages (YP) are delivered to the homes and businesses across the area. These new phone books replace the ones delivered the year prior. Delivery dates may be the same across the country, I’m not sure.
Many of you know that I do some web work on an Army contract several days a week in the Federal Center in downtown St. Louis. Well, I make it a point to watch for the new phone books, which showed up around March 8th this year. Because of the large amount of worker bees here (about 250), they wheel the phone books in on pallets and put them in the hallway. Then the worker bees can just come by and grab a new book (and put their old one in a recycle bin).
This year, I kept tabs on the amount of phone books. Over the period of 38 days, about 16 phone books were taken from the pallet of 200.
Sixteen books.
Just for giggles, I visited a few of the other floors in the building to see how many phone books were still sitting around. Every floor (except for the IRS area) had about the same amount of books remaining on their pallets.
They finally wheeled them out yesterday. I hope they went to a recycling center somewhere.
Mr. Small Business owner, what does this tell you about the future of Yellow Page advertising? Are you still spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on YP ads? Your audience is shrinking, and your money is being wasted.
I have a few clients who are ahead of the curve when it comes to Internet Marketing. They recognized the poor use of their marketing budgets with YP and have since scaled back their spending on these sources, and have put that money into building their online presence through blogging and link building. They are reaping huge harvests on their well-placed seeds.
I’m not saying to drop your YP ad. In fact, I think it’s still a viable source of traffic, particularly if your target audience is over the age of 50. But I am saying don’t put so much money into it any more. A simple ad with your company name, phone number and URL is all you need.
Shameless Plug: Quit wasting money on dying forms of marketing/advertising. Put that money into hiring someone (like me) that will help your business continue to grow and thrive. Create a presence and a following online, provide outstanding customer service, and the customers will come.
