I get asked a lot by law firms about "What should we do with our Yellow Pages adverts?". I've even sat in with a client whilst Yell tried to tell them how great the book was (not at holding up computer monitors) and how they should do more ads, bigger ads, and full colour ads. All of which was going to cost MORE than they spent the previous year.
Oh, that and how great their online site was and how much traffic they were sending to my client's website. No matter that our stats from Google Analytics bore no resemblance to their stats i.e. Google Analytics was lower!
Anyway, in this week's Marketing Magazine there's a great article by Amanda Andrews the media editor at The Daily Telegraph titled "Yell's Structural Flaws". It's well worth a read if you want to understand more about how Yell's business is suffering in the current climate and the challenges they face going from print to online.
We have one client who over the last two years have dropped ALL their Yellow Pages advertising. They were pretty methodical about it. In the year before they dropped the ads they got REALLY good at tracking source of enquiry. Then they cut their Yellow Pages book advertising by 50%, yes a small drop in enquiries from that source but not a marked drop and more importantly no overall effect on revenue OR profits. In the second year they dropped the other 50% and again, no effect. Now all they have is the "free line entry" and that's it.
This backs up what I've long felt about Yellow Pages, but could never prove. If a client is looking for you by name, then they will scroll their finger up and down the alphabetical text listing and find you that way, NOT randomly flip through the display adverts.
So, what are you going to do about your Yellow Pages ads in 2010? As they used to say on Blind Date....."The decision is yours!".