Advertising In The Yellow Pages

* Yellow Pages is not strictly alphabetical, it’s a competitive listing. The ‘No.1’ position goes to the highest bidder, with the earliest application. Your prospect/customer has to troll through pages of your competitors advertising just to find you.

* You’re encouraging people to comparison shop. Now that they’ve gone to the trouble of pulling out the phone book, it’s not that much more trouble to just do a quick ‘call around’ and find out who has the best price. You just lost your advantage.

* You risk that their attention will be drawn to someone else. How’s your little 5 line ad going to look next to a half-page full colour ad of your competitor? I guess you could pay a little more for bold typeface, and a border… but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re still buried amongst 15 pages of competitors.

* It’s a confusing place for most people. MANY consumers don’t understand how the businesses are organised within the Yellow Pages directory. It seems like a haphazard mess- they might just find it too hard and give up.

If you think about the above, how lucrative is it really to advertise in the Yellow Pages? Stop and think for a few moments about your ideal clients and the clients that you already have. Are they or did they “shop” through the Yellow Pages? How did these clients come to you? Chances are they came through solid networking, word of mouth referrals or your personal website.

What do you think? Is it worth it to you?

Becki