Is it time to stop advertising in the Yellow Pages?

[jft135]

How much money are you throwing at it on a monthly basis?

~$1000/mo including the 20% management fee. I'm probably going to drop it by ~$400/mo once I roll out the new website to pay for organic SEO work.

Make sure that if you put any kind of money into adwords (or marketing in general) that you have a way to track conversions, otherwise you might as well just burn your money or better yet, mail it to me. Having a pro manage it is ideal, but most companies want a minimum $500/mo commitment before they'll work with you. Adwords express worked pretty well for us until we hit that point.

 

[ElementalWindX]

Yea I wondered if you were doing it yourself lol. It can be cumbersome to manage. I was doing $300~/mo and saw 0 returns sadly. But I'm also in a very small town, and the next town over has a much larger IT company hogging adwords like they are the only ones allowed to use it haha.

 

[jft135]

Yea I wondered if you were doing it yourself lol. It can be cumbersome to manage. I was doing $300~/mo and saw 0 returns sadly. But I'm also in a very small town, and the next town over has a much larger IT company hogging adwords like they are the only ones allowed to use it haha.

You really have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning it to get good results, and every market is different. What works for us won't necessarily work for you.

 

[GTP]

~$1000/mo including the 20% management fee

Jeeezus!!! I can pay off a house for that!
I would rather do that than give it to Google!

 

[jft135]

Jeeezus!!! I can pay off a house for that!
I would rather do that than give it to Google!

Like I said, it depends a lot on your local market. That $1000 brings in $10-15k in revenue each month, so it's totally worth it.

 

[Markverhyden]

Careful with the carte blanche trashing of Yellow Pages (the book). They are still used by some of the oldest generations which is exactly a target market due to the illiteracy with PCs that that generation has. I don't advertise in the YP but the demographics reached may be good for some.

I've got someone I know who has a bunch of elderly customers and they all came from the local YP. But that was years ago.

Back in it's day YP was the go to place. But when the Internet really started blossoming they failed to adapt, like many other print related businesses. In the business school world this lesson is usually taught by studying the Bud/Bud Light product launch. Back in those days it was considered anathema for a company to launch a product that might cannibalize an existing product, especially in the beverage market. When Tab, a US diet soda, was introduced in 1963 Coca Cola, the king of soft drinks, held off for some 20 years before introducing Diet Coke.

Some marketing people convinced management at Anheuser-Busch to launch Bud Light, arguing the net result will be an over all increase in market share for A-B. And that's what happened.

 

[timeshifter]

considered anathema for a company to launch a product that might cannibalize an existing product

I remember not too long ago when the iPod Mini was the best selling iPod ever. Then Apple discontinued it and replaced it with a new design.