Nothing has changed to slow the Yellow Pages continued slide into oblivion.
However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of their demise are premature.
It’s true that Idearc, the company that handles the Verizon Yellow Pages books (and the online SuperPages.com), filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
It’s also true that at the margins, Yellow Pages are less and less viable. More and more of our clients are yanking their ads, reducing their size or going in fewer books.
Nevertheless, there is still a lot of business being generated by Yellow Pages listings.
Any company that does business in a local area should be seriously considering this marketing channel.
A lot of the reason for poor response is lousy ads. Don’t let the Yellow Pages company design your ad. If their people were talented they wouldn’t be working for the Yellow Pages companies. Spend the few hundred bucks to get a design that really works.
When we are going to do a YP ad design, one of the first things we do is look at last year’s book, at the section their ad will go in, to see what their competitors are doing. Then we design a distinctive ad that stands out by color and imagery from others in their category.
Unless it is a really tiny ad, it should have people in it. The eye is drawn to images of people.
The next big thing is a headline that stops people. Of course there is a great deal to writing a good headline.
There’s more, but if you get those points in your ad, you’ll be ahead of 90% of your competitor’s ads.