A recent Huffington Post entry literally nails what we’ve been saying in marketing for some time now: phonebook advertising and yellow page advertising is essentially a dead horse. Spending hundreds of dollars a month PER PHONEBOOK for an advertisement that is exclusive to your local market is, in today’s internet driven society, ludicrous.
The phonebook companies are desperately trying to sell you phonebook advertising (yellow page advertising) and bundling it with other services to make it seem more valuable but you need to ask yourself: “when is the last time I opened the yellow pages?” Even the “free listing” on the phonebook companies’ websites may seem valuable but, in reality, is a thinly disguised plea for your marketing dollar. Compete.com released the March 2010 listing of the top 50 (that’s fifty, 5-0) websites worldwide and neither yellowpages.com, superpages.com, nor any other phonebook listing website was included on the list. That’s right folks; Target.com gets more traffic than ANY form of phonebook website.
OK OK, please don’t take my “rant” the wrong way, if your business serves a local market (particularly B2C) then you must be listed (free listing is fine) because there is still a portion of your demographic that “let’s their fingers to the walking” – this demographic is shrinking quickly but the intent of these people is far too great to ignore them. So maximize your advertising dollar by going where the people are, invest in search engine optimization, social media (particularly Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) and stop spending on legacy methods if you can.
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