It amazes me how all things evolve. It used to be if you wanted to target locally you had to be in the yellow pages. The yellow pages book was where everyone looked. Similarly if you had to look up someone’s home phone number you looked in the White pages book. Well I am not sure about you but I have not seen either of these books for a while. I think they may be downstairs with a little dust and holding my office door open. The reality is if you want to look for information on a local company, you are likely going to search on Google long before you bring out the yellow book. Similarly, the white pages are at your finger tips online as well, much easier than pulling out the white book.
Companies that want to target locally can no longer just put an ad in the yellow pages and see the leads come in, a large number of customers that I have talked to say that they are reducing their advertisements or pulling from the yellow pages book altogether. These clients realize that prospects looking for their company locally are doing a local search online. The new age of advertising locally consists of local search engine optimization (i.e. optimizing for plumbing Winnipeg) and local pay per click advertising (using Google sponsored ads to target local searches) and finally local map results optimization. There are basic items we can do to help local businesses target their prospects. The Internet is not all about global anymore, the search engines have made great improvements to ensure local search is top priority.
One last interesting item about yellow pages advertising is those leads that do come from yellow pages book advertising tend to be less up with technology and specifically the Internet. We do not do any yellow page book advertising anymore but when we did we knew if a lead came from the yellow pages book, as they definitely knew less about websites and online marketing than a prospect that came from a Google search.
Once again, thanks for listening.
