In order to compete in any industry it helps to know what your competition is offering in the marketplace. As everyone knows Yellow Pages has entered into the online marketing world as they have seen the demand for their printed book in rapid decline.

We have been approached by a number of prospects that have entered into agreements with Yellow Pages that were not happy with the return on investment.  In talking to these prospects the scary part was they did not seem to have a good understanding of what Yellow Pages was offering them.  If asked they would say that it is search engine optimization.  Then I would ask them what terms they were trying to gain ranking for in Google and Yellow Pages could give them certain terms.  I would run a ranking report and the prospect’s site and it was nowhere to be found in the natural (organic) search results.

Then I asked if the prospect received any reporting from Yellow Pages and he said yes.  ”Can you forward that to me?” These are the numbers from the report he sent me:

I looked at this report and I thought “well this cannot be SEO, it has to be Google Pay Per Click advertising“.  So I looked at the search terms that they were told by Yellow Pages that they were targeting and they were:

• Life Insurance
• Home Insurance
• Insurance Brokers Winnipeg Insurance Company
• Life Insurance Winnipeg
• Liability Insurance
• Personal Insurance
• Commercial Insurance
• Business Insurance
• Life Insurance Policy

I did a search for “Commercial Insurance” in Google and sure enough there was the prospect’s pay per click advertisement:

You may say “well that explains the clicks but what about the calls?” I assume the calls are coming from their click to call feature in their listing on yellowpages.ca?  In their Yellow Pages listing if you click on the phone number it comes up with the screen below (where you can fill in your phone number and they will call you):

You may ask “how is Yellow Pages making any money with this client if they are dumping all the spend into Google pay per click advertising?” This is only my speculation, but what I think they are doing is buying clicks for say $.50 per click and buying 500 of them which uses up $250 of the spend then the remaining $250 is revenue for Yellow Pages and covers their costs and at the end of the day ekes out a profit.

After understanding their offering I wanted to outline the top 5 ways our approach to online marketing differs from Yellow Pages:

1. We provide a personalized and customized approach to online marketing.  Online marketing is not as easy as selling printed ads in a directory.  Each customer has different objectives and different conversion points (the action you want the visitor to do on your website).
2. Our customers completely understand the online marketing tactic they are purchasing and the return on investment formula that proves the value of this advertising.
3. We are not vague on how we report leads, Yellow Pages reports emails, calls and clicks as a lead.  In the report above 93% (596/641) of the leads were clicks.  A click or visit to your website is not a lead, in our reporting a lead is a conversion.  A conversion is when a visitor to your website performs an action that captures their name, company, email and phone number so that a sales person can call them.  It does not seem like Yellow Pages reports on conversions, which is the most important element of our return on investment model.  The number of lead conversions we provide is how our customers gage our performance.
4. Our sales associates are much more educated on online marketing when compared to Yellow pages reps.  Their reps are good at selling printed ads but not as experienced as our staff when it comes to explaining search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, social media and website conversion optimization.
5. We are a focused, disciplined company that attracts talented Generation Y professionals that have grown up with Internet and understand the online customer.  We are nimble jet boat that can turn on a dime.  Yellow pages is like the Titanic, it is trying to turn the ship before it hits the ice berg and we all know how that ended.  Big ships do not turn very fast.

If you do not believe the Titanic analogy maybe this will help:

Tags: pay per click, return on investment, ROI, search engine optimization, yellow pages

This entry was posted by John McDonald on Friday, October 28th, 2011 at 9:31 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.