Let your feet do the walking
I will admit that the Brisbane A-K makes for an excellent tray table for TV dinners however when I need to find a service or product, I no longer have the desire to flick through those too thin pages and be covered in easily transferable black ink. It seems the good people of Australia agree .
Once I delved into the world of marketing, I encountered their sales team. Please read on for what I like to call…THE WHINGE….
Firstly, you never hear from Yellow Pages unless they want your money again (I would never deign to call it selling as they do little more than send you an invoice, where the price has gone up yet again). They also give you very short deadlines with which to make these decisions. With no time for changes you are left with the same mind numbingly difficult to find advert amongst two hundred plus other equally repetitive adverts.
Secondly, your rep will give you the only statistics you will ever see from them at the re-sign and believe me ….you are resigned by this stage in the process. These are the traffic stats from your online ad which shows a whopping thirty thousand views. This MUST be good!
A colleague told me of how she allocated a specific phone number to her Yellow Pages ad to track the phone calls. Two….in one year….both from the sales rep from Yellow Pages.
What’s the point if thirty thousand people saw your ad if they didn’t contact you?
If your customers don’t use YP to search and you are not receiving the kind of service you deserve for the money you are spending…. let your feet do the walking.
Feel free to let me know if you agree or tell me about how Yellow Pages works for your business.
Thanks for reading,
Leona
The thing I love about Yellow Pages is how they purchase traffic for their website. Just seems to be a very inefficient way to set up an adwords account for most of the small businesses in there. Not to mention providing direct competition on product terms for their own clients.
Have you considered TrueLocal as an alternative http://www.truelocal.com.au – it seems to be quite good and ranks well I believe with Google. I have just listed with them. You can dip your toe in the water with a free listing.
Thanks Leona. My father-in-law has been bemoaning the ever increasing cost of Yellow Pages for his small business for sometime now. I have forwarded this posting to him for a read.
If people are not using the physical Yellow Pages then how are they finding any YP customer? It can’t be through their site which has always been (IMHO) a terrible online search engine, producing results not too dissimilar in value to that of sacrificing a chicken in a bizarre voodoo ritual!
At least with the voodoo, you still get the left over chicken…
I really like your analogy
I completely agree. I believe small business will get more value if they put the money they were going to spend on Yellow Pages into a high interest savings account for a year. 
That and sacrificing chickens…
I sold for YP a long time ago, and I can assure you it was excellent value- in its day! Business in Qld and NSW saw great results and quantifiable profits. There were no colour ads, the sizes were restricted and…most importantly…there was no competition for directional advertising. Canberra had one radio station, one newspaper and one phone directory, Brisbane was not much different. YP was how the public found your business. It was also managed by a very professional US company which ensured quality and customer service. In 2010 this product is trading on a vague memory of former glory: its pricing, organisation and value for money bear little relationship to business needs today. SB really has to think about its market place and target. The best way I have found is mining your own client base with direct mail!
Reaching out and reminding your customers why they purchased with you is an often overlooked resource. We spend so much of our time trying to grow our business with new clients; we sometimes forget those we already have a relationship with.