Small business owners. Have you found your Phone book advertising dollars well spent?

I just committed to $2,400. bill for next year for phone book advertising. Would like to hear others experience...

We're in a community of less than 60k. I don't know if a traffic to our website would matter?

Cancel your contract if you can.

The yellowbook is the least effective form of advertsiing on the entire planet. It is a book that is closed 99.9% of the time..and that is a real statistic. It is also the most expensive. The reason? ...They have top notch salespeople.

You DO need to be LISTED in the yellowbook, but you do not need to carry an advertisiment. Your money is better spent on media that can readh your aufience every day, such as direct mail, radio, and TV. The idea is to make sure your potential customers never have to go to the yellowbook to solve their problem...if they do...your marketing is failing.

Here are some facts to consider.

research companies have determined thru surveys that only 76% of adults have looked in the yellowpages in the last 30 days.

78% of people who do go to the yellowpages are actually "price shopping" ...which means, the guys with the smaller ads are getting just as mutch response and the big ad guy.

It has also been proven that black and white ads in the book pull equally as well as full color ads. It is the ads with catchy. meaningful headlines that outpull everything else.

ads at the beggining of a category get seen last in actuality, simply because the book is so thick, that people must hold it in a manner where they flip it from Z to A.

Yellow pageses sales people are very clever and convincing, but I assure you, the book is a collossal waste of money. I have clients who have gone down to very tiny box ads, and simple listings, and theyve seen no drop in effectiveness. In all cases, these people have been able to increase their overall marketing effectiveness with all the new money they gained, which was previously being sucked into the yellowbook.

Hopefully you can re-negotiate your ad, and place something smaller.

I wish you great success in the future.

Doran P

No. It is not well spent.

Fewer and fewer people refer to phone books.
I spent less than $1,000.00 a year to drive a traffic
to my website getting more customers than I can
handle. Beside that I can change the information
as I see fit with the seasons, which can't be done
with the phone book or any other printed material.

P.S.

I live in the community of less than 35 thousand refusing to depend on local clientele only and the state of our country's economy. Economy is GLOBAL. I am now getting orders from as far as Montreal, Sacramento, Vancouver, San Diego, Boston, New Orleans and now from France, adding products and services that are in demand and people want. There is no business that could not do the same. What type of business are you in?

P.P.S.
Excellent point from Mr. Durant! Certain Amberbooks did excellent work in TV commercials for a long time convincing everybody to let their fingers do the walking --- and they did. They still do however they do the walking on a keyboard now.