Recently, a local small business owner told me that he spent nearly $4,000 per month to advertise in directories such as the YellowPages and YellowBook. His annual contract included some online advertising, as well as about $400/month in pay-per-click ads. He said he got tons of reports but when we really sat down and reviewed them, he wasn’t getting much in results in the way of website traffic, off-page search engine optimization or phone calls to the separate numbers they had set up for him.

And when we looked at his pay-per-click ads, the traffic wasn’t going to his site — it was going to a replication of his site on one of their servers. Other than the information they were reporting to him, he didn’t have access to any kind of detailed analytics on these efforts, like he would have with Google, even though he has Google Analytics on his website.

I just read that phone directory advertising equates to $13 billion dollars annually.

And what I’ve heard from small business owners is that the sales folks are selling aggressively and doing everything they can to upsell them from previous year’s contract, which is how they make their commissions.  It’s unfortunate, because small business owners often get locked in to a contractual agreement that often doesn’t make the most sense for them if you look at the bigger picture of their overall online and offline marketing budget and plan.

Many local small businesses still should have basic listings in the printed directories, especially if they’re appealing to an older demographic. But gone are the days that it makes sense to take out a full-page ad in a phone directory.  Eventually, over the next few years, I’m guessing that the $13 billion dollar industry will shrink.  But, for now, many small business owners are still not knowledgable enough about what the phone directories are selling that they get sold a service that sounds good but is really less effective in the long run. 

Here are three reasons why we think small business owners should re-evaluate and reconsider their phone directory advertising spend:

1. Fewer People Use Printed Phone Directories. With the increased usage of computers especially in the form of laptops and iPads, as well as smart phones like iPhones and Androids with geo-location services, fewer people have a need to grab a paper directory to find a business product or service, a phone number and an address.   For advertising to be effective, businesses have to be where people are spending their time.  And very few people are spending much time with their phone book!  Facebook, yes.  Phone book, no.

2.  Consider Better Options for Your Advertising Dollars.  The business owner that I mentioned to you at the beginning of this post didn’t realize that he had very little control over what was being done for him.  He didn’t realize that once he stopped paying, that he had no online history of the PPC advertising.  He didn’t realize that none of the web traffic actually went to his site like he thought it was.  He didn’t realize that Google Analytics as well as the Google Adwords and Google Places accounts could have been integrated but weren’t even being used.  Today, there are so many better options – both short- and long-term – that he could have considered such as SEO and better SEM.  Heck, for $4,000 a month, he could have even considered advertising on TV (something he never thought he could afford).

3.  Focus on Building Relationships, drawing people to you rather than have your ad sit in a book on someone’s shelf in hopes that they’ ll find you one day.  There are people looking for your business and products or services every single day – and people who will refer others to you if you remind them and if you reach out and help other people and other businesses.  It’s not all about selling.  It’s about connecting and engaging with your target audience, and paid advertising – especially in phone directories – just can’t do that like social media and organic search methods including effective blogging and content management.

So what should you do instead?

1.  Well, first, don’t eliminate your phone directory listings altogether.  If you’ve always maintained a presence there, then reduce your spending by reducing the ad size.  And always keep your online listing up-to-date.  For example, AT&T’s Yellow Pages will allow businesses to maintain a free and fairly detailed listing as long as you update it annually.  Others like SuperPages.com are similar but don’t require annual updates.  Yellowbook seems to want a bit more control with their sales force but you can still get a free listing if you don’t want to pay for one.

2.  Make sure that the basics are covered.   Create and/or update your other online directory listings like Google Places, Bing, and Yahoo and any local directories like Richmond.com.  Fill them out completely and add photos and/or videos if they let you do that at no charge.  And be sure to include your website URL!  Keep a list of them in a spreadsheet so that you don’t forget your log in information and passwords, or print out the sign-up emails and keep them handy.  Also, be sure you’re talking to your web developer about optimizing your website for appropriate keywords and make sure you have access to your Google Analytics account.  Get familiar with the tools you probably already have in place – review results at least monthly.

3.  Evaluate the status of your current online marketing efforts.  If you haven’t updated your website in a few years, or if you’re not active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or if you haven’t even considered whether it makes sense to begin blogging, then evaluate those marketing efforts as they’ll provide you with better traction in the long run.  Also, be sure you have both an on-site and off-site SEO effort in place and that you know your best keywords, particularly long-tail keywords that might get less hits but better conversion for you.   The idea is to do the work that will get your OWN website up in the search engine rankings – not to help the directories push yours off the first page.  This takes commitment but a lot could have been accomplished with less than 25% of the $4,000/month budget my small business owner was spending on phone book directory advertising!

In addition, test and run your own PPC campaigns, even if you start with just Google Adwords.  If you run your own campaign, you can learn a lot more and know what questions to ask if and when you feel you want someone else to run them for you.  Even if the small business owner spends just $300/month or $10 day on Google Adwords, you’ll at least get a feel for your better performing keywords.

Need more help?

If you’re a small business owner and would like a free evaluation of your online marketing efforts and in how you can get more traction from your overall marketing expenditure, then give us a call at 804.777.9940.  We’ll be happy to talk to you in person, by phone or webinar.

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