Recently a friend that works in the marketing department for a private & public works construction company asked me my thoughts on advertising in the yellow pages.
This way my response:
Our firm believes Yellow Pages advertising is a waste of money for all industries, especially the A/E/C industry. It is good to stay listed so people looking for your phone number can easily find you in the antiquated book or online in their directory, but not much more is needed. I am amazed at how much money both the phone book & newspaper charges even though their reach drops each year.
For the construction industry, I truly believe in building relationships though traditional networking and being found online with a solid web presence is a must.
In this competitive industry where every dollar is carefully spent, more and more companies are pulling their phone book advertising budgets and moving them to other avenues such as social media, website design & SEO.
Have you pulled your phone book advertising? Does it still work for your company? Where are you reallocating your advertising dollars?
3 Comments
I agree that advertising dollars are not best spent in this arena.
After receiving just one validated lead from their service over an 18 month period, we did pull our advertising from the Yellow Pages this past year. We then allocated that money into our website, incorporating SEO- and blog-friendly design to encourage organic search results. We’ve also created a mobile site, which I believe is reflective of how people are and will be searching for online results.
Though garnering organic results is not a swift process, I do believe users find them more trustworthy then those results marketing towards them via Yellow Pages. Anyone else?
It’s almost amazing that this is a conversation people still have to have. You’re right that there are probably people out there for whom the phone book is still a tool they use, but their numbers are dwindling every year. Some jurisdictions are even starting to ban telephone books! I agree that no A/E/C company should be spending its money on advertising in these anymore. Those valuable dollars can be put to better use in any number of other places.
Large waste of time and money… Don’t get scammed into a phonebook ad, because the payoff is worthless ..