Yellow Page Advertising

Most of what we do at Rainman.com is advertising for your site. Sure, we host your mail and put useful information on the internet, but when it comes down to it we are really one wing of your marketing strategy. Maybe you've added us as part of your marketing team, and you want to know how we feel you should adjust your other strategies to work with what we do. In article let's look at one facet of your advertising: your yellow page ad.

Your marketing -should- be a strategy. Those of you have been doing business for a while know this is a balancing act: spend too much and you're wasting cash, spend to little and no one knows you're there. Buy too many radio commercials on a top-40 radio station, and your target demographic of boomer males isn't going to hear your message.

And, of course, it is very difficult to measure the effects of advertising. Even on the web, we can count chow many times someone searched for your site and found it, but we can't tell the difference between a customer who actually came to your business and an old boyfriend finding your site on google.

So a lot of us just kind of buy and pray, and then guesstimate the effects of an advertising campaign.

While it might seem like we're just offering information via the web and social networking, the whole point of having a web presence is marketing. The exact same thing is true with Yellow-page ads: they seem like they are a directory of helpful information, but really they are ads for your business.

It really wouldn't be appropriate for us to give you direct advice, but we do have a couple of pro/cons to yellow pages advertising to help guide you in your thinking.

There are advantages to the yellow pages:

• They are print media: not everyone is on the web, fewer older folks do their shopping on the web, and not everyone always have access to the web. So yellow page ads are good for reaching folks who won't or can't be looking for your business on their computer or cellphone.
• They are established: they have been doing business a long time and have a good grasp on professional presentation. It is very easy to have a professional looking ad. Conversely, I have seen a lot of the existing sites of people coming onto our services, and it is very easy to have a dated and unprofessional looking web-presence.
• They are local: one of the best things about yellow page ads is that you know the advertisers are local. This is perhaps the single best recommendation for that advertising: generating locally relevant results for brick-and-mortar businesses is one of our primary goals as web advertisers, and is almost automatic for yellow page ads.

However, there are a lot of disadvantages:

• They are expensive: since they are put out in a very labor intensive way, specifically by delivering them in the form of giant, paper advertising flyers they charge a premium for their ad space.
• They are information-poor: even in a full-page ad, you can't fit anywhere near as much information as with a website.
• They lock you into a year-long campaign: you can't change the information once it is out there, and you can't adjust you advertising budget. Once you have bought that ad, it is there for a year and even if things like your budget or your location change you're not able to change that info.

Yellow page ads might still be a good thing for your business; that part of your advertising effort is something you'll have to decide. On our end, we can assure you of a couple of things:

• your business will be on Google places,
• when folks search the internet for your business or business like yours in your town, you will show up in google's maps,
• and your contact information such as your physical address and business phone number will be easy to find on your site and the internet

Personally, the only time I look at the yellow pages is when staying at a hotel and ordering takeout, but I am 32-year-old computer savvy gen-x-er. But my parents don't really use the phone book all that often, and people my grandparents age pretty much only use them to look up numbers they have forgotten. I wouldn't hesitate to put a yellow pages ad out for a pizzaria near an airport. I might hesitate to do the same for a small-town insurance agency.

You'll have to think about your business and your target customer and decide on how much money to put in which type of advertising. Maybe a full page ad would be a good thing, or maybe just your name, address, phone number and web address would be best.