Yellow Pages are on a slippery slope into oblivion at the moment, with £3.7 billion in debt they are trying to renegotiate and a share price in freefall. They won't disappear (more likely to get split up) but surely their track record suggests they aren't a safe bet.
IH
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Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ - make your business network WORK! http://www.wecando.biz
Main offline advertising is networking, which is largely free. The trouble with YP is that once you've paid and realised it isn't workig for you its tough, at least with Adwords you can switch them on and off as you please.
Also, as a printer I tend to do quite a lot of flyering and leafleting in the area which again is quite low cost, lot of time investment but the returns are much better than YP per £1 spent. I could run a few hundred flyers and get a couple of thousand pounds worth of business. Yet with YP I could spend £1000 and get nothing.
I used yellow pages once, again, absolutely nothing!
Maybe thats why i am doing my booklet! if i can get adverts priced at about £100 for the 100,000, then i think i could be onto a winner, you may not think so, please dont burst me bubble please!!
When I was offering accounting services a few years ago I placed a small box ad in Yellow Pages. Got a 50% discount for a new advert, cost £180, and in one year I received a single reply. Was profitable as it happens but wouldn't do it again and cancelled permanently the next year onwards.
Remember the salesman told me he couldn't promise but expected perhaps 8 or 9 enquiries per month. What he didn't mention was that 99% of those enquries would be cold calls trying to sell me something not looking to buy my services.
I personally don't advertise in YP. BUT, I got a job yesterday recreating an ad layout for a Day Care Centre/Nursery... it appears they are more than happy with the response they get from their ads, in fact this year have upgraded to a bigger placement.
So I suppose there could be factors that come into play, such as,
your business
the advert itself
are you looking for local customers
competition
From a customer perspective I do use YP, i find it handy... although I would usually search online first.
be careful of the free intro offer that you can cancel on yell.com.
I canceled and they sent me an invoice anyway. When i questioned them on it, they confirmed that it was cancelled but they sent out the invoice "by mistake".
I wonder how many "mistakes" are being sent out in the hope that people just pay them?
be careful of the free intro offer that you can cancel on yell.com.
I canceled and they sent me an invoice anyway. When i questioned them on it, they confirmed that it was cancelled but they sent out the invoice \\"by mistake\\".
I wonder how many \\"mistakes\\" are being sent out in the hope that people just pay them?
Surprised the would try that with you PI Guy, doing what you do.
I have been invoiced 4 times now, i dont bother doing anything now, just bin it.
I wonder if anyone has actually "paid"??
A number of my clients do extremely well out of the yellow pages, which accounts for over half of all their business. However many trade are wasting their time and money with paper based directory listings.
The majority of people use the internet and mainly google for their searches so tradespeople really have to get themselves listed on internet directories and spend time and investment on their search engine placings.
Far better to have a good yellow pages internet listing than a paper book listing. But there are so many more online directories out there to take advantage of.
I think B2C tend to do OK in Yellow Pages, but B2B not so well. I spent quite a lot of money on a quarter page ad when I started out, and got nothing from it.
It's similar with Yell.com - lots of my clients have the free listing on there, but the B2C ones do far better than the B2B.
I had a phone call from yellow pages a couple of weeks ago asking if i wanted to place another ad in next years book. (for £120).
After thinking about it for a couple of minutes i told the person very politely that i did not want to do this as my business is not very financially viable right now, but she was most insistent on me place one , even offered me to pay it over 10 months @ £12 per month starting in march.
so i gave in and said yes OK i would do it (this was before i found out my husband had been made redundant).
The paperwork arrived the next day, asking me to check the details, and to sign the form and DD mandate and then to return them.
When i didn't, they started calling every day until i eventually had to explain the situation and circumstances as to why i had changed my mind.
Now i do not mind the odd sales pitch, but this was way beyond what i would expect from a company like yellow pages. (surely it was short of bullying).
So from this i have decided that i shall not be going to use yellow pages in the future for my marketing , but shall use another company.
I agree with the opinion stated that they are on a downward to tragectory but the arent as much of a potential waste of money as the ones advertised by those two blokes with moustaches!!!
on a similar theme has anyone used the BT phone book and / or thomsons with any success
from a years advertising with the two i managed to get a couple of jobs which didn't even get me to break even with the money i spent and therefore cancelled them the next year
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If not - keep away from it - some will have already tested and proven that it doesn't work - it is not a golden opportunity.
If your competitors are advertising, then adverts as a whole are likely to be profitable so the question becomes - can your advert pull more than its fair share of the enquiries.
Forget tombstone adverts - here[location] lies [name] started in [year] and give people a reason to contact you.
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I'm thinking of publishing a B2B Directory - is there anything like it around? What do you think about it?
I had an advert in Yellow Pages for a year, and like most people, it was more hassle than it was worth.
I thought about advertising in the local Dentons, but for £700 for 3 lines, I was nearly sick.
It all depends on your target market, when I've used it I've got no results but lots of students asking for work experience. I use specialist trade directories.
The problem with start up directories is that we've all been taken in the past, mainly I think by incompetence rather than a deliberate attempt to rip people off, so you have a chicken and egg problem.
In the nine months to December 31, Yell’s infamous printed directory here in the UK, which publishes 76 regional editions, lost 9.4 percent of its revenue, down to £367.4 million, and 9.2 percent of its advertisers, down to 287,000.
Personally, I just tossed last years and this years yellow pages, white pages, local yellow pages and all the rest of the books. I do use the online versions if and when it shows up on Google.
With a previous architects practice I once took an enquiry from a county Police estates officer which led to a £250k commission to refurbish police stations - the source - the RIBA Box in Yellow Pages!
But that is a one-off and not really a reason for anyone to advertise...
We don't advertise in Yellow Pages except in the RIBA Box in the Architects section because occasionally you get such enquiries, but most are for residential projects - private house extensions etc which we dont do anyway. If you take a two line ad you can tweak the text and filter out the unwanted customers, but this may just leave you with no enquiries.
I think it depends on the business but yell.com is so much more practical than the hard copy so if I had to choose between the two I'd go with Yell.
(and word of mouth recommendation is much better anyway)
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Advertising in Yellow Pages
