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Apr 27, 2009 by Mark MaierOne of our largest competitors for advertising budget is the Yellow Pages and the change in how we access information along with understanding Top of Mind Awareness makes them an ineffective advertising medium. Put a plan in place today with each of your clients to target that budget and in turn make them more effective in reaching their audience.
So how do you compete against them? Explain to your clients how a need is addressed by a typical consumer. Let's say that you are driving home and you have a tire blowout, the spare is missing from your car. What do you do? 1) For most consumers they would think of a service business (Top of Mind Awareness Branding Campaigns) that could come to them and fix the situation. 2) If they can't think of a business that offers the service, they will call a trusted family member or friend and ask. 3) They will search the web on their smartphone and find someone who can take care of the problem.(Top of Mind Awareness enters again as they look for a familiar name or brand) 4) They will call directory assistance or find a yellow pages to try to find a solution (once again, Top of Mind Awareness comes into play as they look for someone they recognize).
Yellow Pages are 3rd or 4th on the list depending on the need and your embrace on technology. What is in your Top of Mind Awareness or the mind of your family or friends is much more important and will always be accessed first before we go to a directory service like Google or the Yellow Pages.
So once you clients understand how consumers work through problems, now they need to know how to disconnect with the Yellow Pages. Yellow Page salespeople use fear, tradition, and ignorance to sell their service. Tradition states that if you are a business, you need to be in the Yellow Pages. Really? Try to find a display ad for McDonalds in the Yellow Pages? They don't advertise there because they have done their job with Top of Mind advertising so there is no point to Yellow Page advertising for them. Your clients will still want their "FREE" white page and yellow page listings, so when they say to the Yellow Page ad rep that they don't want paid listings anymore, they need to make sure they are only cancelling the "PAID" listings and not the "FREE" listings. I have a client that went through that question 4 times with the salesperson because they wanted to cancel all the listings to try to get you to rethink your decision. Cancel your "Paid" listings only and keep your "Free" listings, clarify it with the salespeople and don't cave to the pressure or the fear of not being found in a 3rd or 4th tier advertising platform. Your clients can take the monthly fees they were paying to the Yellow Pages and build a campaign that works on Broadcast and Interactive to create Top Of Mind Awareness.
We have several directories in our area, all taking a slice of advertising budgets for something that has become ineffective, The internet, production costs, cell phone only households, totally untracked and unsubstantiated usage and distribution patterns all point to a medium that is bought out of tradition, not out of necessity. Start the conversations with your clients today about what they are doing and how it really works.
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