You & Stephen Cobert can put Yellow Pages on Notice!

In 2010, the properly informed Yellow Pages customer  has all the advantage in negotiating with any of the Yellow Pages Providers. Today advertising in Yellow Pages is only one of many ways new customers can learn about your products and services. You have strong alternatives and Yellow Pages knows it.

Yellow Page Providers need your business – Negotiate early & smartly and you will save big.

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With the use of the internet, the value of  that Dog Eared Yellow Pages Book by your customer’s phone has diminished (Is it still there?).  To create more value for their customers, Yellow Page Providers  have been creating a large variety of advertising services for the internet. With the attention Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are giving to local businesses, all the Yellow Pages Providers are fighting to maintain revenue.

The Yellow Pages Sales Person will provide proposals that seem to show tremendous value that Yellow Pages can deliver to a business on the internet, but without some basic knowledge of Local Search and Local Business Listings you cannot understand the real value of advertising services that Yellow Pages is offering. It is important not to take the information in Yellow Page Proposals at face value. You must analyze the information yourself. My observations in evaluating these proposals are:

• The Yellow Pages sales person has a lot of flexibility in pricing and services. You can push for a better deal than last year and get it.
• Yellow Page proposals can be a large list of services, but the cost is not broken down. This makes it hard to determine the value of any single part of the proposal.
• Even if you do not pay to advertise in the Yellow Pages, they need your listing and will not delete it.
• The statistical information presented in Yellow Page proposals can be out dated and skewed to increase the value of Yellow Pages.
• If the proposal includes paid search, the cost of having Yellow Pages administer the program costs 2 to 8 times the direct cost of using Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask pay per click services.

The most important point is that in 2010, no matter what, re-negotiate your Yellow Page contract as soon as possible. At a minimum you should either pay less for the same level of advertising or get a whole lot more from your Yellow Page Provider than last year.

Below is an analysis I did for a client.  The client was presented a proposal from Yellow Pages that cost $600 per month and had three elements where we saw value; Yellow Page Book, YP.com, and PPC YP.  We included in our analysis our our best guess of the cost of each element  and placed the value for each element against the other Internet efforts that were being done for the client.  We doubled the value (Probability of Sale Factor) for Yellow Book and Local Search as customers that are looking to those places are more likely (more valuable) to call or purchase than just visitors to a website or people that click on PPC Ads.

The analysis above is in 4 parts (Cost Ranking, Initial Analysis, Refined Budget, Total Cost).  You can see each sheet by clicking on the item in the spreadsheet above.  Other than the ATT&T YP (Yellow Book), which was an educated guess, the other # of search actions were measured by Google Analytics.

The client’s final decision (As shown on Tab – Refined Budget) was to:

• Drop Yellow Pages (Save $600)
• Increase PPC Google ($90 to $250) to increase Customer Search Actions by 52 per month
• Overall reduced their marketing budget by $440 per month.

This reduced the cost per Search Action from an average of $0.24 per action to $0.12 per action or looking at it another way – Save 50% per customer action.

The current use of the Yellow Page book is way down, but some portion of consumers still use the Yellow Pages book to find products and services. I do believe that the Yellow Book and YP.com can increase calls and walk ins to a business. The question is at what cost?  In the example above, the client saw no value to the Yellow Page Book and decided to opt out of all paid promotion through Yellow Pages. I am not recommending that all businesses do this, each situation is unique, and there are good reasons to maintain ads in the Yellow Pages.

To evaluate, adjust or eliminate your yellow pages expenditure you need to look at each aspect of the proposal and determine that value of each part. Start with answering the question, “When I want to buy something the first thing I reach for is (the Yellow Pages, my computer, my smartphone, or ?????).” Do a gut check to determine your bottom line value of the Yellow Book to your customers.  Ask new customers how they found your business and when was the last time they took out their hard copy of the Yellow Pages.

Then use a spreadsheet like the one above to determine some relative value for each effort.  Here is a link to the spreadsheet I used above.  Use it to analyze your advertising program or call me to do it for you.

Have you been able to reduce your your Yellow Page cost and increase the value you get? Tell us your experience with Yellow Pages.

I thought it would be useful to discuss how all the Guerilla Marketing tools come together for the local bike shop. The example below was for the promotion of a bi-annual bike swap meet.

Bring new Customers to your Shop

Results:
More than 200 people came to the swap meet. People traveled up to 100 miles to participate. Present customers were able to sell old bikes themselves or consign bikes to the shop for the day. For the day (Sunday) sales were up almost 100% compared to the average Sunday during the Fall season. ~50% of the customers that consigned their used bikes to the shop used the cash toward purchasing new bikes over the next 10 days.

Tools used:

Shop Newsletter – Shop has a monthly news letter where the Swap Meet has been highlighted each month. A special short newsletter was sent on the Friday before the Sunday Swap meet. This special newsletter had a 30% increase in opens compared to normal monthly newsletter (38% compared to ~25%)

Consignment Used Bikes – The week before we took in an extra 10 bikes to increase our listing of used bike on Craigslist. Each bike listed on Craigslist had an image Ad discussing the Bike Swap Meet. Traffic from Craigslist for the week before the Swap Meet increase over 300% and equaled the normal traffic to the shop website from Google Search (~1,500 unique visitors).

Craigslist- Listing of a “Free Swap Meet” was promoted in both the local craigslist and the three other surrounding local craigslist areas for two weeks prior to the Swap Meet.

Shop Blog – Increased posts about the shop and new products coming from Trek. Unique visitors to blog were up ~50% for the week and traffic from blog to website increase ~20%.

Facebook – Event was placed on Business page and individual Facebook page over the two weeks prior to the event.

Twitter – Event was “tweeted” from the shop twitter account day before the event and then retweeted to several other twitter accounts – This activity was tracked to ~4000 followers.

Google Analytics – All internet activities were tracked for next day information of what was working and what was not working

Background:
This was the third swap meet for the bike shop. Other than the promotion effort outlined above there was no additional advertising money used for the event.

Conclusion:
The swap meet continues to be a great event to both drive existing customers to purchase new bikes by selling old and bring new awareness / new customers to the shop. The use of Craigslist was amazing for both the promotion of the swap meet and awareness of the bike shop.

With over 100 interior designers listed in Google Local Search for “Interior Design Encinitas, CA” it looked like it may be a challenge to get on that key top 10 list. I am happy to report that within 10 days using the first Two of my Five Step process Karen was on the first page of Google. We started with the companies below coming up on the search term “Interior Design Encintas, CA”.

A. Rustic Rooster
B. J W McCarter & Associates
C. Stems & Co.
D. Sensible Chic Interior Design
E. Id Studios
F. Designcorp
G. Cedros Design
H. Polinara Interiors

After these top local business were six more pages of interior designers based in the Encinitas area. Karen and I created her Blog / Business Website on Google, took control of Beyond Words Design local business listing and then researched why the Top 10 businesses on Google’s Local Search were in the Top 10.

After establishing Beyond Words Design as a business on Google Local Business Center and taking ownership of that business idenity we started on moving Karen’s company up that road of search pages. The next step was examinining the business that were already on the top ten list and looking at the information that Google had gathered and deamed of value for a Interior Designer from Encinitas CA.

Google and other search engines look to other business databases for information about the validity and value of each business. When prioritizing your plan for moving up the Google Local food chain, you must make sure that your business is in databases that Search Engines use to gather business listings. Google is known to use superpages.com as one of their basic sources of validating bussiness. It is always the first step on your road to the first page of Local Searches.

Another prime strategy is to find business listing data bases that Google may use for specific industries. For example Rustic Rooster and several others in Interior Design were referenced as a business on www.interiordesignersusa.info. With that info in hand we entered Beyond Words Design into the InteriorDesignerUSA data base. The results after 10 days of waiting for the data to be pushed around the internet was:

A. Rustic Rooster
B. J W McCarter & Associates
C. Stems & Co.
D. Sensible Chic Interior Design
E. Id Studios
F. Designcorp
G. Cedros Design
H. Polinara Interiors
I. Beyond Words Design

The next step is getting a similar position on MSN and Yahoo. The other direction is to broaden the Local Search Value of Beyond Words Design to cities close to Encinitas, CA.

• Grew 14% Q4’08 over Q’407
• Were up 5% Q1’09 over Q1’08

Background:
Specialty retailer with one location, that has been in business for over 30 years and has a great reputation within their customer base. They have maintained best practices including the business systems they use. They have excellent IT integration from vendor ordering, POS (Point of Sales) systems, to their website. Being a small business owner, the client was focused on the day to day activities and was not able to spend any time marketing their business other than historic use of yellowpages advertising. Q1’08 business was down compared to Q1’07 and I was brought in to bring a fresh look at bringing new business to the store.

Goal:
Leverage in-store personnel, existing IT systems, and NEW Internet Tools to:

• Effectively compete against three larger multi-store competitors
  
• Bring increase in new customers to the store

Tools used:

• Email Capture in POS system
• Updated Website
• Monthly Email Newsletter
• Controlling Web presence / Social Networking
• Google Alerts
  
• Google Adwords
• Google Analytics
• Google Blogger / Facebook / Twitter

Conclusion:
The tools and framework that I provided were only a part of the clients success. The client put a significant amount of sweat equity (Employee Time) creating marketing programs for their customers including product sales, and free demonstrations of their products and services.
What I was able to do was guide the client in the use of free to inexpensive internet tools (Less than the cost of his old Yellowpage advertising – Which they dropped) to get the word of the client’s marketing programs to existing and new customers.

Other indicators:

• Web activity increase of 3.5-4.5 fold increase in hits / page views from Q4’07 to Q1’09
• Email capture grew from ~200 to over 2500 in 12 months
• New customers grew from 22% of business in Q1’08 to 43% of business in Q1’09