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.

Internet Search continues to explode as total number of Searches increases 31% between June 2008 and June 2009 (21.9 billion total searches in June 2009). The main findings of the TMP Directional Marketing survey are:

• Print media continues to decline in a growing digital marketplace, as consumers reference local business information through alternative methods.
• Google has developed applications that have overtaken online business directories in both IYP/local and local portal searches.
• Mobile search continues to experience growth, as more consumers have access to mobile devices with Internet browsers and applications.

This excerpt says it all

Other Key Study Findings
The closer, the better: Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents in 2009 stated that they expect their search results to reveal businesses within 15 miles of their homes or places of work. This statistic is significantly higher compared to 2008 (59 percent) and 2007 (52 percent), proving that consumers expect more relevance in their business searches.

Click here for the article

The main reason is that they want $399.00 to be listing in their Electronic Yellow Pages.  At best this is a poor verison of what you can get on any of the major search engines for free.  So be wary of anything like this..  And believe me when I say that spending $400 with them will not ” Validate your Internet Listing”.

Here is the Email and PDF I recieved:

Invoice for YellowGoesGreen

Dear Customer:

Please verify your ACTUAL LISTING by printing and completing the attached form.

FAX THE COMPLETED FORM TO: XXXXXX

Please make payment by check or credit card as listed on the form.

Return the stub and payment to the following address:

Yellow Goes Green!! (save a tree).

We have taken the phone book out of the desk drawer and placed it on the desktop! We offer a dynamic and interactive product that can be quickly and easily accessed by you and your customers.

We have eliminated what advertisers do not like about the printed Yellow Pages books, and we are far less expensive. Because we do not bear the expense of ink, paper, binding, and distribution, we can pass the savings on to you!

2007 to 2009 Advertising Focus / Online vs Traditional

The Local Commerce Monitor study also revealed a decrease in overall ad spending by SMBs, owing to unfavorable economic conditions and the long-term substitution of traditional media with lower-cost digital/online media. SMBs decreased spending on advertising and promotion by 23.5 percent, from $2,734 annually (reported in August 2008) to $2,092 annually (reported in August 2009). In spite of the overall decrease in spending on advertising and promotion over the past 12 months, on average, SMBs increased spending on Web sites and profile pages by 26.8 percent, from $608 in 2008 to $769 in 2009.

With Guerrilla Marketing and a focus on online advertising you can reduce your spending and get more new customers.

Here in San Diego Rubios Fesh Mex is working with Yowza, A new iPhone app that is a substitue to paper coupons.

Rather than fooling with a stack of coupons at checkout, those with an iPhone (or iTouch) simply show a digital coupon and the savings is automatically deducted from the purchase price.

Retailers that have already signed with Yowza!! include Sears, McDonald’s, Finish Line, ESPN Zone, The Container Store, Islands Restaurant, Sports Authority, Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill, Pier 1 Imports, REI, Saks Fifth Avenue, Regency Shopping Centers, California Pizza Kitchen, American Golf Corporation, Cavallo Point Lodge, Marmalade Café, Traditional Jewelers, American Car Movers, Aveda Salon/Spa, Inner You Pilates, JRK Hotel Group, Cheeseburger Restaurants, Kiehl’s, Midway Car Rental, Santana Row Shopping Center, Seaton, Jill Roberts and many others.

Coupons for the Iphone

There is a nice article about this in the SD Tribune.

Two forces are driving mobile coupons, said Greg Hallinan, chief marketing officer with Verve Wireless in Encinitas, which works with newspapers, TV and radio stations on wireless services, including The San Diego Union-Tribune and the company’s Web site, SignonSanDiego.com.

“One, coupons are back in vogue in the midst of the recession,” Hallinan said.

And two, faster cellular networks have boosted what can be delivered to a wireless phone.

“Consumers see these phones as more like a personal information device that’s not just for making voice calls,” he said.

Use of electronic discounts and coupons more than doubled in the first half of 2009 compared with the same period last year as overall coupon use rose 23 percent, according to coupon-processing company Inmar Inc. Electronic coupons now account for more than 3 percent of all coupons used, up from roughly 2 percent in 2008.

Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, gave the morning keynote at the Microsoft Bing Summit in Carlsbad, CA last week. It was an introduction to Bing. The main reason I am highlighting this discussion is that Nadella explains that people engage in long search sessions when making purchase decisions. Almost 50% of time spent searching is spent during sessions longer than 30 minutes.
The slide shows 66% of people are using search more frequently as a decision-making tool; and in their strategic verticals:

• 75% product purchases
• 62% Local activity
• 45% Flight or hotel
• 43% Healthcare

It just keeps getting better for local business on the internet

R.H. Donnelley filed Chapter 11 in a Delaware federal bankruptcy court last Friday May 29th. R.H. Donnelley said it has reached an agreement in principle with key creditors on the terms of a plan of reorganization that proposes to reduce debt by approximately $6.4 billion, eliminate approximately $500 million in annual interest expense and extend the company’s bank maturities out to 2014.

The stock has had a tragic run, peaking at around $78 in 2007 before plunging on signs the economy was beginning to cool off.

As the deal stands, lenders will get 100% of the equity. I am not sure that is really a good deal for the lenders? Would you want to own a rapidly dying business with shrinking cash flow?

Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages and get with the program with Free Internet Local Business listings.