SmallBizResource Blog -- Marketing

Yellow Pages 2.0

Posted by Gayle Kesten Friday, Dec 12, 2008, 10:45 AM ET

When contemplating the best ways to advertise online to your local market, don't let your fingers walk past a tried-and-true resource that has been at your disposal long before you were born.

The Yellow Pages.

I recently spoke to Neg Norton, who's president of the Yellow Pages Association, which represents some 450 members (Yellow Pages publishers and marketers) across 29 countries. His main message: The Yellow Pages is a multiplatform business that has plenty to offer small businesses that want to leverage the Internet for their advertising.

Those offerings include localized search, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) -- "which many small businesses don't have the time, inclination or expertise to do," Norton said -- video, and mobile search. He was especially bullish about the latter two, video because of the higher click rate he's seeing among Internet Yellow Pages advertisers that use them, and mobile because of the ever-increasing uptake of smartphones.

More than 3 million small businesses already advertise with the Yellow Pages (print and online), Neg said, with the Internet portion growing and up around 20% from 2007.

"As the market fragments, we see our role as playing in a number of the different technologies to deliver high quality leads to local businesses in a very transparent and convenient way," Norton said. "Also, unlike other media, we don't have a set demographic who uses the Yellow Pages. It's episodic -- as life events occur. It's not just white, single guys or urban dwellers."

Another value-add: results tracking. Though few Yellow Pages advertisers take advantage of this now (which made me feel better about not knowing this), publishers use a technology called Call Measurement Services, which assigns customers with a unique phone number that accompanies their ads. Those numbers port over to the advertisers' main number and provide a way to determine where calls come from.

"As pricing for [tracking] services have come down, Yellow Pages publishers are now offering it to just about everyone with whatever packages they're purchasing so they can measure where there business is coming from," Norton said. "I've been on calls where an advertiser thinks something isn't working. Then we go through some of the results, and it turns out they got all of these leads that came during lunch time when no one was there, or they came in and were handled by a person who wasn't trained properly."

Costs to advertise with the Yellow Pages vary from publisher to publisher. Package deals, a la carte arrangements and performance-based fees are all options, Norton said.

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