Yellow pages is synonymous with business advertising and has been for many years, but are its days numbered. Ten years ago you may have got some return fo

If you have ever advertised with Yellow pages, the process starts with a sales person coming to visit you to book your money making advert. For more and more of the advertisers the book is a money loosing proposition.

Normally the sales person tells you to expect lots of enquiries a week, that you will be rushed off your feet and the small monthly payments of 3 – 4 hundred pounds will be easy to meet as you will have so much business that this amount will be small change.

The reality is normally a lot different. I first advertised many years ago, fresh faced out of university after completing my degree in Media production, specialising in multimedia design.

I was eager to join the world of small business, selling my newly acquired skills to a hungry local business community. My advert in Yellow pages was going get me business the likes of I had never known. That year went slowly, I didn’t receive one call from that advert; not one single little enquiry.

I cant blame the directory completely, my advert was small but it was the only paid advert in the section. The web was all new and shiny,many businesses didn’t know about websites or thought them just a passing fad.

I even went and did it again a few years later and thought it was the size of my advert that was the problem the first time, so I splashed out on a full colour half page ad. I did get responses to that ad but twenty times less then the directory sales people were telling me the average response rate was for an advert of that size and in that section. I covered the cost of the advertising but not much else.

The thing was I didn’t know what I know now. Paper directory advertising is dieing, then it was just in decline now it’s on its way to the retirement home.

For some; paper directories like Yellow pages can be great but for these it’s normally out of hours services like emergency plumbers or services aimed at the older generation who don’t use a computer let alone the Internet. For most, it’s a dead duck.

Advertising is changing for the first time online marketing spend is going to over take traditional paper advertising

If you want a business or service nine times out of ten the web is the place you look first not last. I, being a person who makes a living online one way or another do everything online from shopping to research to entertainment it’s all there. I suspect I may be a little extream because of my comfort level online but I don’t think average Joe is far behind me .

If you run any sort of business you need to be found online so you need to establish a web presence now if you haven’t already got one. If you main form of marketing is paper directory’s then you need to be moving at least some of your marketing spend to online marketing now , not tomorrow.

We can use Google trends to see how the interest in Yellow pages and Thomson Local had declined since 2004

Yellow Pages

Thomson Local

As we can see the Yellow pages interest has dropped dramatically over the last six years to approximately 25% of the 2004 search volume.

Where is the interest going

Online marketing is growing with the biggest gains in search volume being in SEM an acronym for Search engine marketing

SEO

SEM

PPC

So as we can plainly see the interest in online marketing is growing.  I can see the growth slowing as we see with SEO (search engine optimisation) PPC (pay per click) is in a slight decline but I put that down to businesses trying to reduce costs.

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