I talked with a business owner recently who was upset that his competition was above him on Google’s results page. His exact words were, “I want to be first on Google. What do I have to do?”
My response was obvious. “You’ve already done what you need to do. You called me.” From there, we got into a conversation about how his business works, who his clientele are, and what kind of marketing he does now. I bring this up because we had a really interesting conversation about the phone book specifically. He felt like his phone book ad was still helping his business. He “gets a lot of leads” from it. We talked about the leads he gets and they are, unsurprisingly, almost entirely composed of senior citizens.
Don’t misunderstand. Senior citizens need to be able to find businesses, too! And the phone book is a great way to advertise to that crowd. But not to the exclusion of every other potential client. In this case, the business owner is running a 1/4 page ad in the yellow pages to the tune of about $700 per month. He said he is getting a return on that investment, which is great! But how much business is he missing out on from other groups? Enough to justify the expense of online marketing? Absolutely.
So, how do you know if the investment you are making in the phone book is really paying off? Typically, when I ask this question, I hear a few different answers. The most common one is that the yellow pages can now give you a unique phone number in your ad. That way, you can track the number of calls that come in. Based on that number, you can get a rough idea of how much business came your way from your friendly neighborhood phone book. You can then apply whatever formula your business uses for incoming calls that lead to sales and figure out exactly how much you are making from the yellow pages. Or can you? What does that number really tell you?
I came across this article awhile back. It is quite long, but is a very detailed analysis of how one marketer figured out the answer to that very question. In this case study, the business owner (a service based business called DrinkMore Water) felt that they were getting a return from the phone book. They had a custom number, knew the number of phone calls coming in, applied their lead/close ratio to that number and determined that they were making money on the ad.
Once Ben (the marketer who eventually started Blue Corona) got involved, he realized that wasn’t good enough. He wrote a software program to actually track the details of each and every call. It was tedious and laborious, but it proved his point quite well.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“If I had to pick one word to describe the performance, it would be pathetic. From January 1, 2008 to September 30, 2008, DMW has received a total of only 54 calls from the book. Without Blue Corona’s advanced technology, the yellow book sales rep would have used this data to imply that if we typically close 75% of our inbound calls, his book has generated at least 40 new sales (times $400 in annual revenue per account = $16,000 of sales) – of course we’re going to renew!!”
The point here is that unless you are tracking every single call and the outcome, that number provided by the yellow book representative really doesn’t mean a whole lot. The YP may still be generating you business. But how much business are you losing out on if you are not paying attention to your online presence?
