For people making payroll, by people making payroll
For people making payroll, by people making payroll
Becky McCray at Small Biz Survival recently asked if the Yellow Pages still matter for local businesses. It ends with some valuable lessons, including this one:
If you do advertise, track your results. And don’t fall into the “just one more year” trap. If it doesn’t generate enough business to pay for itself, kill the ad.
We’ve wondered whether we were spending too much on our Yellow Pages and Yellow Book ads (the two directories available here in Huntsville, AL). Because the Yellow Book is less popular, I had decided to drop its ads, and was considering a smaller Yellow Pages ad, too. After all, phone book usage appears to be declining, and how many calls could we be getting from the second-place phone book? Right?
Before we gave our rep the bad news, Ryan decided to check our Switchvox incoming call logs. In a moment of unusual cleverness, we’d used a different phone number in our Yellow Book ad this year, so we knew calls to that number had to come from Yellow Book users.
What we found proved once again that you shouldn’t trust your instincts if you have any way to measure instead.
It turns out we were averaging 9 calls per week to the Conditioned Air Yellow Book number and 5 calls per week to the Focus Electric number. Wow! That’s around 60 calls per month.
While it’s not perfect (some of those may have already been planning to call us and just picked up that book to find the number), 60 calls per month for what we were paying was a great deal. So instead of dropping the Yellow Book ads, we’re even adding Greenway Plumbing to it this year.
None of this means we disagree with the Small Biz Blog piece’s major premise. The evidence is unavoidable that print directories are becoming less relevant each year. We’d hate to be in that business.
But the moral of this story — like so many others — is you really don’t know what’s happening until you measure it.
Popularity: 84% [?]
Posted: August 8th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Category: Marketing and Selling
Becky McCray Says:
Keith, thanks for adding your numbers and story to our discussion. It’s been very interesting to hear different experiences from real small business people.
Chris Gattis Says:
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. It’s the hallmark of continuous improvement and quality systems. Whether yellow pages advertising or manufacturing space shuttle parts, process improvement requires measurement. In your case, you would have patted yourselves on the back for saving some money but might be struggling to figure out why your business had declined a year from now when you had missed those 700 or so potential customer calls. The facts contradicted your ‘gut feelings’ about the system and common knowledge about the industry. This is an excellent story to illustrate your point.
Darlene Saal Says:
Thanks so much for this article, I am printing it for all my clients. I am certain most do not have a seperate phone line, but they can accomplish the same thing by asking “How did you hear about us?” This simple question can save most owners money and stress. I do not believe the yellow pages will ever go away. The key for advertising is figure out how to get your information in front on the customer on the day they need it. We had a plumber write his number on the hot water heater when he installed it. When we need a plumber, we go to the hot water heater and retrieve the number. Go figure..Thanks, Darr
ryan Says:
Hi, Darr! Funny you should mention the number-on-the-water-heater thing. We do that with our HVAC, electrical, and plumbing businesses. We put a sticker on HVAC units we service, on the breaker-panel door for electrical, or the hot water heater for plumbing. We figure if a homeowner’s looking very carefully in any of those three places, they’re probably about to need to call someone to help. 
