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Updated – Is yellow pages still effective for marketing???

• hire industry
• hire leads
• lead generation
• rental industry
• yellow pages advertising

Increasing research in the US and Australia has found that the use of  the traditional yellow pages is declining.

A survey in May 09 in Australia by Core data, identified that over half of the population DONT want yellow pages even delivered.

People are increasingly turning to the Internet to find information, even local information.  Some figures suggest that this the use of on-line search can be as high as 80% of all information searches.  The following citation from blognow.com.au, shows the impact:

As the volume of locality focussed searches for products and services increased (ie “beauty salons in Chatswood”), Google and other major search engines responded by adding local search functionality such as Google Local (now Google Maps). Quite suddenly, some competition began to emerge in the Australian directory advertising market.

Even Wall Street acknowledges that the days of printed directories like Yellow pages are numbered.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that advertisement spending in US print directories is expected to drop by 39 per cent in the next four years, the steepest projected decline across all local media categories, as customers migrate to the web en masse.

Dr Lynella Grant is the author of Yellow Page Smarts, she makes the points that relying on just yellow pages is now longer safe: (click any point below to be taken to the article – well worth reading)

• Most customers research first on the net even for local products.
• Trust in the internet as a source of information is increasing.
• Search engines now offer local search functions.
• Significant percentage of young adults dont use Yellow Pages at all.

Further proof, recently emerged that the recession may be accelerating the decline of Yellow Pages, where the Australian Yellow Page provider Sensis announced on 31 Mar 09, that it was reducing staff numbers by nearly 50 due to a large drop in print classified advertising.

So what to do?

Well the answer is to look at your marketing advertising mix.  The Yellow Pages still has a role – but should it be the dominant element?  There are alternatives now – the question becomes where to most effectively spend your marketing budget?

This question of balancing the marketing mix is becoming a challenge for all companies.   It is no longer static.  The Yellow Pages is a barometer of this change.  The days of solely relying just on Yellow Pages has finishedfor some companies - we are in a different more social and connected world – where the marketing rules change almost daily.

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