Supplyant

I got sight of some interesting statistics last week showing that peoples use of the yellow pages is dwindling at its fastest ever rate.

The fact given was that the number of people using the book on a weekly basis has dropped by over 20% in the last 4 years.  Interestingly yellow pages advertising rates don’t appear to have changed.

So is it worth being in Yellow Pages?

As with every form of advertising it all depends on your return on investment. On that basis you shouldn’t do yellow pages unless:

• You monitor where your leads come from
• You monitor how many of these leads turn into customers
• You look at the lifetime value of those customers

Once you have an understanding of how much your yellow pages customers are worth to you its a far simpler decision.

What about Yell.com?

Yell.com is a good site for local search its worth appearing on there but:

• It will not give your own site any google friendly back links
• Its going to be under serious threat from Google Local which is free
• Its going to be under increasing pressure from other free providers

Despite this exactly the same rules apply its all about your return on investment. Spend a pound, get more than a pound back in profit then go for it.

Google local

Here’s an example of what google shows you if you search for decorator in Northampton.

This ones easy, its free, it gives you a really high position on google and its easy enough that you can do this yourself. You can do it here

Have you had any good or bad experiences with Yellow Pages. I would love to hear them, or you can tell us about them here

I found a great article over at tech-crunch talking about advertising revenue from newspapers. You can see from the pretty grim graph below all is not well in newspaper land.  Its worth noting that these figures talk not only about newspaper advertising revenues  but also advertising revenues on the newspapers websites.

So is it time to start looking at newspaper advertising?

Well, nothing’s changed really. For most people  the answer to any question regarding marketing is down to one thing, ROI (return on investment). If you can test and measure it and it works, do it. If not, don’t.

On page advertising is much harder to test and measure, so be careful and don’t go for it unless you’re onto a real winner.  Also, ask yourself is a newspaper reader going to be your best customer or should you be targeting web savvy users?

For now, unless the offer is amazing, I’m recommending you look at easily measurable online opportunities first before even considering newspapers.

What do you think?

• Were is the newspaper market going?

• Will it last the next 10 years?