Business Marketing — Fewer businesses will continue with Yellow Pages
If you are a business owner that has used the Yellow Pages in your marketing mix you know that this can be very costly, and sometimes there is little return on this cost. A huge cost with little return is something that most businesses can not afford to keep and remain profitable.
We have one client that was paying almost $1200 a month for their Yellow Pages listed and from what little tracking tools they had were only able to attribute about 2 customers a month from those ads. We have now switched this client to other marketing channels which include Social Media, Blogging as well as Email Marketing. The goal is that within three months of adding these services (at a MUCH lower cost) that we will be able to a substantial increase in traffic and revenue from these efforts.
Looking at other methods to market besides the Yellow Pages is becoming a trend with small businesses or what some call micro-business (micro-business = 10 employees or less). Personally, I believe that there are better methods to market than the Yellow Pages where you can better track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing.
Vistaprint conducted a survey in April of 2010 of 1,100 customers and in this survey found that two-thirds surveyed have no interest in marketing in the Yellow Pages and only 11% plan to use it in the future. Here is graph of the marketing channel trends of those surveyed:
In looking at this graph it is nice to see that many businesses are currently using Social Media, Online Direct Marketing and Physical Direct Marketing. This is a trend that will continue and is one that will help small or micro-business cut cost and build focused prospect lists.
If you would like to read the full survey you can do so here at Vistaprint’s Small Business Blog.
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