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Is There Still Advertising Value in the Yellow Pages?

In the days before Google, if you wanted to order a pizza or call a plumber, you needed to find someone to do so via the Yellow Pages. Ah, that giant yellow book that weighs a ton and is chock full of local businesses. With no way to narrow the search and with the increased dependency on internet search, is there still value for contractors in advertising in the Yellow Pages?

The answer to that is yes… for most contractors. Some of the benefits of advertising in the Yellow Pages are that they’re extremely targeted to your service area and often stay within the home for a long period of time. Not only are the books delivered throughout your city or town, as well as the surrounding area, but Yellow Pages also breaks down the Contractors category into more specific areas of specialization. If someone is searching through the book and needs an HVAC repair company, they will find very specific results and only encounter contractors who definitively service their area.

Homeowners who use or rely on the Yellow Pages to find local businesses tend to keep the books for at least one year or longer. Compare that against advertising in a newspaper, where they are almost immediately thrown away or recycled, and you could be getting more bang for your buck in the long run.

Furthermore, utilizing the Yellow Pages ensures that you’re putting together a more well-rounded marketing campaign. No one is denying the power of the internet, but it is not the be all and end all of advertising, lead generation, and communications.

Speaking of lead gen, the Yellow Pages is purely a lead generation tool. In order to calculate ROI, you’ll want to look at the cost of the campaign (which covers one year of advertising), then determine the value of a customer as well as the amount of customers you’ll need in order to break even. Once you have your target number, you’ll be able to measure whether or not the investment in YP is paying off.

But how can you capture these leads and attribute them to the Yellow Pages? It’s not like advertising online, where website traffic is easily tracked for you. A few tips to help make your YP marketing campaign more transparent: Purchase a dedicated phone number so that any calls that come through on that line are because of YP, provide a code or coupon exclusively in YP, or simply ask people when they call how they heard about you.