Phone books are for jerks
October 13th, 2010 • Posted by Seth Gardenswartz • Permalink
Starting next year, several large phone companies will no longer deliver white pages to some residential customers. Why? Because no one uses them. They are just bound for a landfill. "Everyone goes online anyways," says New York City doorman Ramon Almanzar in a New York Times piece. He explains that “[w]e end up throwing them away,” which is exactly what you are doing with your money if you keep relying on old media to bring you new customers. Navin L. Johnson (Steve Martin's character in "The Jerk") may be the last person to want his name on dead trees.
The white pages are something phone companies have to provide but customers don't pay for. Therefore they have a vested interest saving the planet and ending the waste. However, it's interesting to note that the yellow pages is not going away as quickly. That's because the phone companies are clever enough to convince many small businesses to pay for it. Don't be one of them. The people who are looking up phone numbers online use online directories to find business. There are better ways to spend your online marketing dollars.
• Trackback • Posted in General, Social Media, Spa Marketing
Thanks for confirming my decision to scale back on my yellow pages ad and staying with an online listing. Next year, paper listing will be gone all together.
I agree that almost all of my clients use internet rather than paper pages to find us. I also will be dropping much of my yellow pages listings next year. However, I am concerned that much of my Google, Yahoo, Bing search results come from my yellow page listings. Would I lose much of my top search engine results to others who would continue to use yellow pages?
Hi Jon,
That's a great point about search results for the yellow pages, and I would have been worried about it a few years ago. These days, the search engines (and Google in particular) have really devalued yellow pages' search results, because much better information is available from other sources (particularly their own local listings). When I search for massge McHenry, IL, for example, the first yellow pages results is on the second page, which almost no one will get to. Your practice, however, shows up second in the local results 7-pack listing, and second again in the regular search results. Good job!
Save your money on yellow page ads, and instead invest a little time in the Local Search Listings recommendations in the Online Spa Marketing Guide.
– Bill