Yellow Pages and the Web
What should your practice do with yellow page advertising?
By Michael J. Dobkowski
Since the paradigm shift in advertising responsiveness from traditional forms to new media and the Internet, the printed yellow pages has found themselves in an awkward situation. By 2002 search engines had surpassed the yellow pages as the primary source for information gathering. Most people had switched from seeking phone numbers in the yellow pages to simply going online. Now with the recent craze of Internet cell phones such as the blackberry and the new iPhone, more and more people will seek information via the Internet. During this transition the yellow pages failed to develop a successful online website that performed well with organic search. Quite honestly, an institution like this should have never let this happen because they were in the drivers seat to dominate local search. Now, with a relatively poor economy it is clear that you will need to find customers where they are spending time. Much research suggests that you can find them online.
So where does this leave your practice in terms of advertising with the yellow pages or planning your Internet advertising strategy? The yellow pages are now very expensive for the return most practices are getting. Many practices are getting a very low return this investment. One practice I recently interviewed tracked this to be 2.5% of their actual patient calls while the Internet marketing generated 37.5% of interest calls. Recently, this same practice was quoted $15,000 for a complete yellow pages advertising spend. The cost of yellow page advertising appears to be out of touch with the real value. Advertising by small businesses in the printed yellow pages is predicted to decline as online advertising is predicted to increase. Perhaps when the actual cost of advertising in the printed yellow pages decreases and becomes more inline with actual value will we see an increase in spending with this media.
With this type of gap in ROI it is hard to place a top priority on this type of advertising anymore. Because I come from days before the Internet I find this hard to grapple with but things change. Unfortunately, the real value of the yellow pages isn’t in the yellow pages anymore. The real value to be understood with yellow pages or any type of local search or Internet yellow pages portal is with the listing itself. Just having a listing with a direct html text link on one of these websites will help your overall organic search effort. The value is with the incoming link, not the click in their actual directory. The Internet yellow pages portals tend to have decent page ranks and will make a difference in the assessment of your link popularity.
If you are thinking about using the yellow pages you can be certain that most leads will not come from this medium. If you have large marketing funds perhaps a large media buy with the yellow pages is reasonable. If you are like most practices marketing spending is limited and you have to be smart about where to put your resources. Perhaps you should consider a basic listing in the print pages with no large advertisement and a direct HTML link in their online portal. While you are considering the yellow pages you might also look into other online local search resources such as YellowBook, SuperPages, and Findit.com.
