I have a friend who works for one of the big books out here in San Diego. Hes a cool guy, doesn't force the sale like most of the blood suckers that work for the yellow pages. After I finished his most recent pest control service, I spent the better part of an hour talking to him.
The books are loosing a ton of business, roughly 10-14% per year according the reports. But we all know this already, so I asked him what they we're doing to save the company both on paper and virtually.
- SEM Online Informational Videos
- Price Reductions for Book Clients
- Television / Internet Local Advertising
- Virtual Listings Online
The
video SEM series to me is a totally failed marketing ploy. They shoot a video of someone explaining why their company is better than the competition with a camcorder, and put it up on a couple sites. Rarely do I see these videos sent to major sites like You Tube, and frankly the videos are rarely entertaining enough to keep the attention of the person watching for more than about 15 seconds. I mean really, how interesting to your average person is a pest control guy talking about his equipment? A plumber talking about his pipe snake? I'm developing interest in watching paint dry just talking about it. Its not a wonder that companies I talk to are willing to drop the video SEM campaign after their one year contracts are up.
Price reduction is well, obvious. If less people are using the book, then you have to make it worthwhile to the clients, however I'm sure theres a lot of cost behind producing several million books. However, a full page ad in most of the books I've seen are $2,500 a month! So I'm sure they can afford to cut the coin a bit.
My friend mentioned that in the upcoming future the yellow pages are working out a deal with cable companies to effectively allow consumers point and click interfacing with television ads. Say a round table pizza ad comes on the screen, with a click of the remote, they can order what they want on a pizza and have it delivered to them. While this idea works well for pizza companies, I have trouble seeing the correlation between tv advertisements and a fashion or clothing store.
In the last few years the yellow pages have been running online search engines with listings of clients to provide a searchable database. Google and yahoo have emulated this with the local search listings, which initially were entirely book based, but as time has gone on, the search engines have begun to separate themselves from the books, which is going to hurt them greatly in the long run.
As you can see, the situation is grim for the big yellow book. Unless these boys get with the times and start offering
real SEO and website development, its only a matter of time till the gimmicks and advertising ploys are recognized as such.