Yellow Pages... Has It Worked For You, What Did You Do?

will575

Have you had success with yellow pages? I haven't used YP in several years. In the past some years it worked incredibly well, other years it was a total waste of money. If I'm going in the book I have to do it shortly..... undecided on whether to do it or not and on what approach to take. I'm doing remodeling & repairs, carpentry, cabinets etc. Any Ideas? I need more work, but don't need to waste money!

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davitk

IMO yellow page ad salesmen are crooks.

electricohio

I agree. I used to advertise a hlf page ad in the phone book but it was way too expensive. I truly be leave in using a form of internet marketing to get just about all of our work. I explained it in another post one here some were.

I would never spent the money to advertise in the phone book again

Matt

DavidC

Yellow Pages wasted a bunch of my money and I sadly discovered that I was locked in for a year once I figured it wasn't working. Plumbers and electricians probably get better success with the emergency calls. I haven't yet met a remodeler that used it successfully.

I get a one line YP listing because I opted for bold print in the white pages. Once every 2-3 years I can attribute 1 job to that free line. It performs better than our 1/4 page ads did. Save your money.

Good Luck
Dave

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A W Smith

just a single line with a url has worked for years with me. don't neglect to fill out your superpages profile, because its free. almost none of my competition in my area does this.

http://advertising.superpages.com/sp...nessprofile.do


my superpages profile
http://www.superpages.com/bp/South-R...0117081555.htm

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

knothole

It also seemed to be a waste of time for us.

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electricohio

I am an electrical contractor and yes I did get emergency calls from a half page full color ad. Even getting those calls didn't produce enough work to justify the expense on the ads. Obviously when your dealing with emergency call you need to be there right away, sometimes you just don't have the men available to make that work. I still have the opinion that it is too expensive for what it does

Matt

Max Nomad

In this part of Virginia, there are a few printed phone books along with the Yellow Pages. For some types of contractors I believe the Yellow Pages will be a decent source as long as they keep printing them (e.g. - HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Roof Repair, etc). For others, the usefulness of the Yellow Pages will probably never reach it's heyday again unless the Internet mysteriously vanishes one day.

When I took over this company early last summer, it was listed in both the local Yellow Pages and on Yellowpages.com. From the perspective of a tile installation and home improvement company in southeastern Virginia, here's a summary of our experiences with both of them.

Yellow Pages:

For every 20 calls we received from people interested in getting estimates, no more than 3 of them will have found us through the Yellow Pages.

Profile of our typical Yellow Pages customer in search of Home Improvement: More often than not, this customer will be in his 60s or 70s, almost always a married male (even though it's his wife who is really calling the shots), comfortably retired, doesn't use the Internet, and on a mission to get estimates from *every* tile installation company in the area code. With guys like this it's strictly a price thing; quality and top-notch service is a distant second. Often he will have worked with a home improvement contractor in the past and try to haggle your price down based on that experience. Instead of acknowledging that his pricing information is God-knows-how-old, he'll convince himself that every contractor out here is trying to rape him.

Over the course of this past year, we might have landed one job from the Yellow Pages that justified the cost of being in the book.

Yellowpages.com:

For their sales reps, they seem to recruit anyone over the age of 18 that can recite a well-rehearsed script, dial a phone, and use a web browser.

Although our initial listing was correct, the minute it was upgraded to a larger ad they put down some slogan they made up and screwed up *everything* else except the company name and phone number. It took many calls, 5 months and us refusing to pay for someone in customer support to finally get involved. Hopefully with their new CEO things will get better.

Oh, I forgot to mention -- as far as I know, we never received a single call from being listed on that site.


Hope this helps...

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nycballer31488

We have used their service in the past. There are ups and downs to the yellow pages. Number one is competition. The yellow pages has a lot of competition in it so your ad has to stick out among every other contracto in the book. Throughout the years i have used there service i received some jobs but not a ton of leads. Most of my jobs came from word of mouth and reccomendations. One job from the yellow pages could pay for your years advertisment. You have to take the positive and negatives and balance them out. Advertising in the Yellow pages in NYC is a tough call for me.

will575

I can run 2 1 1/2" in column ads and 1 3/4" ad in three different headings where these size ads will be competitive in size for a total of about $100 per month. Seems cheap enough, I'm still a little skeptical. $100 isn't that much but it's still $100 (X12 = $1200)

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threaderman

It works well for me,but I do some niche work which draws attention to my ads,I design the ads myself ,they are time tested and bad-a$$ed.The people with AT&T are a frickin nightmare to work with though ,I despise sales people,and they will screw you in a heart-beat.I have 4" end column ads and they cost an arm and a leg.

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Joe ---International Code Council Member

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