Last year I was working with a client in the flooring business. When I started working with this client I told them to cut all yellow page advertising that wasn’t working. The problem is this client advertised in 3 yellow page directories and didn’t know if one or any was effective.
In my mind a retail business like this might still have some prospects finding them through the yellow pages. Although I’d bet the number is a small one I wasn’t comfortable telling the client to entirely cut all yellow page advertising the first year. I thought it would be good to readjust his focus and produce better ads for one more year to test each book we were in and create ads that had ways for us to track their success in a few ways.
In one book we cut one of the ads from a large ad to the smallest ad possible ad plus the line listing. This ad looks like this: Yellow Pages Retail Advertising.
The next yellow page advertising campaign we created for the client is where we actually went big and really focused on standing out and being different than the competitors. Isn’t this what you are supposed to do in advertising? In order to make the yellow page advertising work for my client we needed to go big or go home. So we broke out of the mold of typical yellow page advertising.
Here are the ads we ran in one campaign in one book:
1. Full Page Inside Front Cover Yellow Page Ad
2. Half Page Yellow Page Ad – listed under Carpet & Rug Dealers
3. Quarter Page (dollar bill ad) Yellow Page Ad
4. Half Page Yellow Page Ad
So what are some of the none traditional items we added to this campaign to go big and shoot for success?
- We advertised big ads through out the book for the opportunity to grab people’s attention more than once
- We created ads that used white background to standout more than the yellow ads
- We took the inside front cover and used a bold image and statement to grab people’s attention
- We used bold headlines and whitespace to set these ads apart (clean and organized ads are rare in the yellowpages)
- We promoted not only the website, but also social media
- We made an offer for a free downloadable eBook for Top Tips for Buying Wood Floors
- We used a customized landing page focused only on the ads in this book so we can track how many people go to the ad specific page on the site (it was not promoted anywhere else so this the ad is the only way to get to this page)
So what was the real thing we did here? We set up a way for our client to build their brand and to track which ads worked and which yellow book worked best. This will allow the client to know once and for all if their yellow page advertising is working. If at the end of the year they have no one commenting on the ad (when in the store), calling the tracking number, going to the tracking landing page, downloading the eBook, bringing in the coupon in the back of the eBook then we can say for sure if yellow page advertising works or doesn’t work. Advertising is expensive so test, track and measure the results so you can make a better decision next year.