The Truth About Yellow Page Advertising

Aloha Fellow Rainers,

As we are building our business, whether you are an Agent, Lender, etc., we always look for the best ways to promote and advertise ourselves.  There are so many forms of media to choose from, you wonder where you can get the best ROI- Return On Investment.

I've been in mortgage for a few years, but prior to that I sold yellow page ads so I would like to share with you the truth behind yellow page advertising from someone who both sold it and advertised in it:

With yellow page advertising, there are 2 types of ads:

1) An "In-Column" ad where your company name falls alphabetically in the phone book

2) A "Display" ad, where the bigger the ad, the closer to the front of your business category you appear.  So a Full Page ad in the Realtor section of the phone book will be the first ad shown, unless there are other full page ads in which seniority will push you ahead.

In Hawaii, a display ad will start at around $300 a month for a business card size color ad, but of course quarter-page, half-page, and full-page ads will be displayed ahead of you.  So chances are if you are not spending around $1000 a month for a full-page ad, you will get lost in the sea of ads. 

Now Yellow Page reps are trained well to sell.  They will push ROI during their sales pitch as they try to get you to purchase the display ad.  "For $1000 a month, your competitor with a full-page ad gets X amount of calls a month.  If you received X amount of calls, how many would you be able to convert into sales.  And how much is each sale worth to you..."  Before you know it, the argument is convincing enough to invest!

Well, knowing what I knew, when I first got into mortgage I registered a business name that started with an "A".  I purchased an "In-Column" ad in 2 phone books at a fraction of the cost of the full-page display ad.  There is a chance that this technique might push you ahead of the full page display ads, depending on how the phone book lays out.  In 1 book, I ended up being the first ad!  In the other book, I got stuck behind all the full page display ads.  Pretty good gamble, I thought.

Phone Book Pros:

• The phone book is distributed to nearly every home
• People only look at the phone book when they are are ready to buy, so if they do look up your ad they are already motivated to move forward

Phone Book Cons:

• With the popularity of the Internet, Google, etc., less people use the phone book. Maybe the older folks still use it. 
• Yellow page shoppers will do just that..."shop".  You will not be the only one they call
• You are stuck with the ad contract for the whole year.  If it doesn't work the first couple of months, you can't pull the ad!  So if you got bad placement, you are screwed for a year...

Did Yellow Page Advertising work for me?

Of course I was biased because I sold a lot of ads to a lot of businesses, and for most of them it did work.  But businesses that benefit most from yellow page advertising are Florists, Plumbers, Carpet Flooding, Locksmiths, Auto Repair... basically purchases that may not be THAT expensive or/and you need it right away.  And you may not know somebody in that industry (how many plumbers pass out their business cards!) so you look through the phone book.

I did get some calls, but only the first couple of months when the phone books were distributed.  After that it collects dust on the shelf for a year!  Unfortunately the calls I did get were from people who already got rejected from the bank they go to, so there was only so much I could do by the time I got the call... which wasn't much!

NO!  The ads did not work for me, and after the first couple months I no longer received calls, and I still had to pay for the next 10 months!  But this was just my experience...

With newspaper, radio, etc., you could at least try it for a while, and if it doesn't work you can pull out.

I hope this helps you as you look to market your business!  Feel free to comment and share forms of advertising that may or may not have worked for you.

Aloha,

Pete Castillejos

Specializing in:

Hawaii Mortgage Refinance, Hawaii Real Estate Mortgage Loans