The phone book can still be an excellent place for some businesses to advertise. But when businesses don’t get the results they want from those ads they abandon their local directories.
The same is true of all kinds of traditional media – local papers in particular are finding it increasingly hard to attract and retain advertisers.
Part of that is no doubt down to the medium itself.
People are increasingly turning to the Internet to find the services they need – and so advertisers are doing the same or simply ignoring their local phone books and newspapers altogether.
But that isn’t the entire answer.
The biggest problem is not with the medium but with the ads that go into it. Most are carbon copies of each other. The standard idea is make the logo bigger and stick a massive bold phone number in too.
Advertisers know that benefit driven ads get better responses – and the people at the phone book know that too (or at least they should). But if you ask them to help you design an ad you’ll get the same square box, big logo, phone number and a list of meaningless platitudes; “fast, reliable service” or “great quality at an affordable price”.
Everybody says the same thing – and nobody believes it anyway.
My advice to advertising led local media
So what if the phone book took a slightly different route? What if they designed ad templates for small businesses based on quality research? What if they offered articles and tutorials on ad design via their website? What if they held free marketing seminars for small businesses?
Not only would they likely attract more advertisers but the people that did advertise with them would no doubt get better results – turning them into long term customers. What’s more, if Yellow Pages or whoever your local directory company might be, became the trusted resource for small business marketing, they could leverage that trust into additional products and services.
But they don’t. Nor does your local paper.
Help us sell more stuff
Small business advertisers don’t buy ad space for fun, they do it because they have a problem to solve – a need to attract new customers.
Phone books and other print media need to realise that they’re not selling ad space, they’re selling a solution to that problem. The sooner they do, the sooner they can start to arrest the decline in print ad revenues.
How can you apply this idea to your own business? What information could you provide that would help your customers get better results? Feel free to share some ideas in the comments below.
photo: edkohler
