Phone Books Yield to Internet Search   

It’s official: More consumers are going online to search for local shopping information instead of their phone books. The reason? The vast majority are finding better sales and discounts offered online than from offline retail stores and catalogs. (BizRate Research study).

A new study from Kelsey Group and conStat revealed that 70% of US adults utilize the Internet before purchasing products and services available locally (Kelsey Group and conStat).

The Yellow Pages (YP) has suffered the most from the print to online migration, but newspapers will soon yield to the Internet as well, though currently on par with the Internet in terms of consumer influence.

No longer an anticipated theory, the Internet as the premier shopping resource is changing local advertising as we know it. "Traditional local advertising media must find ways to evolve or risk losing dollars to the new advertising options available to local and small businesses," says Neal Polachek of the Kelsey Group.

While some YP are taking their directories online, some consumers are complaining of stale and out-of-business listings far too often. Local search advertising no longer means just an online YP directory. There are an increasing number of local search advertising products cropping up in the market. The best empower advertisers to choose the verticals most relevant to their products and services.

These and other studies reveal that local businesses are discovering just how profitable online advertising can be compared with print advertising. One case in point recently reported in a search engine marketing article at ClickZ.com: One small business owner in Massachusetts was spending $600 dollars a month on two YP ads which were only generating about five phone calls per week. He began a very basic paid search campaign with Google and Yahoo! and within a few weeks, those ads were yielding him 10 times better ROI than his YP ad. The paid search campaign was costing him just $130 a month and was yielding 25 calls per week!

If your business can benefit at all from localized advertising, make sure you build a Web site (if you don’t already have one) and begin placing some local search advertising. If you just simply can’t be bothered with a Web site, at least get a “business card” ad – a simple one-page overview of your business that you develop and is usually offered for free to advertisers – from local search outlets like WeAreNetwork.com.

Consider all the potential customers out there who have already scrapped their YP for search engines. Using search advertising will help more prospects find you more quickly and easily. Your Web site will educate them better than a YP ad meaning that once they contact you, the purchase cycle will be shortened. Giving local search advertising a try could turn out to be more profitable than you ever imagined.