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Where is Internet Marketing Going? My Answer - Who Uses the Yellow Pages?!
But I don’t know how. But I’m not sure what to do. But it’s too expensive. But I don’t need to because I have a (insert product name here) and I get all of my traffic from people in my store. But, But, But……STOP. As I always like to say, get the Buts out of the way.
Ask yourself this question “When was the last time I looked in a phonebook?”. Google and other search engines are now the Yellow Pages of the world. “But that’s only for products that have a National appeal” you say? The answer - Absolutely Not.
How do I know this? Let me ask you this question “How can a local restaurant owner make over $95,000 in 2 months, with a $50 advertising budget, without cooking a single meal or having customers come to his restaurant?” True story. How can this story be yours?
So what next?
1. Learn what is available to you in your local area. Internet Marketing is not as difficult, expensive or irrelevant as you think. How do you find someone? Google your local area and the term “internet marketing” or “seo” or “internet advisor” i.e. internet marketing santa rosa
2. Watch what is happening on the search engines. Go google yourself or a word that people would search for when looking for the products or services you provide. Where are you in the Search Results? If you are not to be found you have just lost potential customers
3. You can do a lot of research to determine what to do next or do what I suggested in topic #1 above. People call me all the time and I give them fre.e information on what they can do and I give them access to low cost and even fre.e resources to get them started. And I don’t make a single dime.
4. TAKE ACTION. Without this last step you’re finished. Hang up the hat, take down the shingle, call it a day, whatever….because you will be out of business soon. My formula for success is: Desire-Action = Frustration, But Desire+Action = An opportunity to LEARN.
The world has evolved, have you? If you do not evolve, where will you be in the next 6 months or 6 years? Internet marketing and search engine optimization is changing how we do business right now and those who adapt, evolve and take action will win. The question is, Will You?
Tags: county, designer, e-volvenow, e-volvenow.com, evolvenow, francisco, internet, kithcart, mark, marketing
Comment
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Comment by LisaF. on November 3, 2009 at 3:43pm - I know you wrote this a long time again but it's soooooo true. I just had to laugh at the thought of the Yellow Pages. :)
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Comment by Connie Brand on March 30, 2009 at 12:19pm -
interesting... this came into my email box recently -- from the industry's POV:
"FORRESTER RESEARCH:
Consumers Use Print Yellow Pages
Most to Find Business Listings
On January 27, 2009, Forrester Research released findings based on data from 4,700 U.S. consumers gathered as part of its North American Technographics® Media, Marketing, Consumer Technology, Healthcare, and Automotive Benchmark Survey, Q3 2008. The Forrester findings revealed that:
There's a disconnect between the sources consumers rely on for local news and information versus those they rely on for business listings, which explains in part the origin of the widely-held misperception that "everyone's online".
75% of the people who don't use the internet and 66% of the people who do use the internet still use the Yellow Pages directory to find local business listings.
When asked "Which resource(s) do you use to find listings for local businesses?", survey participants responded:
Online Consumers* Offline Consumers**
Yellow Pages, Print
66%
74%
Yellow Pages, Internet
34%
Internet Search Engines
31%
Newspapers
22%
36%
Multiple Responses accepted
*Online Consumers: Those who go online at least once monthly
**Offline Consumers: Those who go online less than once monthly
These facts brought to you as an advertiser and consumer service of The Association of Directory Publishers"
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Comment by Kevin Cesarz on March 30, 2009 at 8:20am -
Take a mental picture because piles of Yellow Books might be a thing of the past by as soon as next year.
http://klcesarz.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/dead-trees-in-the-hallway/ The expense is mind-numbing - cost of ads, printing, distribution, etc.
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Comment by Connie Brand on March 22, 2009 at 10:45pm
- I still spend ad dollars on the YP because clients still use it when looking for someone local, and I focus on custom work. When it stops working, I'll be happy to drop it. I suspect lots of others feel the same way. I believe in diversification of marketing techniques, and results-driven decisions, not just trends. Another example, one of my client's GA stats demonstrated the majority of referral links came from the newspaper website. Not a good time to drop the paper's adverts, even if they may go out of business or go online only eventually.
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Comment by Mark Kithcart on October 30, 2008 at 4:41pm -
Good Stuff Robin! I saw the post from Joe Coots and knew immediately that he had been hiding somewhere. I don't want media of any type to go away. But you can only bury your head in the sand for so long.
Why is the NY Times is such financial straights? Yes, money mis-management is one issue but there is the whole underlying issue of Ad Revenues dropping in older media channels.
We can dance around this and deny it if we want to folks but then you will end up wondering what happened in a couple of years and how "everything passed you by".
Locally I work with a group of radio stations (5 total) that reach 50% of the marketplace in Sonoma County (that equates to about 250,000 people). They have seen some advertising drops from various large scale businesses. But they didn't sit around and wonder why. They went out and asked where people were shifting marketing dollars and why. Once they had their answer they have invested heavily in interacting with the listener base online and offline by synergystically developing a complimentary approach to value advertising in various channels.
Wake up and EvolveNow......in case you wondered where the company name came from.
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Comment by Robin on October 30, 2008 at 3:27pm -
To support Mark's point check this out see below. Per WebProNews I cut and pasted the following below plus the comments:
What the Data Shows
While most people still use a variety of different methods to find a local business, the study found what people seem to prefer as their first choice for doing so:
1. Search Engines (31%)
2. Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
3. Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
4. Local Search Sites (11%)
» View Large Image
Last year's numbers had Print Yellow Pages at 33% and search engines at 30%. When it comes to online habits of consumers, the study shows that more people turn to the Internet Yellow Pages sites than the Local search sites like Google Maps and Yahoo Local, but I suspect the reason for this is that they don't have to go to the actual local search sites to get the same results.
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Comment by Joe Coots on September 30, 2008 at 2:45pm -
As a designer who works for a major Yellow Page company (ps we are on the web as well as in print) you would be very surprised to know how much use they actually get. Think about this, after a night on the town you drink just a bit much and get arrested. Where do you turn to get an attorney or Bail Bonds agency to get you out? No Computer access. Finger do the walking. Want to get the number of a local Auto shop? Some may not be on the web so you open the book. A recent batch of research in the industry found the Pages are where people go for local information for lifes largest purchases and even though we are an internet society the numbers for Yellow page usage are up from just 10 years ago.
Personally I was a bit surprised.
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Comment by Raji on September 25, 2008 at 10:01am - That's a good point about text size. Didn't think about that! Hey, I smell a marketing idea.
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Comment by Mark Kithcart on September 23, 2008 at 11:14pm
- Also I was speaking to my grandma who lives in Angier North Carolina. She's 86 and won't use the yellow pages - she can't read them. So she gets on Google because she has made the text in her browser large enough for even her to read.
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Comment by Mark Kithcart on September 23, 2008 at 11:12pm
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Hopefully where you live will make it into the internet age. It sounds somewhat primitive. I used to have a girlfriend in college that lived in Morgan Hill and it was a little bit of a throwback. No malice intended....
The best thing I can say is thankfully, even on dialup, Google is quick!
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