Poll: Do You Advertise in Phone Book

[pjboden01]

Originally Posted by JawZZ

We now have someone answering the phone full time and it makes life so much easier.

No yellow page ads here either. As far as reception/phone answering, I use a "virtual" phone answering service through an executive suites company. It's cheap, they sound so professional, and my phones are answered no matter what. I don't have to worry about anyone calling in sick or paying vaca time.

[CLARK LAWN]

i am right now but im not going to renew it. cost just keeps going up nd up, now i found out that they are not going to even deliver to homeowners this coming year.

[grassman177]

we still get tons of calls from it and maintain the biggest ad for our services. i dont think it would bea good move to not do this and would very much drop sales. we are also going to market this year more than ever and advertise our website. we want to hit all angles to get as much exposure as we can, while keeping cost of it to a min.

but, i can say the yellow page ads are stupid high. i thin our 1/4 page ad is now about $1800.00

[STIHL GUY]

i looked in the lawn care section of the yellow pages and there were over 75 adds. i cant see what would make my add stand out and be picked above the rest

[Landscape Poet]

I simply think this medium of advertising is not effective anymore and darn sure not a good return on your investment. Couple things to think about - myself and most younger folks do not even use the phone book/yellow pages. If we are interested in looking for something 90% of the time we are going to use the internet - in particular google or yahoo - the most popular search engines. So I think for less money you could start a decent web page - pay bill for keeping it up and use money for google/yahoo add words. You can make the choice how and when your advertising dollars are spent and spent during more key times with more properly directed content. All that vs. a page that will sit in the same book that most of the population really does not use anymore.

Add to that the return on your investment of either the above mentioned or door hangers - I am sure since both my suggested methods you will able to tell if your advertising dollars are working for you with ease - and you would find if you spend the same money doing both of my suggestion and the yellow pages you find a much better return on your money with my suggestions.

Damn yellow page people are just to greedy and overpriced, I think we need a illegal version to start low balling and bring the industry standard down..LOL

[DLAWNS]

I was in the yellowbook for one year....I got approximately two calls and both were price shoppers and didn't get any work. Besides that I had nothing but problems with yellowbook, from the salesperson to the fact that they printed the ad wrong than tried to put it on me. It took an act of congress just to get them to acknowledge the fact that they messed up....I might try a phonebook ad in the future, but I will never use Yellowbook again. I also found it to be way to expensive!

[Mahoney3223]

i advertise in only one book and it's the major book around here and i have a pretty huge ad in landscape contractors and lawn maintenance and i have DEFINITELY seen a ROI. I spend almost $4000.00 a year on it and it generates roughly 5-6x that amount...(i track all my calls )...i have def. grown big time with the advertising

[SangerLawn]

we dont use the yellow pages phone book here

[vanncann]

Originally Posted by DLAWNS

I was in the yellowbook for one year....I got approximately two calls and both were price shoppers and didn't get any work. Besides that I had nothing but problems with yellowbook, from the salesperson to the fact that they printed the ad wrong than tried to put it on me. It took an act of congress just to get them to acknowledge the fact that they messed up....I might try a phonebook ad in the future, but I will never use Yellowbook again. I also found it to be way to expensive!

Don't feel bad I put an add in the YP and paid. When the book came out they forgot to put my add in and would not give a refund. This was in about '92 or '93.

[Vogel-Landscaping]

i had ran an add for about a year also and never made a penny from it. google adwords is my biggest winner in advertising so far! my ad pops up over 200 times a day right now in january to a targeted audience. i can see which search words generate the most impressions of my ad and see how many clicks to my website i get. its great. also have had many calls from it.