This white paper discusses the disadvantages of enrolling in and using Yellow Pages as an effective advertising and marketing medium, both in print and online; as well as the subsequent benefits of working with a firm whose expertise and competence lies principally in online marketing.
1. With Yellow Pages, a business must enroll in both its print and online services simultaneously.
With the major shift in the past decade to online advertising and marketing from consumer and business perspectives, Yellow Pages now forces businesses to subscribe to its print advertising services in order to subscribe to its online services, and vice versa; therein, businesses are forced to split their budget between two contrasting marketing methods, greatly reducing ROI. To make matters worse, businesses must commit to an entire year of advertising and marketing with YP.
2. Primarily, Yellow Pages outsources their online services to third-party providers. Conversely, an online agency like Enlightened Media is personally committed to and invested in the success of its clientele.
The Yellow Pages Outsourcing Affiliate Program offers off-shore representatives to monitor and maintain your business’s account. The many disadvantages of such an arrangement include but are not limited to having an account manager: who is not personally or emotionally invested in the success of your business, who cannot be a dedicated and hands-on resource for your business, and who will not be able to offer the best customer service possible. With an online agency, however, your business has direct and instant access to a specific account manager who can make himself or herself available to you 24 hours / 7 days a week, and who knows your account inside-and-out.
3. With an online agency, your Return on Investment tends to be much faster and more instantaneous than with an outlet like the Yellow Pages.
It is much quicker to get started on a marketing campaign when working with an online agency. If a business decides it needs to ramp up its marketing and advertising efforts with an ad-buy online, the online agency can move immediately and almost always deliver results within the same day. Furthermore, internet marketing and advertising through a dedicated online agency has the potential to offer cumulative results; i.e., as your site spends more time online, and as you drive more traffic to your site through your advertising, search engines will trust your site more and benefits, such as more preferred placement in search engine results, will slowly build on each other.
4. Businesses receive wide-ranging consulting when doing business with an online agency; whereas, with a company like the Yellow Pages service is inclined to be more one-dimensional and less aggressive in its tactics.
A reasonably-sized online marketing and advertising agency has the benefit and the capacity of being able to diversify its services, more so than a big conglomerate like the Yellow Pages. An agency like Enlightened Media can choose to focus its priorities on methods it has mastered, such as:
PPC (Pay-per-click advertising). Landing page development.
Conversion optimization. Call and lead tracking.
Social advertising. Facebook advertising. Mobile advertising.
SMO (Social media optimization). Lead generation.
Website builds.
5. Advertising and marketing with YP tends to be much more expensive than with an online agency like Enlightened Media.
When partnering with Yellow Pages a business must pay a series of costs throughout the duration of its subscription, including initial costs, monthly hosting costs, outsourcing costs, and costs for additional services. Additionally, when comparing pricing in terms of how many people would see your ad per dollar spent, online advertising will almost always provide better value. Lastly, working with an online agency is more cost-effective because your business is not paying for the account to be outsourced, as with Yellow Pages; and so, your business is not paying two sets of markups.
6. In addition to the above advantages of working with an online marketing and advertising agency, with a firm like Enlightened Media you have the added benefit of working with aGoogle AdWords Certified Partner agency.
To become a Google AdWords Certified Partner agency, one must pass rigorous exams that test one’s knowledge of Google products, advertising best practices, and campaign management. AdWords advanced certification exams test one’s expertise and specialized knowledge of AdWords features and concepts. If your business chooses to work directly with a Google Partner agency, you reap the benefits of working with an agency which is:
- Shaping the future of AdWords and other Google business solutions.
- Among the first in the world to try new Google features and products.
- Up-to-date with industry insights, case studies, and fresh marketing resources directly from Google.
7. Print advertising is essentially dead.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that now more than ever when a consumer or prospective client is looking for a particular good or service, he or she turns to the internet (i.e., search engines) to locate or discover what he or she is looking for, as opposed to using an actual Yellow Pages book. This fact, coupled with the ever-dwindling readership of traditional print publications, signals the end of an era for print advertising.
