6
Aiming Your Company at the Bottom of the Barrel
I REMEMBER THAT 25 years ago I loved leafing through three big books: Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Big Book of Amazing Facts, and the Yellow Pages. Maybe it was my lack of friends in third grade or avoidance of people commenting on my bulbous head, or just a general interest in things that made me want to go through them. I would sit there for hours.
Fast-forward to the present day. The encyclopedia has been replaced by Wikipedia, the big book is now called the Internet, and the Yellow Pages are called Google. Yet many businesses and phone directory sales reps continue to use these big hunks of paper and try to justify it. I’ve had this debate with many people about businesses using tools like the Yellow Pages. Most people say it is a great doorstop, booster seat, or a thing to beat people with when they don’t pay up on a gambling debt. But let’s look at the case that most people say justifies using them, “They work in some markets! People still use them! Like old folks, shuts in, and people who are still locked into AOL contracts!”
So, let’s roll with that—people who still potentially use them. I have a few issues with this way of thinking.
• You are aiming at the bottom of the barrel (the Hierarchy of Buying) - As you can see when you look at the hierarchy, even people who use the Yellow Pages on occasion will only go to them if they don’t already have a service provider, they don’t know anybody who could perform the service, don’t know anyone who knows anyone, and has never even heard of anyone in the field. So no relationships, no word of mouth, nothing. And even if someone got to that point, you would still have to get noticed.
• Paper spam - E-mail spam works on the premise that if you blast it out to a million people, a fraction of a fraction may be in the market for the product and a fraction of that may even click. Phone directories work on this same premise. Per year, 1.6 billion pounds of paper are used to produce the 500,000,000 U.S. directories that go in the post. You may be in the market for one of the 2,000 categories of businesses that are listed. It’s paper spam at its finest! You didn’t opt in, the majority of people don’t use it, many do not even take it out of the plastic; instead it ends up in landfill, might get recycled, or thrown at random phone company trucks that drop them off. Sadly, I don’t see the books going opt-in, because like most things in the print industry, advertisers are charged based on bloated circulation numbers. And I estimate the number of people who would actually ask for it are 14, give or take 12.18
• Price/competition sensitivity - The lower down on the hierarchy of buying you are, the most you are up against bargain shoppers and competition. The thing that I have heard the most from former advertisers was that even when they got calls from their ad, it was usually people looking for the lowest price. This is because you have not built any clout or trust with the potential customers and you instantly make yourself a commodity. Or even worse, people call who are trying to sell you something, because what better way to sell somebody who advertises in the Yellow Pages than with a cold call.19 It also becomes a competition of who can have the most “aaaaaa’s” in their legal name just to rank as first in their section or sales reps telling you that you need to buy a bigger ad than your competitor that is right beside you. It fascinates me that businesses pay good money to be listed next to all their local competition.
• Lack of updates - Because ads come out from a provider once a year, as soon as your ad is printed it becomes stale. No testing on which ad converted to leads is better unless you plan on doing it on a year-to-year basis. That would mean to do a proper test using three different ads it would take you years to get any comparable data. It’s like walking from Los Angeles to New York to see how your product is doing.
• A dying market, literally - Through my totally nonscientific opinion I am going to go ahead and guess that the amount of people who use a phone book to look for a service provider goes up with the age demographic. Even senior citizens are ditching them to go online. According to PEW Internet and American Life Project, 45 percent of senior citizens over the age of 70 are online, and even 20 percent of those over 76 are surfing the interweb tubes. The average life expectancy is around 80, so I am not sure whom you are aiming for. Those over 80? Go get em! Just make sure you buy the big ads with the large fonts.
I understand that there is still a lot of money to be made by businesses that aim for the bottom, when people have exhausted every other resource. But even those people are using Google at that point.
The Better Bottom of the Barrel
Considering that Google owns or controls the entire world, I should probably touch on them, but they may be listening, or may even already know what I am about to type.20 The comparison between the Yellow Pages and Google is so far off that I regret putting them together in the survey. The theory still holds true—which is that you only go searching for something if you don’t know the answer already. If I already have a lawyer, I don’t go and search Google for another one. But the tools that Google offers for advertisers from click-through tracking to conversion rates to keyword statistics have changed the world of advertising and cannot be compared to the Yellow Pages. So if you must do some kind of advertising I suggest learning the ins and outs of Google AdWords.21
The flip side to using AdWords is placing them on your site to make some money. It is a simple enough concept—your site has content and the ads are matched to the content, and when someone clicks on an ad you get paid from a few cents to a few dollars depending on the topic. This is fine for web sites that are purely informational and where there is no person or company attached to it that is trying to position itself as an authority in a marketplace. However, you need to think twice about placing these words on your site or blog. For example, a copywriter friend of mine decided to place AdWords on her site, which is also where potential clients come to learn about her and to hire her. I asked her why she had the AdWords on the site and she mentioned that if it made her a little extra money, then what was the harm? I replied that there are multiple things that are hurting her (or you, if you have AdWords on your site).
One concern is that you are sending people away from your site. People leave sites prematurely enough as it is, so you do not need to show them a way out. Is it really worth 6 cents to send someone away from your site? A potential client who is potentially worth hundreds of dollars to you? You can’t even do the “open a new window” trick when they click, which would open the site from the ad in another window, leaving your site open. This violates the Google AdWords terms of service.
Another issue is that ads can show competing products—which is good for the competitor and bad for you. Not to mention that you are lending your credibility to whatever that ad is, because the ad is on your site it is almost an endorsement. The ads are blended so well that they almost look like they are a part of your site. This makes it look pretty but can play with the customer’s perception.
If you are aiming for the bottom of the hierarchy of buying, then Google AdWords is a great tool. But I would rather aim higher.
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