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Let Your Fingers Do the Walking—Or, the 411 on the Internet Yellow Pages

August 18, 2008 Once upon a time, life was simple, and when you wanted to find a phone number, you looked in the phone book. (We used to call Directory Assistance until those old TV commercials from the 1970s castigated us for calling Directory Assistance to get numbers we could just easily find in the phone book.) Now, if you’re like me (and I know I am), you get as many as five different phone books, all of which have somewhat different listings, which can make what used to be a very simple task inordinaterly frustrating. Even my “Talking Phone Book” has nothing to say about some numbers I need to track down. No wonder I find myself increasingly going online to get phone numbers.

And I am not alone. One eMarketer Daily e-letter last week discussed the Internet Yellow Pages and how it is the reference of choice for folks in the 25–64 age range—which is quite an age range! No wonder 89% of folks in that range said they used the Internet Yellow Pages. I bet that number would go up even more if you changed the age range to 10–99. They also provide bullish forecasts of Internet Yellow Pages revenue.

For years, the print Yellow Pages was an imperfect but fairly reliable way to find local businesses for a variety of purposes. Need to make restaurant reservations? Look in the phone book for the number of the restaurant. Need a dentist? Check the book under “Dentists.” An electrician? A plumber? Likewise. Sure, every once in a while it took some effort to figure out the often abstruse Yellow Pages categories—for some reason, bars and night clubs used to be listed under “Saloons”; perhaps the editor of the Yellow Pages was obsessed with the Old West—but even if you got a recommended name from someone else, you still consulted the phone book to actually find their number. Alternatively, when a phone book was not at hand, we called 411. (Not to be confused with 911, which you call when you are having an emergency, or 711, which you call when you need a Slurpee.)

The Yellow Pages, ultimately, is about giving potential customers the ability to find you, and in some ways the “phone book” issue is the multichannel marketing problem in a microcosm. There are so many different places that people can go to get information that you need to have at least some presence in all of those places to wrangle a sizable audience and potential customer base. Sure, you can advertise in the print phone book—but which one? And if you leave it at that, you are missing all the people who don’t use print phone books. You can advertise on the Internet Yellow Pages, but what about those who simply do a Google search for, say, Albany, NY, plumbers? The top items are Sponsored Links—which conveniently appear in Google Maps by location. If you’re not a sponsored link, you tend to appear toward the bottom of the list. And most people tend to rely on the top few Google hits.

And then potential customers may simply do a Google search on your company name, which means you had better have a Web presence—or even a dedicated search engine optimization strategy.

Posted by Richard Romano on August 18, 2008 | Comments (3)