As a follow on to a recent post about Marketing in Today's Economy, something pretty interesting happened last night that struck me kind of odd but just goes to show that there still may be a market for "ole yellow" after all.
Just after getting home last evening my wife happily carried our new phone books into the lounge, unwrapped them and promptly put the old ones in the recycle bin. I made an off-hand comment about how they were useless and no one uses those any more...
To that remark I was informed in no uncertain terms that people still do use them and not everyone was addicted to searching on Google for Businesses in Perth.
Sensis does promote studies that pronouncing that a user searching in the yellow pages is more likely to turn into a sale versus someone doing research online (Not sure if I can truly beleive these surveys and studies since they are sponsored). There are also generational issues where I'm sure that people over a certain age would use the pages first. So I am indeed wrong, people still do use them, I'm married to somone who uses them.
Sensis has already pretty much conceded defeat to Google in terms of Online Search and Maps.
Personally I see this as the next nail in the coffin for the yellow pages as we know it. True that in some ways that they are a form of inbound marketing, but it's still paid inbound. I would rather set up a good SEM Campaign that includes Organic and Paid Search.
Why spend $25,000 for a half page ad when I can spend a fraction of that and have a 50 or 10 page website where I can actually measure the results in almost real time.
I grew up with the phonebook and the yellow pages...but I'm not wearing clothes from the 70's anymore either.
Have you found a creative way to use them like a massive door stop, or a handly little step stool?
Edit: Just Came Across another blog with some interesting statistics on this very item. The death of print the final days of the phone-book