I use both the phone books from Telefónica (which are given only to people who have a landline) and the local “shopping guides” such as QDQ - think of them as “the yellow pages published by someone other than Ma Bell and handed out in every house, regardless of whether they have a landline”. The shopping guides tend to be more focused, and often better organized; the categories Telefónica uses have been defined at the national level and categories defined locally can fit local markets better.
If I’m looking for a business it will be either the Yellow Pages or the shopping guide: often, a business’ landline will be listed in the White Pages under the name of the business’s owner (which I’m unlikely to know beforehand) rather than under the name of the business.
If I’m looking for a business it will be either the Yellow Pages or the shopping guide: often, a business’ landline will be listed in the White Pages under the name of the business’s owner (which I’m unlikely to know beforehand) rather than under the name of the business. Lately I tend to avoid the e-pages, because they’re supposed to be the same as the physical copy but, since businesses have the option to indicate which provinces they “work in”, you can be trying to look up local carpenters in Isaba (Navarra) and get listings from Seville :rolleyes:. Yeah dude, I’m sure you’d be happy to come fit my kitchen 1500km away from your shop - for the price of a car!
At home, I never use the phone book and always use the internet. However, for several years now I have kept a phone book in the car, which I find extremely handy. I am finding-places-challenged, so if I’m looking for a place and I don’t know the exact address, I can easily look it up right then, or get the number and call them without having to go through 411 or whatever on my phone. I suppose if the day ever comes that I have a smartphone, then I will no longer need a phonebook in the car, but until then that thing’s a godsend.
They make fantastic parrot enrichment. We have an elderly cockatoo here who, despite being almost deaf and almost blind, can make confetti out of a whole BIG phonebook overnight. Also useful for papier mache and other crafts, since newsprint is becoming rarer.
It’s been more than 10 years since I have opened one. I am annoyed that they keep showing up on my doorstep. I figured the only people who use them are people who are too old to know how to use the onlines.
I use the phone book only when I don’t know what business I am trying to call specifically; despite being quite computer literate I find that the breadth of businesses in the phone book for certain categories is much larger than what I can find with a google search. IE, I would crack open the yellow pages when looking for a plumber, or a handyman, or a few other similar businesses. Never if I need to look up a number for a person or business I already know the name of. Not usually for restaurants either, those seem to be well represented on google.
In practice this results in cracking the yellow pages maybe 1-2 times a year.
Yeah, that’s what my dad used to use them for. He’d teach mom how to shoot the .32 in the basement. Without telling us. That was fun, waking up Saturday morning to hear gunshots from the basement.
Yet, I think a lot of people do just this. I’ve had more than one customer volunteer to me that they called because they liked my YP ad; I assume some others did the same and just didn’t need to tell me about it.
In general, no. You can opt to have your mobile number listed, but it appears to be a bit of a pain in the butt. I don’t know anyone who has actually done it.
I have a bookstore and tea bar. It’s the only bookstore in a 60-mile radius, and the only tea bar of its type in at least a 100-mile radius. My demographic trends younger on the tea, older on the books.
My shop is in a small town of 2,300 people, we’ve had the same phone number for 26 years, and we’re in the main four-block downtown shopping area. I can’t imagine a local not being able to find us.
The yellow pages are for the nearest big city – Billings, MT, with a population of 100,000 is about an hour away. They have their own bookstores, but I’m pondering whether we’d attract their tea crowd.
We have a yellow pages, but I do not think it ever gets opened, even for the pages of coupons in the back of it. It gets stuffed in the junk drawer until the next edition comes along. I am not sure why we do this - habit, I guess.
If we ever need a phone number, or address, we just go online.
I think I’d concentrate on Yelp or similar local rating sites, rather than the yellow pages. I’ve never once contemplated looking in the yellow pages for a tea bar. I wouldn’t even know what to look under if I *wanted *to find a tea bar in the yellow pages. Restaurants, I guess? Maybe?
ETA: Dang, that’s a sweet tea bar! (Google was my friend. You are the only result for the first page, at least, of bookstore and tea bar montana)
I can’t imagine something like a bookstore would be worth paying more than $50/year or so to be in the yellow pages; I suspect they want way more than that. I’d bet the yellow pages get more use for stuff where you need somebody now and you don’t know who - there’s a reason the yellow pages are full of lawyer ads
As the YP buyer for my company, we’ve cut way back, way back. However, we do survey people about their usage. Many still do, specifically to find a business near them without wading thru a gazillion google listing, not when they know the name of the business they want, but rather for a general search for a category near them. We live in a very large, very spread out metro area, and people simply don’t want to leave their near surrounds sometimes.
The other reason is for an emergency type situation, when, again, they don’t have time to search Google listings, but want a 24 hour plumber NOW. (We’re not a plumber)
Another reason to keep some presence is our g-d competitors. When we do a YP review, we think it’s madness to just not appear in some fashion when our competition insists on remaining the damn book. It’s not a decision you can make in a vacuum. Want a Weezil Driver? And everyone in the book has a 3" ad, and we’re not there at all? Not so good. We’ve reduced them to a single listing with no address (we have 4 locations), but rather a general location (Valleywide) which calls a number that asks which location they prefer.
And the last reason? People, many of them, simply don’t know how to do a local search. The other day I asked my BF to find me the # for Chuck’s Auto. He was online at the time. So that’s what he Googled. No city, nothing. There must be a zillion Chuck’s Auto in the world. Until people get to know how to do a local search, we’re in the book. Reduced to a bare minimum, but we’re still there.
Gary, what kind of ad do you currently have? In which categories are you placing the ad? Does the publisher have other offerings (SEO/SEM, social media, AdWords, etc?) What other advertising/marketing do you do?
I would do a no-graphics box ad just to keep your face out front. Sounds like you are in a pretty niche market - not so much that you need to pay for a lot of ad space, but you should at least keep your presence announced. And phone books are more used in small towns than the big city.
Gwendee would likely benefit from a door hanger campaign. Print and delivery on those can be less than $.25 per household and DH’s (with the right message/offer) are pretty effective, far more so than a direct mail campaign or ValPak. At the very least, with DH’s you’re not competing for initial impression eyeball time with a bunch of other ads.
Thank you! I need to get that website updated – we’ve done some improvements and expansions since the pics I posted there. I keep the Facebook page much more up-to-date.
Awesome!
We’ve been running an ad under “New Books” and a listing under “Used Books,” and now that the tea bar has taken off (it’s between 1/4 and 1/3 of our income now), I’m trying to decide if/where to list it. The publisher offers listings on the online version of their yellow pages, but I don’t really care.
Right now we use a lot of free advertising/marketing (Facebook, Twitter, industry directories, Constant Contact newsletter…), limited online marketing, a regular segment on a local radio station, articles in local papers when we can get them (here’s a sweet one that ran a couple of months ago), newspaper ads for special events.
It’s a small enough store that I haven’t experimented with television ads. If I can find a videographer that will shoot me some footage fairly cheaply, I plan to set up a YouTube channel with short tea seminars and do a few promo videos.
