Do People Still Use the Yellow Pages?

Your a business owner and times have been tough lately. You’ve had the global financial situation, loitering at the door of your shop, scaring all your customers away. You look at your calendar and realise that its that time of year again. Time to cough up the 20 grand for your pathetic, half page yellow pages ad.

You ask yourself, Is it really worth $20,000? Isnt there a better way?

Like expected, you hear that little voice in your head “I know you cant afford it, it may be the last roll of the dice, but you have to do it, there’s no other option, just pay the 20 grand and hope for the best”.

Ok, now hang on a minute. What decade are you living in? I don’t care what you say, the 80’s and 90’s aren’t coming back into fashion. Keep up with the times, dude.

Let me be the one to tell you, if the yellow pages haven’t already been pronounced dead, they sure haven’t got long to go. They simply don’t work as well as they used to.

People don’t use the yellow pages anymore. Well maybe a little but not enough to condone spending 20 grand for a half page ad or 40 grand for a full page.

Customers are moving with the times. As technology develops, people are looking for faster, more efficient ways of finding what they want. For a business to thrive, they need to move with the times also.

Did you know that 79% of Australian’s have an internet connection in their place of residence and 96% of Australian’s have access to the internet in some form or another during their daily lives (i.e. Internet cafes, libraries, schools, mobile phones, etc, etc).

I conducted a paid poll asking this question “Internet Search vs Yellow Pages, what service do you prefer when searching for local businesses?” The results are what you could call “Eye Opening”. Obviously I am slightly biased when it comes to the Internet but the results even shocked me.

80% of the people that took part in the poll answered with Internet Search, while 17% went with yellow pages and 3% chose other services.

Here are the results

As you can see this is a paid poll that cannot be manipulated.

The poll results show that neither male or female are similar with their preferred search method.

There is little variance between age demographics.

As a business owner, I hope this was a bigger eye opener for you than it was for me. I have been into internet marketing for years now, so I’v always known the potential of internet search for offline businesses.

The problem is a very high percent of business owners have no idea. 60% of businesses don’t even have a website let alone know about Optimising their sites to rank in the search engines.

Like Nike always says, “Just do It”. Will be the best move you will ever make for your business.

Tags: dead, dont work, poll, results, seo, survey, yellow pages