Yellow Pages are the most competitive Media. It’s the only Media where you are positioned side by side with all of your competitor’s adverts.
And it’s expensive.
It is not like regular advertising that you can cancel after a month if you find out it is under performing. You have to sign a contract for what is essentially an annual lease of the space. You can’t make changes in your ad until next year after if has gone to print and been distributed.
In Yellow Pages you can’t choose where your advert appears on the page. If your ad lands in the crease response can plummet to only 10% of what
it could have been.
Yellow Page Sales people want to design your advert, but they have no training, experience, or idea of what to put in the advert. They will give you bad advice like; you need more blank space in your ad. But I’ve never had a customer respond because of the blank space or air value in my ad. It gives them no reason to respond.
The design factory at Yellow Pages is doing thousands of adverts and has less than 20 minutes total to design and layout your advert. The layout alone takes about 15 minutes which leaves only about 5 minutes to design your ad from one of a few basic templates used on all the advert. Yellow Pages goal is to sell the space and have businesses compete on size and colour not on design. Blending in with all the other adverts, and letting the design factory design your advert like this is the formula for a disastrously unprofitable advert.
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You have to catch the reader’s eye, your ad must jump out from the page, stand out from the crowd, and the impact must be there the moment they look at the page. Text alone may not achieve this. You have an opportunity to capture the readers attention before your competitors, giving you the chance of that all important first call.
When creating a powerful message you have to get across what is most important for your customers and how you can potentially solve their problems better than your competitors. You need to detail what makes you the best value, and the provider of choice. Your headline needs to attract and hold attention while, your body copy needs to outline meaningful, unique benefits that target your ideal prospects most important emotional wants.
You have now got your customers attention and confidence with your message and they should read the rest of your advert. The supporting copy needs to back up what you have already said. This is a good time for you to highlight your qualities of honesty, integrity, quality, value and good customer service.
Your Yellow Pages advert needs to look the part; it needs to show quality, professionalism and value. The information in your advert should match your target customers emotional wants and train of thought. The format needs to be in a proper psychological sequence, asking the right questions in the right order just like selling face to face has a psychological sequence.