The Truth About Lawyer Internet Marketing

Yellow page has become a very tricky business. In this post I will attempt to give you some insight from my experience with the yellow pages, what I am hearing from other attorneys and even some reliable statistics on yellow pages vs. Internet usage.

(For a comprehensive analysis for your firm please feel free to call me anytime at 720-985-7945)

Don’t get me wrong-the yellow pages is  a viable way to market a local service business, but in the current world it is often over priced and over rated by the people selling it. Of course, that can be said about many people selling advertising and marketing programs.

10 or 15+ years ago, businesses used to line up at the local yellow pages office (the “real yellow” pages-always associated with the phone company) to buy ads so they could grow their business. It was like trying to get Jonas Brother tickets. You had to get in line early, make the big decision on whether or not your were willing to spend a few hundred dollars a month on the biggest ad in your heading-which at one point was a “half page ad”.

Year after year the yellow pages grew the size of the ads, and admittedly accomplished some very high quality full color ads on paper that was maybe slightly thicker than the paper in a compact bible.

This program often worked very well for attorneys until recently.

Then came cover ads, spine, inside covers, tabs, magnets and even brochures and magazines delivered with the books. Not to mention all of the smaller community books. For example, I believe Dex Media (the YP for Qwest) has as many as 20+ books being delivered in the Denver metro area alone. The Yellow Pages for a long time has been a cash cow with huge profits-up to 60% on each book.

Then competitors like Yellowbook came into many towns and in some cases offered an excellent return on investment for the attorneys and other businesses in their markets. I will not try to explain in any detail how this affected the legal industry, because I know that many of the attorneys could tell that story better than I could.

Then came the search engines, and the shift from using the yellow pages to find local information to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others-but mostly Google.

I worked for Dex Media for a while at their headquarters working with product development and sales. From 2004 to 2005 we more than doubled the revenue Dex generated from Internet marketing, however, that did not make a dent in the lack of growth in the print side of the business-which at the time was a $1.6 billion source of revenue, vs. under $70k in Internet advertising revenue.

Let’s get some facts:

This report came out in October 2008 from TMP Directional Marketing; a reputable company that sells Pay Per Click marketing, Online Yellow Pages and Yellow Pages. They act as representatives for all of the major yellow pages across the country for businesses that need to advertise in multiple states but want one point of contact. They have credibility with me because they have to approach direct advertising from a consultative approach for national and international businesses like Pizza Hut and Porsche, and they have to deliver results to stay in business.

Here is the report they put out from their research last fall:

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) –
TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM)-the largest local search marketing agency…
…announced today the findings of its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, which confirms shoppers still use a variety of online and offline directional media resources to find local business information.
First sources used are Search Engines (31%)
Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
Local Search Sites (11%)
(61% of Searches are online searches-more than twice the usage of the books)
This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked:
Print Yellow Pages first (33%)
Followed by Search Engines (30%).This affirms what most attorneys I talk to are experiencing, and as a result I am seeing many attorneys this year do one of two things:1-Pull their ads from the book

2-Negotiate some pretty amazing deals

3-Get talked into a very bad Internet marketing strategy managed by their yellow pages provider

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) - TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM), the largest local search marketing agency, announced today the findings of its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, which confirms shoppers still use a variety of online and offline directional media resources to find local business information.

First sources used are Search Engines (31%)

Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)

Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)

Local Search Sites (11%)

61% of Searches are online searches

This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked:

Print Yellow Pages first (33%)

Followed by Search Engines (30%).

Bottom Line: It is now very apparent that local search is being dominated by the Internet.

Come back soon for the best ways to capitalize on these drastic market changes-and how to win the negotiation battle with your yellow pages representative.