Once we created their website, we tied other web properties to their website to start getting traffic as fast as possible while increasing their presence in their local community.

If you’re looking for a pizza website design firm, contact us to help you get more clients.

However, now that technology hands you literally thousands of results with a single 2-3 word phrase, the question is, “Do we still need the yellow pages and is it the best use of a business’ marketing dollars?”

My opinion is that it really depends. It depends on your overall marketing strategy. It depends on your marketing and advertising budget. It also depends on the ad itself.

One of the considerations you should have before committing to advertise on the costly yellow pages is the media itself. Within the last 7 years or so, a huge population of consumers have gradually moved away from traditional forms of business searching and now go to their cell phones, search engines or their favorite online business directly like Yelp, Urban Spoon, Merchant Circle, and City Search.

Another consideration is the cost of advertisement vs. the return on investment. Unfortunately for most businesses paying for their ads to appear in the yellow pages, their main focus is getting exposure and not necessarily keeping track of the results they’re getting. Chances are, they don’t even know how to track the response on their ads at all.

If you’ve advertised in the yellow pages in the past, were you aware of exactly how many calls or visitors you’ve received because of the ad itself (not including other marketing you were doing at the time). With technology, this tracking process is now possible and isn’t very expensive at all.

Lastly, if you’re looking to advertise in the yellow pages, the ad itself could be the most important aspect to determine if the ad will be successful (or effective at all). For small to medium sized businesses, the luxury of spending money on branding alone may be too costly since resources are often limited. It’s for that reason that you should design your ad to get a direct response from the viewer of the ad.

Contrary to what most advertisers do, you should only have one specific call to action so the viewer knows exactly what to do. The biggest mistake I’ve witnessed has been offering a business phone number, an 800 number, a cell phone number, a fax number, an email address, the physical address, and a website… (I’m exhausted just typing them all). What is the viewer supposed to do next?

Just make it dead simple for them to engage with you. You may try something like this “To Get A Free Marketing Review On Your Website Or Advertising Piece  To Increase Your Response By 87%, Call Now At 800-890-7461”

How did that make you feel? Does it leave you unclear about how to get involved with us? Does is leave you guessing about what to expect when you call? That’s exactly what you want your yellow page ad (and all your advertising and marketing) to instill in your prospects mind.

It’s either that or seeing page after page of ads with no clear benefit or clear call to action.

Have you utilized the yellow pages to get more clients? Do you still use them to find local businesses to shop at or visit?

How can you apply this into your current advertising? I’d love to hear your comments below.

This isn’t a trick question but one that most businesses must consider.

Typical businesses focus on lead generation and spend the most money in this area of marketing. While lead generation is great to focus on in order to increase your sales and profits, many people don’t have a system or strategy to follow once they’ve acquired the new lead.

The other less utilized and often forgotten area of marketing is client retention. Along with lead generation, this is a fantastic profit opportunity.

However, what both have in common in most businesses is not having a system of follow up and engagement that turn a greater percentage of leads and past clients into paying clients once again.

Luckily, there’s still hope.

I want to focus the solution on an underutilized tool that can help in either situation, and I’ll mention to you why it is perhaps the ultimate tool to generating more sales in the most efficient manner.

The solution that I’m talking about is doing teleseminars and/or webinars. For those who don’t understand this technology, a teleseminar or webinar is a way to get many people to connect with you at one time to listen to what you have to offer, both intellectually and your business’ offerings.

The difference between them is that teleseminars are more of a conference call to the multitudes while a webinar adds video to the mix using visual presentations.

So, why do I say this may be the ultimate tool to accomplish deeper relationships with leads and past clients? Because you can address them both at the same time.

Let me paint the picture for you.

Let’s say you do a monthly (or weekly, you decide the schedule that works best for you) teleseminar or webinar and invite all your news leads AS WELL as your current and past clients. This will be on a subject matter that your clients and prospects are interested in including updates to what they’re already familiar with.

The value for your new leads is that you’re offering free training (or paid, but that’s for another time) that is helping them become more educated about what you offer and how it helps them solve their problems. You’re building trust by giving something to them with no strings attached unlike the typical sales call that other businesses do.

The value to your existing and past clients is that you’re adding additional value to them after the sale, staying in contact with them, and further ingraining yourself as an expert in their minds.

Here’s the amazing part about this strategy that very few, if any, marketing methods offer to everyone involved; SOCIAL PROOF!

Since you have both new leads and past clients on the teleseminar or webinar, you can open it up at the end for a Q & A session where they’ll all here each other on the call. New leads will hear past clients talk about their experiences with your service or products which further develops trust.

If your past client John is on the call, he may say something like this “Alex, the email marketing strategy that you implemented for me is generating tons of new sales and it’s only been about 5 weeks. How can I use this new strategy to do the same?”

Do you see the power of this? Your past clients are giving you testimonials live while new leads are listening in. There’s absolutely no better way to accomplish this.

There you have it, a killer way to keep your clients engaged and add amazing value to your new leads without much effort at all. The only drawback that I see to this is you may become addicted to it!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas of how you can start capitalizing one this fantastic opportunity using teleseminars and webinars. They work for virtually every business.

Feel free to contact us for a free consultation where I’ll show you how this strategy can work for you.

What we did is integrate a membership system that allows Ruddy and his team to provide both free and paid-for content in once central place, making it easier for him and his team to streamline content creation and providing easy access to that content.
We also helped him implement a multi-tiered membership ascension model that allows his students to move up in his training in a natural, progressive way.

We created a new interactive community portal for them that provides much needed tools, information & resources to their marketplace as well as the ability to interact with their affinity colleagues & clients. The end result? a new $20,000/ per month income stream for Chicago Office & Commercial. Their invested was quadrupled the very first month!