In my early days of advertising sales for a newspaper, one of our biggest competitors was yellow pages. There were multiple books competing in a relatively small market. In fact, I worked at a newspaper that even started its own yellow pages product.
Clearly times have changed for yellow pages. They are doing so much more that an annual directory; a directory that is likely to go away in many markets. Honestly, I'm not sure where my phone books are at my house.
Yellow pages are offer a wide variety of services to help them survive. Among them, yellow pages offer SEO, SEM, text clubs, mobile advertising, web hosting, online directories, and...oh yeah yellow page ads!
Selling against the yellow pages was an important training session. I hired consultants to help sell against yellow pages, with some level of success. The key was pretty simple: sell top of mind awareness (TOMA) campaigns to businesses that would run at a high frequency in the local newspaper. That way if consumers were reaching for a phone book because of a need, they would turn to the white pages and that directory instead of the yellow pages and the ads.
It wasn't rocket science, but it worked. The percentage of referrals to yellow pages for event their best categories was very small, while newspaper readership was strong (and it still is!). As I read an article about the importance of SEO, I started thinking about that old tried and true strategy.
Barry Feldman's from feldmancreative.com writes about the importance of SEO. I don't diminish the importance of SEO by suggesting reps sell against it. While I would sell against it, I would prefer actually sell it as a solution to a customer, and in fact my current company does.
I do think that legacy media like newspapers need to get back to TOMA selling as either a way to combat SEO or to compliment it if you are offering it to customers. The same principle applies to SEO that did with yellow pages. Run high frequency campaigns so that when that go to Google to search, they are searching you specifically instead of your industry type. A specific search is the same as getting the consumer to look your contact info up in the white pages directory instead of being exposed to the open market through yellow pages.
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