What to do when you live in a “Two-Book Town.”
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Nope, we’re not talking about the very small library. We’re talking phone books.
In most towns and cities, you receive at least two telephone books. Lucky you! Well, one directory will always be from your “carrier” –Ameritech or Southwest Bell or any of the other AT&T units that spun off from the Bell System and now, like a puddle of mercury in a corner, are coming back together. Your carrier is…well, the carrier, or provider, of your local land-line telephone service. The other books will be from one or more “independent providers” of the phone book in your area. Should you advertise in both? Well, if there were two roads running through your town, would you have a billboard on one road? Or both? “Both” is the right answer, of course. Within reason.
The good news is the ads don’t have to be the same size. We always ran a dollar bill size ad in our carrier’s Yellow Pages. And we ran an ad one-third that size in the competitor’s Yellow Pages directory, even though current readership surveys here suggested that each book commands about 50 percent of the population that uses Yellow Pages.
The reason for the disparity in sizes is simple. We always had the biggest ad in the Ameritech book, and we were the ONLY display advertiser in the competitor’s book, so we were -by default, almost -already the largest advertiser in booth directories.
Our strategy was to keep those ads running as is until one of our competitors got close (or equal) to those existing sizes, and then –and ONLY then –would we jump up in size just enough to make sure our ad REMAINED the largest.
Another thing we did was track our ads to see which book was most effective for us. I’ll tell you how we did that in my next post.
Questions? Comments?
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