High-Performance Yellow Page Advertising

The Six Key Elements
of High-Performance Yellow Page Ad Design.

Always use professional-looking, clutter-free design.

Most consumers form an opinion about your company before they ever read one word of your Yellow Page ad. How do they do it? They evaluate your company based on design.

If they see an ad design that is clean and professional looking, they'll assume your company is clean and professional. Sometimes these assumptions are subconscious, but the results are the same.

If a potential client looks at your ad and it looks like a third-grader slapped it together...well, you get the picture.

Today you have a lot of choices when it comes to selecting a designer. Make sure the designer you choose can provide clean, clutter-free, professional looking design. Let's go through some of your options.

When looking to develop a Yellow Page ad that rockets your call volume—crushes your Yellow Page advertising competition you have a few alternatives to choose from. Which one is the best? Your Yellow Page publisher? An ad agency? A friend?

This can be a difficult decision. These days, in addition to the traditional design avenues, there are even about a million self proclaimed "Yellow Page ad design experts" to choose from. Let's examine some of the obvious differences between these many alternatives.

About half of the people that contact our company, do so because they just got a proof from their Yellow Page directory that is hands-down the worst looking ad they've ever seen.

While the Yellow Page directory will use whatever copy you instruct them to use, the design element of your ad is always going to seem amateur. This is because the Yellow Page directory has no incentive to make your ad any better than your advertising competition.

Think about it. If your Yellow Page rep brings you an ad that looks better than all of your competitor's ads, and as a result you get the lion's share of the calls in your Yellow Page heading, what is he going to tell all your advertising competition next year when they all complain about what few calls they got? It is actually in the best interest of the Yellow Page directories to ration out calls on an equal basis based on the one factor that overwhelmingly influences their bottom line—ad size.

Since your Yellow Page directory has little interest in the success of your ad, you probably want to consider an independent designer. With this route, you still have some options.

These days, with the abundance of personal computing, everyone has a friend that can handle their Yellow Page ad. This can be a cost effective approach as long as you're comfortable with your friend crafting a Yellow Page ad that will, in a very real way, determine your income for the year to come. If you are not however, comfortable with this proposition, you will probably turn to either an advertising agency, or a Yellow Page advertising specialist.

While ad agencies do exceedingly well with television, radio, magazines, outdoor and direct mail, most do not handle many Yellow Page ads. The reason their volume for Yellow Page advertising is so minute, is because large ad agencies make most of there money off the purchase of advertising media spots—billboards, television time, magazine and newspaper space.

Ad agencies are equipped to negotiate bargains with various media outlets based on the volume of their business. But this model does not include Yellow Page directories since the vast majority of Yellow Page advertisers are small business owners that find advertising agencies cost prohibitive. This leaves a huge market filled with a wide range of independent Yellow Page ad designers eager to meet your needs.

Still, choose your designer carefully.

Many designers have a narrow agenda. Some are convinced your ad need only "jump off the page". Some designers are really copy writers that want to fill your ad with 101 reasons customers should buy from you. Steer clear of these narrowly focused Yellow Page ad designers. They are generally more interested in selling you what they are good at, as opposed to what you need.

A good way to select a Yellow page designer is to ask for some sample ads and evaluate them objectively by the criteria focused on here. If you look over the designer's samples and they have a strong headline, a sharp focus, eye-captivating artwork, emphasize clear differences, contain relevant copy that covers less than 50% of the ad, and have a clean, professional-looking layout, then I'd say you've found a designer that knows what they're doing.

Master these objectives and you'll have a Yellow Page design that makes your competitors green with envy. We all want to succeed in business, and a powerful Yellow Page advertising strategy is an intricate part of that success.