Where do you advertise? There are alot of free websites now, do you use any? Yell.com and freeindex are 2. Or do you still use the yellow pages and do you get work from it?
Circulars, parish newsletters etc. Never in the newspaper, and the net is a total waste of time, the locals don't trust those. I'm not sure whether I'm still in yell since I told one of there phone jockeys to feck off when he told me a barefaced lie.( he said they were ceasing all free listings, so I would have to pay to keep in)
I never took out the yell one this year only the free listing as they wanted £1650 and could only guarantee me bottom half of first page no higher than 7th place and thought no one is going to phone 7 or 8 companies for a quote, so going to do a year just doing free Internet ads and the local mags see how it goes
With Yell go through the motions and then hold off committing by pleading poverty ......the offers of discount will come.
But do you get the rest of your "investment" back? Do you track where you clients are coming from? Yell.com and pages have become dinosaurs of their time. We only advertise in local magazines, the rest comes from word of mouth and our websites. (We make it easy for word of mouth by adding a postcard - with a discount code - with every small order we dispatch for our clients to give to friends, family etc).
I used to be in Yellow Pages but stopped this year. I advertised in there for about 10 years, gradually increasing the size of the advert each year and found that the response increased accordingly. However all good things come to an end and over the last couple of years the return has not really been worthwhile and then last year when they reduced the size of the book itself it really lost its cost effectiveness. I am hoping to do more with my website this time and spend what few resources I have on that. I also belong to the local BNI and do get a great deal of work from that.
I when to one of them BNI meeting but thought it wasn't for me as going every Friday morning would be problems cause of the kids.
Are you still a member Karin? I have been a member for the last 14 years and would certainly have struggled over the past 18 months if I had not been a member and I would definitely recommend it as a good source of business leads.
No, no longer a member (as said above: run out of 60 seconds) ;-) Still have various good contacts from the group, not just "clients" - "suppliers" as well. Main reason for leaving was the launch of our new showroom: too much to do (still)
Website, Facebook Page, Odd ad once in a blue moon in local paper. And van Seems to have worked for me.....so far
Have spent a small fortune in '11 :cry: website, seo's, van wrapping, local adverts (all in total well over 4k :shock: ) Hope it pays off this yr :?
Well i,m getting pestered by yellow pages at the moment been in their for years, think i,m gonna save myself £155.00 a month, just found out about Google Places just as good as yell.com and its free !!! Think the book is waste of time now , most people use the internet now apart from the much older generation. Search my own name on google and came up as a business on all sorts of sites I never even new about ! Any good sites any one else know about ??
