If you owned a consumer-facing business in the 1980s the Yellow Pages is where you had to be, or so I am told. Including by several clients now working hard to extricate themselves from those contracts.
Local versions were delivered to homes and business across the country. A mainstay for homeowners, the book was an in-home advertising resource like none before, right? ‘Brick and mortar’ businesses that rely on people calling and walking through the door competed for space in ‘the book.’
Well, obviously, those days are long gone. Disappeared.
First it was bulky computers and cathode-ray monitors with access to ‘the Internet’ in the late 1980s. Then it busted wide open when Netscape released the first ‘browser” and “www” entered the lexicon in the mid-1990s.
Laptops, VPNs and then a mobile phone making cellular calls while also accessing the Internet has become a staple of everyday life.
Yellow Pages are now tossed into the recycling heap. When local consumers need a solution they reach into their pocket for their phone. Their pocket!
Effective local business owners today need to be in those phone results when prospects are looking for what they offer.
Getting atop the results on that phone search isn’t as easy as the 1980s when it was calling your Yellow Pages rep and writing a bigger check.