Freelance Marketing question

[HUNT]

Has anyone placed there business in the yellow pages?
If so, have you seen any return on your investment?

What, other than word of mouth and Direct Mail campaign would be the best way to get peoples attention?

Lets talk about this.

[Logo-Mechanix]

Email advertising, I have used that before to target a specific industry and it worked.

[cgmpowers]

I've done the online yellow pages, in fact it provided me with about 4 leads a month when I advertised via them. Now I mainly do online yellow page directories (in fact, I'm still listed but haven't paid in years) and still get a few calls a month.

Now what I will do is post an Ad i the local community newspapers and community magazines. Those always give me my best results!!

Chris

p.s. I don't advertise anymore because I work for a company now and am far too busy to freelance until after the holidays.


Has anyone placed there business in the yellow pages?
If so, have you seen any return on your investment?

What, other than word of mouth and Direct Mail campaign would be the best way to get peoples attention?

Lets talk about this.

[CamarotaDesign]

I'm very interested in this subject too. Where, and how to advertise is something our place is trying to figure out...

We've mainly been seen as a mail distribution center, but now we're branching out, so we can offer full service marketing solutions. On top of that we have in-house capability to do direct mail. So a lot of potential, but unfortunately nobody has much marketing experience, so we havent been seeing a lot of new leads for design. I think we've been targeting the wrong audiences with our direct mailers as well. Any thoughts?

[Jackimalyn]

Just FYI, if you begin publicly advertising freelance, make sure your taxes are in order. Auditors look for that sort of thing because some freelancers don't pay all the proper taxes :eek:

[EC]

The yellow pages never did anything for me, so I finally cancelled it for next year. It did nothing but cost me money. The salespeople will tell you that it's because I wasn't spending ENOUGH money. Whatever.

I have tried various forms of advertising and they didn't work for me. Networking, search engine results, and affiliations have been most effective.

That said, it's going to be different for every business. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, who is your ideal customer? Once you really have that defined, then the answers for where to spend your time, efforts and promotional budget will be much more clear. I think people make the mistake of casting too wide a net and trying to reach everybody.

[balou]

We get about 5 different phone books distributed to us. Never know which one gets picked up the most by potential customers in the area and I can't affort to advertise in all 5.

I also was turned off by their marketing ploy. They sent me an official looking invoice for the yellow pages listing. It wasn't until you read the fine print on the back that said this was not an invoice but rather an offer to advertise. Ick.

[EC]

I know.

Plus, who uses a phone book anymore anyway? I use google for everything. They'll come at you with the "well we have you listed on our website as well" to which I respond, "I check my referrer logs religiously and not once has somebody visited my site by clicking on a link from yours." That get's them all conflusterationed.

The way I got them to stop pestering me, btw -- is when I told them that I have a good clientele and I'm booked several months in advance and only take new clients on via referral. That I don't have an administrative staff and don't want to be pestered with calls from the public. After that, they had no "salesy" come back so it was cancelled immediately.

[budafist]

I hear if you are going to advertise in the yellow pages, you'll fare much better if your company name is at the start of the alphabet. Very few people will go through and call all the way to xyz.

I haven't done it, but just a thought.

[Jeff Fisher LogoMotives]

In 30 years as a designer I have never run a Yellow Page ad or had a Yellow Page listing. Many designers I know have quit advertising in them as well - way too many "tire kickers" looking for discount logo services. In fact, print advertising in general has been a suprisingly ineffective method of promoting my work over the past 25 years.

Edit: After originally writing my post here last night I decided to expand on it - with some appropriate links - on my blog. You'll find the revised version here:

To market, to market, to get design gigs? (http://blog-omotives.blogspot.com/2006/11/to-market-to-market-to-get-design-gigs.html)

- J.

[JustAGuy]

Thumbs up, Jeff, very interesting!

[dots]

online advertising works for me.

[HUNT]

I am starting to think Gorrilla marketing might be more my bag.