Advertising?

[George Elsmore]

I would say 50 to 60% of our work is out of yellow pages

so you could say i disagree with you i suppose it depends on how much you pay for your ad i pay £3K plus

George

[Shane Drew]

Ryan, I gave up yellow pages in 96. A complete waste for me. I found anytime I did get an enquiry, they were ringing everyone on the page or section anyway so you had a low % of success.

I don’t advertise at all now.

All my work is referal. Because I don’t advertise, I’ll do a freebie for a client that I really want. Especially if it will lead to a lot of work. When I see a project that needs a lot of signs to be redone, I’ll see the management and make mention that the signs are a bit daggy, offer to quote them on replacements, and offer the least expensive sign to create, for free, if they want to get the job redone.

One of my biggest clients approached me for a lot of little signs, so I offered to do the first one for free as an opportunity to show him the quality of my work, without him having to have any risk. I’ve had that client for 9 years.

Local advertising in the paper here for a small advert is about $260 per week. I know then that I can giveaway $260 work of signage before I am spending more than it will cost me to advertise. $260 worth of material is a fair few signs.

The only thing is you have to know that your potential client is worth investing in the free sign for.

The other thing is I do free signs for local community groups that have a high profile in the community. I get a bit of work from that, certainly repays the investment.

I also do free signs for my major clients to donate to their kids sports functions etc. They never forget you for that. Most of my major clients that I do this with never even ask me for a quote now.

Hope that helps mate

[Aaron & Chris]

Hi

I agree, yellow pages was a waste of time for us also, I think we had two enquiries from people whao wanted something for nothing, and as said previously you can tell who is price surfing through the pages!

We got a better response from our leaflets, but we offer leaflets and business cards in our service so naturally that had an impact in it’s own market.

We had simple graphics on the van to start with which did nothing then we did a major job on it which was lets say bright and got a few bits of work, looked o.t.t though. We have just redone it yesterday to a happy medium which we think will do th trick..who knows.

Fact is if you are good at what you do and you treat your customers right, word of mouth out weighs any other form of advertising for us.

Just my opinion mind!

Aaron.

[Dorian Marks]

word of mouth
own effort (flyers, mail shots, sponsorships, etc)
yell low pages on-line
yell low pages
our website (no ad-words just a listing) 3/4 of the hits come from google followed by Yahoo then MSN.

[David Rogers]

Yellowpages accounts for about 30% of all enquiries.
65% repeat & referals – 5% Website

YP is handy for keeping you ‘on the map’, but it’s mainly low value dross as it’s what the public in general flick through.

Website is good if you’re prepared to either PAY to get good rankings & links, or work hard to achieve the same results by submitting it to every directory & search engine you can. I currently get great hits (ranked 1st to 5th) in Yahoo, Ask (Jeeves) and a couple of other minor search engines. Google on the other hand – I just get the ‘In Your Area’ at normally #3 company and don’t appear in the frst few pages.

A good check is to type “Signs xxxxxx”, xxx=your locality.
I’ve read meta tags are on the way out these days – most robots will trawl your entire site (mainly index page) so having the right protocols in your robots.txt is always a bonus!

Word of mouth & referals beats all – a good job (not necessarily cheap) goes a LONG way to fostering long term relationships, contracts and spin offs to their contacts & business partners. And to always make the customer feel special..not ‘special’.

[Mark Tuffin]

I agree Word of mouth & referals beats all i get 60% from Yellow pages,
but you have to put up with the waste of time calls & people just phoneing
for the cheapest quote rather than quality of work,business pages i did this year and it was a complete waste of money.I also did thompson before that but that was a joke too.
Mark Tuffin

[Martin Forsyth]

I find word of mouth/referrals is by far the biggest source of my work.

Also, a mailshot, followed by a phone call is good too.

I do advertise, but only so my name is seen constantly, not really as a method for obtaining work, although occasionaly I will get someone saying they saw my ad in…..

[steve geary]

I agree with a lot of what Shane said.

For me word of mouth is about 80% and that’s usually the work that I want.
Yellow pages are a waste for me, but I’m still in them. I defiantely didn’t get a return on that investment, although i believe it got my name around a bit.

I believe direct mailing would work to targeted customers, but i haven’t done it yet.. same goes with cold calling. A lot of people recommend those two.

[Hugh Potter]

i’m on yell.com, but have no real intention of going for anymore than a lineage ad in yellow pages,

what works for me is word of mouth, and new custom thru my walkabouts,

i don’t really see it as cold calling, i simply walk into EVERY business in the street, town or industrial area, briefly introduce myself and my company, explaining that i’m just poping round to everyone since i’m not yet in the yellow pages etc, ask if i can leave my flyer and business card with them, and leave, dont push it, if they want something, you’ll know about it very quickly !

my last walkabout, about 4 weeks back, produced 3 jobs there and then. a further 2 in the following 4-5 days. as well as a number of quotes pending a response, already had several referrals too !

local advertising has produced little, though the one sale i had thru it, has just produced a little lead off the side which is proving to be a bit better !!

had at least six people say they saw the signs on the car.

[Jill Marie Welsh]

#1 letter your own vehicle…in your best work
#2 Sign at your shop…make it look great.
#3 Word of mouth/referrals
#4 Website (wish I had one)
#5 I have a one-line YP ad that I get free for having a biz phone
(mostly price shoppers/tire kickers call that)
#6 community involvement (not free signs, but give your chosen cause a price break)
#7 the dreaded cold call
#8 put GOOD LOOKING biz cards everywhere (store bulletin boards etc)
Love….Jill