Does Local Newspaper Advertising Work?

 

Does Local Newspaper Advertising Work?

The other day I was doing some pricing of trades and services classified advertising in local newspapers in the Sydney metro area. I called a number of local papers, and to be honest, was a bit shocked at the price of what seemed like very small ads that did not exactly jump off the page and grab my attention. Lots of ads all looking the same, all with pretty much the same message - call me please!

This really got me thinking as to whether or not local newspaper classified advertising actually worked for small businesses. It also got me thinking in relation to how people who read the ads actually made a decision as to who to call, and after making their call (or calls) how they selected a service provider or tradesman. After all, one single column, 3cm ad for a plumber looks very much like all the other single column, 3cm ads for plumbers. And each ad cost a couple of hundred dollars to run for a month or so.

I can only surmise as to how people relate to local newspaper classified ads and make their buying decisions, but I did ask one of the call centre operators a rather blunt question - do you think the classified ads in your paper work? Her response was interesting. She quite openly stated that she personally would never actually read a local newspaper, and if she did, she would certainly never use local newspaper classified ads, preferring to use a search engine instead to find the products and service providers that she needed. She actually went so far as to recommend that I put my money into search engine marketing rather than an ad in the local paper she represented.

Admittedly, the person making these comments was in her mid twenties, but nonetheless you don't need to be Einstein to work out where all of this is going. Just take a look at your own kids if you have them. Even at a very young age, they are already well versed in the use of search engines to find everything from information for school projects to tracking down where to buy the latest video game. I am also sensing much greater use of the Internet by older generations, no doubt fueled by wider penetration of broadband Internet connections. The reality is that it is probably much quicker these days to click on a search engine link and type in a search term than to find the paper or directory and  trawl through the results. 

Taking all this into consideration, its not a real stretch to see that printed local newspapers probably have a very limited future and that performance of advertising in those papers will probably continue to decline.

The takeout from all of this is that there are a number of potential problems that smaller businesses in particular are now facing in relation to getting found, much less noticed, by consumers - the performance of tried and true forms of traditional local advertising is continuing to wain and this situation is not going to improve, but only get much worse. The alternatives really seem to lie in online advertising - a far more complicated affair than simply making that call to the local newspaper and dictating the same ad used last time. To get it right, business really needs to think carefully about online local advertising and consider all the options before devising a strategy.

What business really seems to need is a local online advertising service that can enable them to cost effectively transition from traditional forms of local advertising to online local advertising. One such service is a local business directory called LivePages that lets businesses of all sizes create and manage listing pages that can be increasingly found on major search engines. Best of all an annual listing in the LivePages directory can cost less than a single column, 3cm, black and white nondescript classified ad run in a local newspaper for a month. More on this later.

8:28 AM - 16/8/2007 - POST COMMENT

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