Phone books are falling out of favor with people looking for local businesses. It used to be that your name in the yellow pages was the first line of advertising. No longer. Curious customers have begun moving away from the turn of the yellow page and toward the click of the mouse. As a matter of fact, three of the top five ways in which a Comscore study determined that people find local businesses involved the Internet rather than print media. Here they are:

• 31% visit a search engine, searching without a specific brand or business in mind
• 30% look up a business in print in the phone book
• 19% use Internet directories
• 11% look at local search sites like Google Maps (driving directions)
• 3% get their information from a newspaper or magazine

Sure the phone book still ranks second among avenues for prospective customers, but taken in total barely one-third actually use print media to find businesses anymore. And you can feel confident that these numbers will continue to decrease. The phone book of the future will be uploaded, not left on your doorstep.

Source: Small Business Trends

Tags: contractors, customers, google maps, how they find you, internet, internet directories, leads, magazines, marketing, newspapers, phone book, search engine, searches, statistics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Contractor Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.