Do you remember Yellow Page ads? If you’re an insurance broker whose been around for a few years, how could you not?

We compare today’s digital advertising to the Yellow Page ads of the past and wondered how Power Pair Marketing’s rates compared. Wow! Are we reasonable!

We dug out a New York Times story from 1990 to find a base cost for a Yellow Page display ad. And, yes, we used Google in exactly the way someone would use Google to find your small professional service firm. 

In the article linked above, we learned that NYNEX – which was the so-called Baby Bell for New York and New England – was charging $54,000 for a full-page Yellow Pages ad. To provide some context, in 1990, Buffalo was the 50th largest city in the United States, according to the U.S. Census. 

We ran that $54,000 through an inflation calculator to get the 2024 cost of that ad, and it would be $130,000 in today’s dollars.

Like we said: Wow! Are we reasonable! We’ve never come anywhere close to charging a client $130,000. 

So, how do you compare an ad in the Yellow Pages with a digital marketing strategy that would cost somewhere around 20-25 percent of that total? Furthermore, why isn’t everybody doing this?

Well, we can answer the first part very precisely. A Yellow Pages ad, like a billboard, is essentially a very expensive wide net. It has the potential to catch you some nice eating fish, or you could be hauling in all the wrong species, plus other stuff you really don’t want. 

A digital marketing campaign is more targeted. When you’re a small insurance or accounting firm with a limited budget, you want to make sure you’re getting the right customers. If you’re a life insurance broker and your ad is getting you a lot of calls for property and casualty companies, your campaign is wasting your time. If you’re an accounting firm that wants to focus on local customers, you don’t necessarily want to have to travel to a business several hours away; you want your clients to be local.

Digital marketing, which involves establishing a solid website, creating an SEO plan, generating lots of content, imaging, messaging, branding, and lots of patience, will yield those results. You can tailor your marketing campaign to precisely the kind of client that is looking for you. And you can focus your strategy on a very defined geolocation area. 

Power Pair Marketing are the guys who can do this for you. Our specialization is in small firms who have exactly this kind of marketing orientation. In one case, we took a firm that was in a highly competitive field and became so specific in our terminology and geolocation that we went straight to number one in Google rankings in literally hundreds of categories. This didn’t happen overnight and took a lot of work, but it did happen. The more we have refined our processes, the more our clients have benefited. 

So, we asked the question: Why aren’t more people doing this? The fact is that a lot of firms believe that word of mouth is enough. Even in the days of the Yellow Pages and small newspaper display ads – even in weeklies that land on your stoop Thursday morning, a lot of small businesspeople think very small. 

If you want to think a little bigger than your competitor and you realize how fortunate you are to live in a time when there are much more targeted options than the local Yellow Pages, then let your fingers do the walking – click the button below and make an appointment to talk with us.