Is PPC The New Yellow Pages for Home Services Companies?

Right up until the early 2000's, if you were almost any kind of business and wanted more customers, you HAD to be in the yellow pages. This was especially true for home services businesses where yellow page sales rep would threaten to put you at the end of the category if you didn't spend more, showcase how your competitor down the street was spending more than you, and come up with innovative marketing strategies, like arbitrarily starting your company with the letter A.

Times have obviously changed and anyone younger than a Millennial has probably never even used a phone book. Just the idea of it sounds as old as a dial-up modem.

Back then, most marketing budgets were built around yellow pages and it got the majority of home service businesses advertising spend. Essentially if you wanted to grow, you had to pay to play.

This is starting to sound kind of familiar, right?

Imagine a marketing platform where:

• Customers start the search with a heading or general need, without any relationship to the company

• Even though there were smaller options, the main publication more or less had a monopoly on consumer behavior

• Placement can be manipulated by the vendor with a mysterious algorithm

• You pay even if a lead doesn't convert or isn't qualified at all

• All ads basically say the same thing (Reviews, Offer, "Since," Emergency Service, etc.")

When you think about it, the yellow pages is starting to sound more and more like PPC.

For any home services company, this was and largely still is where business owners dump money when they want to grow and are afraid of the negative effect if they pull out (just like yellow pages).

Customers scroll through a list of companies, pick a few that look OK, and then call around for pricing and availability (just like yellow pages).

The rising costs of PPC due to increased competition are making it hard to be a profitable marketing strategy for many service based businesses (just like yellow pages).

Between AI generated responses, Google LSAs, and the Map Pack giving customers the local recommendations they're looking for, being able to depend on good leads and lead volume from PPC spend might be an outdated tactic sooner than later. Potential customers are strapped for time, and don't have the attention span nor resources to visit 3-5 websites listed in PPC to do research on each company. This is why the AI generated responses are so popular right now and are growing in the home services category - it's doing all of the heavy lifting for us!

In a few years, will we think of PPC as just a white pages with blue links instead of yellow pages with black ink? Potentially. Every type of marketing has its place but the days of spending your entire marketing budget on PPC and hoping the leads come in might be as outdated as the yellow pages themselves.

Luckily, spending wisely on PPC along with diversifying your campaigns with direct mail, local community marketing, and participating in online social groups can be part of a successful marketing program - which we would be happy to help you with, so please contact us today.