Greetings Gary,
Allen, I cut my half page ad in 5 phone books @ 37,000+ a year to 3 phone books down to a 3 inch Column ad to $5,880.00. I then put $7,272.00 into the ATT & Verizon Internet Super pages and Pay-Per Call.
I reduce my $37,000.00 phone book ad down to $13,152.00 a year including AT&T & Verizon Internet a savings of $23,848.00. I took that $23,484.00 and will spend $1,500.00 per month, while mailing out 5,000 mailers each month to high income homeowners within 3 miles from my zip code.
In my area, the computer internet is the best bang for my buck. Next year I will probably be out of the phone book and their internet and put all my advertising into the optimizer’s internet and mailers and nothing else!
We are using Soc Force to mail to new movers in house about 50+ per month. We are also using Soc Force to Businesses within 1 mile from our zip code also we do in house around $100.00 per month.
In addition to the above I have 2 Internet Optimization companies that keep both natural searches and sponsored on the top of all searches driving them to my web site www.modestis.com .
In addition to the above I also use Yelp and CitySearch Internet.
I believe in my area the phone book is not as good ROI as it use to be. For the last 4 years I have made a commitment to the Internet.
Because of the density and traffic, I have reduced my advertisement to a 3 mile radius down from 5 miles. It will take 45 minutes to 1 hour to drive 5 miles on a busy traffic day. My clients will not do that.
For 2009 I have increased my Advertising budget to 5.5% from 4%.
For the year of 2008 over 2007 we had a increase of 12.5% in sales.
Mission Critical: Put a tracking # on every piece of advertisement you do. I already gave Gary tat info a while back its $6.00 per number per month. Next year whatever does not work!
GET RID OF!
Best Regards
John Modesti
www.modestis.com