[Alan Rowley]

I know this has been covered before on this forum, but I wondered what you lot would do in my situation. We are a new company, only been in business for a few weeks and just getting our first jobs. We are based in Derby and there are many domestic cleaners in Yellow Pages.

A rep from Yellow Pages saw one of our flyers yesterday and gave me a call. I have arranged to see him tomorrow (Thursday) with a view to discussing what they can do for us. I know it's going to be expensive, but what I need to know is would anyone in my position consider advertising with them, or wait until we are more established?

Do you think I should advertise with them from the start, or do you think I will be wasting my money? Any comments?

[Timmy Boy]

Hi Alan
Everyone will have mixed feelings about Y/P. Mine is that I was spending 7k a year for carpet cleaning & office cleaning ads. Response.....About 3k worth of business. I had my ad designed not by yellow pages, but by a company called adtrak. The ads were good but the response was low. In my business (not sure on domestic), no-one looks in the Y/P anymore - yell.com is a different story.
Regards
Tim

[heritagecleaning]

If you do go for it, it's worth knowing that you shouldn't take their first price - they will negotiate. Push them very hard.

I just went in the latest book. £335 ad.  Got a contract 2 weeks later worth 2,496 a year.


Owen

[Cleaning Resource]

I am not advertising in the yp this year, I only went with a small box ad last year and didn`t get alot from it.  I went with a colour ad in the thomson and had quite a bit more from it, but again it only just covered the cost.  I also went with the same ad as I had in thomson in the bt phonebook it was a third of the price and I have had more work from that than the other two put together.

It does seem to vary alot from area to area and of course how good your ad is but I`m not bothering with any of the directories this year, the web is the way to go 90% of my work comes from my site although the web is not a quick method as it will probably take a year and alot of hours spent on the comp to get good rankings in the search engines.

Also bear in mind that I only spent a couple of grand on all three ads, so I don`t know how your response rate would be affected if you were to splash out on half page ads 

[Amethyst]

I had a chat with a marketing guru today who suggested that you did not double the response by doubling the size of the ad. I'm starting to think I would be better off halving my YP spend and buying a new machine instead - do an even better job and get referrals which don't cost much (if anything!)

[Alan Rowley]

Thanks for your responses guys. People I've spoken to seem to be split 50/50 over whether YP is worth the money. Not sure what I'm going to do - it all depends on the price they quote me.

[Jonny jones]

hi saw woman from y/p yesterday and was quoted 2,400  2 adds one small one for floor sanding and credit card size for the cleaning side and adds on yell.com.  im only just starting out and i dont have this sort of cash to fork out i have until aug before it goes to final print, im going to stick with the yell.com.  because my thought would be if i get a good response from the the yell adds i. that would show that it might work in the book to.

anyway the d/d on the payment,  i know it nearly £200 a month but if i just get three contracts that would more than pay for the adverts. 

in about a months time im think i might call them to tell them im pulling my adverts out and they are sure to give me a discount to stay with them.

p/s  dont let him or her fool you into getting a big adverts as they will try and sell you on the impact of the advert and not the quality of your service.

anyway good luck

thanx jonny

let castle take the hassle
 

[The Great One]

Hi

I went into YP last year with a smallish as, 2 colours and turned a small profit.

This year they wanted me to go in for £3000...

To which I said no as I have to earn £3000 befopre I take any profit for myself.

I went into yell.com in August, for me, crapus maximus, anus collapsus (nothing at all) so far this year with a colour ad costing about £900 I have had 1 job and 1 enquiry.

I would personally save your money this early and go with direct marketing, letter to pubs, businesses, houses etc.

Regards

Martin

[Cleaning Resource]

I think I would also advise to keep your money and spend it on a suit and having some nice business portfolio`s printed and go cold calling on the business`s in your area, you`ll get loads more work from it.


 

[need a cleaner]

We gone with Yell.com for a priority ad that cost us £460 for 2 cat and on the first week got us a commercial client worthing £4320 and a domestic 1 that is worth £1216 a year + we just got a EOT from ther referral worthing around £250 so we are more than pleased but this year we will only repeat our investment as i dont see any reason to go overboard

[Alan Rowley]

We were quoted £1,200 for a decent ad in Yellow Pages and a full listing on Yell.com. These are full colour, matching our flyers, and includes all artwork, design etc. This works out at around £25 a week, which I think is pretty reasonable, compared to other advertising.

Might be tempted to give it a go for a year.

[steve doyle]

HI.

i would be carefull with yp. i had nothing but poor service with them. told me a pack of lies to get me to agree and wasnt what i wanted. they are just sales people so will say anything to get the deal.

they will also be on commision so you need to not be too keen.

my ad was b/w and the size of a stick of chewing gum. plus 2x 1line entries and 2x 1line entrys on yell.com ( which was my issue, they were used as a free tempter to close the deal knowing that i didnt want my address on any of my ads),
i agreed and they then put my address on yell.com. when i asked them to remove it they said it had to be on or i couldent have a listing. i told em to remove it then.

they should never have sold me that package and i felt ripped off!

i paid £160 which i dont think was dear but only got 2 jobs and a poopload of charities! i definatly would spend money on flyers, parish booklets local booklets free papers etc.

you have time when your new, so use that commodity, dont chuck cash at advertising, to encourage word of mouth why not give customers a 10%discount next time for every referal job they get you?

believe me some folk will canvass for you like mad if they are gonna get something fo nothing!

[steve doyle]

just a thought, dont fall for the old, " its only £20 per week" trick. its a classic way of disguising the true cost. just like car finance.

you then discover it aint £80 per month its more, cos theres 4.3 weeks to a month. and you are commited to paying 12x the figure even if you get nothing from it.

so if yours is £1200 should be £23.07 per week plus vat? if they have told you its £25 p/w your add  is £1300 is it plus vat? if so £1527.50

just make sure you know exactly what the full price is in writing.

i have no trust of them myself, i used to be in car finance and they way they acted with me i thought they were cowboys of the same ilk, but.....

think how many responses you need per week to make a profit, and work out how much direct delivery of 1000 leaflets would cost, i pay about £50 total.  much more cost effective for me!

[Alan Rowley]

We had 5,000 high quality postcards printed for distribution. We went for top quality stuff on decent card as we thought people would be more inclined to save them. These cost us £250, which I thought was a bargain. (They are also real easy to shove through letter boxes).

If you want to see what our postcards look like, click here. (3.5mb pdf).

We tend to drop a few leaflets when we aren't too busy, or when we've finished a quote in a new area.

The total cost of £1,200 was inclusive of VAT and includes artwork, design etc. We've told them we want the ad to look similar to our postcards. It broke down to £900 for the directory and £300 for yell.com.

Still very undecided ...

[Cleaning Resource]

I tell  you something else to watch out for with yp is their catagories 
they put me in office cleaners and not the normal cleaning catagorie with everyone else

[steve doyle]

well alan,

only you can make the decision (unless of course your married ) if you do go ahead with it, i would tell them you dont want it cos to expensive and let them chase you for the deal. they will most likely lower the price.

if they dont at first, leave it a week and tell em if they could do it for £1000 you will do the deal right now, or commit to the bt book

that usually wakes them up. whatever you do i  hope it works for you.

regards,

 steve

out of interest cos i do drives etc....  how many punters will you need to get from the add cos £1200 for me would mean i would want 6k + return (ish) and im not sure i would get near it.

has anyone previously faced this dilema? what happend?

[Alan Rowley]

Steve,

To re-coup an outlay of £1,200, I would have to get new work totalling 80-100 hours. This, of course, will only get back the outlay. If we say that we make 33% profit on everything we do, we will be looking at around 300 hours of work to make it worthwhile.

That's over 5 hours of additional work per week, if I've done my sums right.

Doesn't look very tempting when you look at it that way does it?

[steve doyle]

alan, i think i understand your figures, so as loose eg.

10ph x 100h = £1000=add paid
but your time is 100hours with no pay so i would think that nearer the 250 hours is your break even figure cos extra 150 hours at 10 = £1500 . devide total time of 250h by cash left after add (£1500/250=£6.00 ph cash return, plus of course  you have an advert paid for.

that does seem like alot of work to do to  break even 

as people often think companies with big ads are expensive, maybe consider a smaller simple add with an inclusion (hook) like " mention this add for our special promotion rates". the more personal type of add?

i dont know, but maybe your promotion could be 10%disc on over 3 hours per week for domestic work tell em how much it would work out saving per month! so £10x3= £30 less 10%= £3per week x 4.333 (weeks in the month) = £12.99 saving per calender month, or £155.88 per year!

people do go for things like that, and when they call you just need to "sell" them your services!

i view the add as a tool to get the calls not sell the service, thats my job if you know what i mean.

regards,

steve

ps. sorry if this is the old sucking eggs for you, its just my thoughts as i have a sales and finance background, i obviously dont know what your background is. maybe if nothing else food for thought!

[Alan Rowley]

Thanks Steve - I follow your reasoning.

I seem to have been boring people over the weekend about Yellow Pages and very few people seem to have a good word to say about them. I doubt that I will be investing £1,200 with them, but I may consider yell.com.

ALAN.

[mike peters]

You can get a free ad in Yell.com but beware, you will get YP reps on the phone constantly trying to sell you £0-000 s worth of ads, we also got at least 3-5 cals per day from other organisations trying to sell advertusing space elsewhere, calling my freephone number at 14p per minute. after  a month I withdrew the insert....... use gumtree.com, friday-ads or similar free sites.

we have recenly used leaflets by printing.com and A5 full color both sides  x 10,000 for about £300  prime.