Ethical Cosmetic Surgery Association

By Ben Glass, Fairfax, Virginia

If your community is like most, when you open the Yellow Pages to your industry’s section, you find the following:

• Anywhere from five to 70 pages of ads (depending on the number of companies doing your kind of business)
• The front part of the section is filled with full page or even two full page ads
• If there is a graphic in the ad, it is either a picture of the business owner or store front or logo
• If there is any sort of a “headline” on the ad, it is either the name of the company or a generalized but totally meaningless statement such as "no job too big . . . or too small" (sometimes there’s even a wasteful heading that says something like “need a plumber?” No, I was just looking in the P-L-U-M-B-E-R section because I need a C-H-I-R-O-P-R-A-C-T-O-R.)
• There is generally a long list of types of jobs that the company handles such as (in the case of a lawn service) mowing, mulching, fertilizer, leaf removal, trimming, edging, pruning, seeding, snow plowing, hauling
• There is one, or at most two, ways of contacting the company for information, usually in the form of a “free estimate” as the only offer being made in the ad

Now, looking at those ads, imagine taking the name of the company out of a particular ad and simply pasting it into one of the other ads in the same section of the book.If you switched the names of the companies all around, would it make any difference?In other words, is there any real difference at all between the ads?

If you were the consumer in need of goods or services provided by your company, how could you go about differentiating one business from the next based upon their Yellow Page advertising?Can you begin to see now that there is almost no useful information for consumers in the Yellow Pages?(By the way, you could do this same experiment with most TV or radio advertising as well.)Think about it.Switch the names around.Most businesses have a terribly difficult time differentiating themselves from one another in a very crowded market place.

For the consumer who is doing "research" and is in search of a carpet cleaner, for example, there is almost no useful information currently available in any media typically used by carpet cleaners. Does size of an ad matter?Maybe.But carpet cleaners can continue to beat each other’s brains in buying larger ads, more pages and more color.This is nothing but shouting louder.In marketing, “shouting louder” means spending more money. (How about the most useless thing I’ve seen in years?Lawyers buying two yellow pages, side by side, with exactly the same text and photos on both pages! What - they couldn’t think of anything different to say on the second page?)

There are vast possibilities for you here.People do not pick up the Yellow Pages just to generally thumb through the book. When they go there, they are looking they have a specific need or want that they are trying to get help with.If no one else is giving them any useful information in the Yellow Pages, then your ad, no matter how small or how far back in the section, can make it drop dead easy for the consumer, because virtually no one thinks “outside the box” with their Yellow Page advertising.You can vastly increase the number of inquiries to your company by providing real access to useful information that no one else is giving them.

My law firm has been very successful in developing and implementing a method of advertising in the Yellow Pages that can used by any business.(In fact, I “stole” it from another type of business.)This method not only does not require me or another staff person to respond "live" to the request for information, it also gets free information in the form of books, reports and audio CD’s into the hands of callers long before they have an opportunity to get in to see another attorney for an in person "free" consultation.(See attached example.)

Our Yellow Page advertising says nothing about us or our law firm!Instead, we market several consumer books that we have written.Our two most popular books are Five Deadly Sins That Can Wreck Your Virginia Accident Case and The Truth About Lawyer Advertising.These books were amazingly easy to write, cheap to publish and deliver a ton of information that not only educates the consumer but “sells” our firm as the obvious choice for their case.

The object of this style of legal marketing is simply to (1) offer something that looks different and then (2) make it as easy as possible for the consumer to initiate contact with you in a non threatening way that rewards the consumer by delivering comprehensive information materials to them to read or listen to on their own time, in their own house or in their car. We do this through toll free recorded message lines and through a variety of small, one page web sites that we have developed. (www.TheTruthAboutLawyerAdvertising.com, for example).This is called “direct response marketing.”

Here’s how it works.You attract their attention with an unusual headline (i.e. the book title) then make it easy for them to request information.Then, through the use of tantalizing bullet points (“Why service provided by some lawyers can be the kiss of death to your case”, or, for a computer repair company, “Why a free download from the Internet can be the kiss of death for your PC”) you stop their search and they receive and read our materials.They have not had to call to talk to someone live.They do not feel that they are going to be pressured by an aggressive and persuasive sales person.They understand that in most cases there is no urgent rush in the process of making a buying decision.

In fact, if they slow down a bit to get more info, they’ll do a better job of making the right choice.And if, in your information materials, you have clearly communicated to them exactly what type of jobs your expertise and level of experience is best suited, for then you will have essentially provoked the very good set of higher qualified potential clients or customers you want to contact you and to beg you to take their business.This sets you up as the wise man on the top of the mountain, with a long line of people waiting to get in to see you.

About Ben Glass
BEN GLASS is an information marketer and a practicing plaintiff’s personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Fairfax, Virginia.He is the author of The Ultimate Personal Injury and Practice Building Toolkit.Visit www.GreatLegalMarketing.com to learn more about Ben’s information marketing business.You can reach Ben at ben@GreatLegalMarketing.com or by fax at 703-783-0686.