Andover Commtech

How to Promote Your Business in the Yellow Pages:

Ask the Expert

By Fran Finley

The Expert

Our expert on Yellow Pages advertising is author, speaker, consultant, Barry Maher. You may have seen Maher on the Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CNBC or in the pages of USA Today, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. His book, Filling the Glass was recently honored as “[One of] The Seven Essential Popular Business Books” by Today’s Librarian magazine. Few people realize that Maher is also the author of the book, Getting the Most from Your Yellow Pages Advertising, and that he conducts Yellow Pages workshops at conventions across the country. According to TIME, “Barry Maher has helped thousands of small businesses get the most cost effective Yellow Pages advertising possible.”

Does Yellow Pages advertising really work?

Well, it certainly can work. But it’s far more likely to work if you pay attention to a few key rules.

Can’t you rely on your Yellow Pages sales rep for any help you need?

Sometimes the rep can be part of the problem. Too many Yellow Page ads are whipped up in the few minutes the rep has left after trying to sell you a bigger ad. Ask, no, insist, that your directory publishers develop an ad for you that justifies the cost. If they can’t, have the ad produced yourself.

Okay, so you need a great looking ad. What about the content?

Content is another key. The first piece of ad copy that readers see, the headline, has to be powerful enough to drag them away from all those competing ads. Never use your company name as your headline unless it really is that powerful. Unless it really is the most important selling copy in the ad.

What other copy should you include?

You have to include all the hard, factual information potential customers need to make a decision to call or drop by: be it about image, market niche, products and services, features, brand names, expertise, pricing, quality, hours, reliability, speed, location, service area, credit available, whatever it might be.

So you should use every bit of ad space you’re paying for?

Absolutely not. Your ad is competing for readability with every other ad under your heading or headings. If it’s difficult to read, it isn’t going to be read. You’ve got to refine your copy until you can provide all the information potential clients want in an ad that’s so uncluttered and inviting that reading it becomes automatic.

What about visuals, like drawings and photos?

Nothing can turn a mediocre Yellow Pages ad into a great one faster than the right illustration. If your picture isn’t worth a thousand words, find one that is.

How about ad size: is bigger better?

Unfortunately, all things being equal, bigger ads get a greater response. They also get the best placement, closest to the front of the heading. Placement can be even more important than size.

A visually appealing ad can make up for some size, especially under a heading where all the ads are on the same page or two. It’s much more difficult to compete with ads on an earlier page. That page may never be turned.

Always consider placement when you’re deciding on ad size. Have your sales rep show you where the size you’re considering would fall in this year’s directory. That should give you an idea of the position, relative to the competition, you’d have next year. Sometimes going up a size and spending just a few more dollars will move you much closer to the front of the heading. Sometimes you can cut back in size without losing much in the way of position.

What about using color?

Color is eye catching. And expensive. If the money you’d be spending is approximately the same, you’re better off significantly improving the size and placement of your ad than the color.

Some areas are covered by several competing directories. Should you buy ads in all of them?

Make the sales rep prove value before you buy, especially when you’re considering a directory for the first time. If he or she can’t prove value, don’t put any real money there. Instead, try something small: perhaps even a simple in-column ad, or even just a listing. Track your response, survey your customers to discover how they discovered you. Then next year you’ll have know.



What’s the biggest Yellow Pages mistake you’ve ever encountered?

That’s got to be the attorney who found herself listed not under ATTORNEYS but under REPTILES. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that was perhaps more truth in advertising than she bargained for.

Which reminds me: Always insist on getting a proof for your display ad.

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remember Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey, ” you might recall when the space ship’s HAL 9000 computer says to Dave the astronaut, “I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.” Is that what you feel like without your PowerPoint file when giving a presentation? That’s a bit disturbing, yes? If this is so, your PowerPoint file has taken over!

In order to recover your dignity as a presenter and prowess using PowerPoint, we must get back to the basics. First, we will cover what it means to give a good presentation. Second, we can look at the purpose and value of using PowerPoint. Finally, we will consider how you can overcome common tendencies of presenters with some hints and tricks to engage your audience with your presentation.

You engage the audience, not the prop! It is perfectly understandable that in this rapid paced world, we all want to press a button, plug in, or clap on-clap off for results. When you do this with an audience of live people, you start sounding and behaving like a HAL 9000 and I am sure many of us did not make it through that movie for the monotonous voice of the main character! You must remember that you engage the audience, not the prop! A good presenter is like a good jazz musician. You must know the song: your main point. You must know the melody: the points you expect to cover. Finally, you must know your audience so that you can wow and amaze them with what they might be surprised to hear. Start with writing a thesis that includes your interest to inform in terms of their interest to learn. Next, block out basic points and consider props you can use to describe your points with that audience in mind. Finally, consider your arsenal of presentation tools and how you can align them with the introduction, supporting points and call to action or conclusion.

Uh…Hello! Step away from your PC or Mac and consider your list of presenter tools! We know that PowerPoint can give visuals to reinforce points with pictures, bullets, charts and even movies. Now, remember that a good presenter uses body movement, the dynamics of his voice, topic related props and my favorite of all, the audience themselves with questions, games or demonstrations! The people in your audience retain information differently, therefore it is critical that you use a variety of tactics to engage their senses and make the presentation memorable for all. If you simply click F5 to slide show, you can be replaced with a HAL 9001! Besides, most people do not want to get a break from their computer screen to sit back and follow along with a projected version of yours.

PowerPoint is a modernized overhead- not cue cards! Ah, PowerPoint? How lovely art thou! Already one year past our legal drinking age, PowerPoint was derived from a product called Presenter developed by Forethought and sold to Microsoft before they created the Windows platform. As the story goes, this application was designed to replace the expense of making and sending high-quality 35mm slides between companies. Do you remember these slides? These projectors? And not to mention editing these when we made a mistake! PowerPoint today is a multimedia software application that can be used to present, make handouts/signage and even create self-running and interactive shows on the internet or via CD ROM. This is why presenters love this tool but some have mistaken PowerPoint for box of cue cards with taped on pictures. That is not exciting! During your presentation, it is fine to use PowerPoint to reinforce your point and objectives. Maybe you have the freedom to become Carrot Top but most of us are expected to use a PowerPoint throughout the presentation using either a linear or a pictorial wheel style to articulate and reinforce our information.

Do I use a Linear or Pictorial Wheel style? First, one must think outside of the application and discern which style best suits your audience. A linear presentation guides your presentation on screen with your main point, supporting bullets in multilevel fashion. This is the traditional style you may find yourself editing passed on from others. Ensure that you have no more than 6 bullets per slide, use no fonts smaller than 24 points, and no more than 2 font styles and font colors (if you can help it) per slide. Vary and simplify your slides by avoiding paragraphs or using bullet lists on every slide. Be frugal, consistent and creative with animations, slide transitions and especially sounds. Take advantage of movie clips, charts, tables and diagrams one slide at a time. You may also incorporate links to hidden slides, applications or websites to objects or sentences so that you can elaborate further on a topic according to your audience. A Pictorial Wheel style gets the audience away from just following a slide show. Using this style, you would make many slides that express only one point using pictures, movies or specific complex animations. Next, you would need to use slide sorter view, to create thumbnail buttons you can place on the first slide. During the presentation, you can simply click one of these thumbnail pictures that are cleverly linked to a matching hidden slide in your presentation and conveniently linked back to your first page of thumbnail buttons. You choose how to reinforce your points and can easily elaborate on others as it interests the audience. As you can see, this design could be very useful for sales people who do not always impress with “we will get to that.” All presentation styles benefit from giving an outline handout but do not mistake this with a duplicate of the presentation. That’s a complete spoiler! In either scenario, the idea is that you maintain your flexibility to give your presentation in an indispensable, memorable and flexible way that caters to your ever changing and diverse audiences.

Finding Confidence outside the ppt. file: Some final tips So why do we ever let the machine dominate us? Maybe we feel the need to get it right consistently, or over with swiftly, or pack in everything we thought our audience ever wanted to know. How many stars, how many reason, right? I repeat, step away from the PowerPoint and back away slowly! You need an outline, 2 lists, a PowerPoint and then, Practice! That is a real presentation. First phase, start in Word or on paper to make your points as noted above. Your presentation is about your audience, not you. Next phase, create 2 vital lists and then, your PowerPoint file. First list what Presentation tools can we use to reinforce the points to be covered? Consider time and group dynamics. Second list will include what will be needed to successfully deliver the overall presentation (ie. props, presentation space, printouts and projector/white boards, schedule of guest speaker, microphone, flash drive, laptop, etc.). Only if you have created this outline and these lists, may you now safely approach the red PowerPoint icon to discern which style will use to make a template or tweak the file you are given. Alas, you are preparing a real presentation and not just a PowerPoint ppt. file. Good job …but you are not finished yet! For the final phase, there is no avoiding the need for live rehearsal, assembling of your props, running through your games or questions as well as having your associated handouts and demonstrations updated for that new audience. We can package this up in a folder but if we have not reviewed and updated our presentation, we will deliver like an out- of- date HAL 9000 and the audience will wonder where to trade us in!

So ‘Dave’, are you ready for your Presentation Odyssey? Astronauts have to be a bit smarter than gerbils to figure their way back to earth when the space flight has issues. Therefore remember that you are in charge and you need to get to know the mechanics of your PowerPoint software so that you can apply some of the tips mentioned here as well as reinforce your points by knowing your outline. Take a course on presentation skills and also take note of genius strategies you see used to engage a professional au
dience elsewhere. Be indispensable, flexible and memorable. That’s good jazz. Have a nice flight!

Many small and medium businesses are cropping-up every day all over the world. Only a few of them remain profitable, while over 70% are shutdown during the first three years of their operation. A primary reason is that they spend a great deal more of time and resources on their day-to-day operational activities and down the line lose focus on their core business. This brings down the profitability curve as the back-office tasks keep on gulping more and more resources. An easier way out is to outsource portions of your work to people who have expertise in those respective domains.

Your business can also utilize tax preparation services and tax processing services offered by professional service providers to file your taxes and returns accurately and on time. Here are the top three reasons why you should outsource your company’s tax preparation:

#1: Save up to 60% of your cost through offshore outsourcing

The math is simple. If you employ full-time resources who have ample experience to take care of your taxes efficiently, then you would end-up investing in their salaries, training, office space, workstations, benefits, software license, and a lot more. While if you outsource the work to an offshore company that handles tax processing services and already has a team of qualified and trained professionals then you would spend up to 60% less.

#2: Gain from the expertise of the tax preparation services provider

Companies that provide tax preparation services, tax processing services, VAT return services, income tax computation service, income tax return filing services, etc., have already invested in a solid infrastructure and their staff members have expertise in top-of-the-line tax computation tools like Intuit’s Lacerte, Creative Solutions’ Ultra-Tax, Intuit’s ProSeries, ATX, Drake, and many other popular financial software. Therefore, you won’t have to spend time in learning these tools. Moreover, the service provider’s staff would work at a faster turnaround and with greater accuracy.

#3: Easy to ramp-up and ramp-down resources to manage load

Typically, the finance team in small businesses (if at all they have one) takes care of the taxation part too. Throughout the year, the workload is constant but at the end of the quarter or year when the tax has to be calculated or during the time when your company takes critical expansion steps; it puts additional pressure on the finance team. If you outsource your accounting and tax preparation work, you can take advantage of a flexible team, wherein you can increase or decrease the team size whenever you want and get any amount of work done without hassles.

Through tax preparation outsourcing, you can remove yourself from the trouble to managing tax files and free-up your in-house resources to do more lucrative business development tasks.