Basements or Plumbers
At a workshop I was running on how to make smart decisions about Yellow Pages advertising, I gave the group an assignment: Imagine you are a single mom with two school-aged kids. It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday night, you just got the children into bed, and a pipe has burst in your basement, releasing a flood of smelly gross stuff into your rec room. Open your Yellow Pages and find help.
The participants opened their directories and, within a few minutes, most had spotted a plumber whose ad might persuade them that he could solve their problem. One young woman, however, was having difficulty and complained she couldn’t find anything. I looked over her shoulder. No wonder she was baffled. Rather than opening her book to “P” for plumbers, she was looking under “B” for basements.
Basements or Levels
On a separate occasion, a remodeler saw an opportunity: He had decided to focus on basements, establish himself as the expert in this niche, and build a franchise. But the word “basement” just didn’t sound right to him. Too downscale, too declasse. He preferred the term “lower level.”
So he put the words “lower level” into his company’s name. He put them in his printed materials and all over this web site — the word “basement” was banned. He instructed his employees and the colleagues in his BNI group to never permit the word “basement” to cross their lips again.
And nobody ever found his website, unless they typed his URL right into the navigation bar. The reason: when a homeowner goes to Google looking for a contractor to finish or remodel his house’s lower level, what does he type into the search bar? “Basement.”
Moral: If you want to be found in a print directory like the Yellow Pages or an online directory like the Google database, you need to describe your services using the same words your customer is going to use to look for you, not the words you think your customer should use.
Lesson: Begin with an understanding of where prospective customers will be looking for you. The young woman in my Yellow Pages seminar will probably never look in the Yellow Pages to solve a flooding basement problem — she’ll look on the internet. (Good thing she came to my seminar so she’ll know how to make good choices with the YP for her business, considering she doesn’t use the YP herself.) When she tunes in, though, will she find what she’s looking for? She will, if a savvy plumber knows she’s going to plug “flooded basement” into the search bar.
Once you know where people are going to look for you, make it your mission to understand the process they will go through to look for you. Then make it insanely easy for them to find you. If you’re going after the Yellow Pages user, have a listing in the section of the directory they’ll be looking in. If you’re going after the web user, load up your page content with keywords that your prospect will use to hunt for a company that does what yours does. Don’t require your customers to learn your language in order to do business with you. Speak theirs.
