The new yellow pages came out in our area last week, so as usual, I took a spin through to check out the competition. To my surprise, some of the newer practitioners in the area had chosen not to advertise. Our area is pretty thick with chiropractors, and the number of naturopaths and TCM practitioners is on the rise, too, so I was curious why a new practice would overlook this choice. A yellow page ad is relatively inexpensive here.

I’ve always been a fan of the yellow pages. You can find a list of good reasons here, as well as a list of negative aspects here.

My favorite reason has always been that the yellow pages are how *I* find things. Even for a company I regularly patronize, I don’t tend to use the white pages. And if you happen to be a holistic practitioner with a hard-to-spell name, the yellow pages are critical – it may be the only way your patients can find you.

What can be challenging, once you’ve decided to use the yellow pages, is how much to spend. The most useful piece of information for helping you with this choice (or any advertising choice) is your average annual revenue per patient. To find this, take your total revenue for a year, and divide it by the number of active patients in that same time period. I find this is a handy number to have in mind for many expenses. It seems so much easier to make decisions when you can say, for example, “Okay, all I need to do is get two new TCM patients this year from the yellow pages, and the ad is paid for.” It puts things in concrete terms.

If you track your referral sources, you’ll also be able to tell how many new patients came through the door in a given year as a result of your yellow pages listing. Using your revenue per patient number, you can then easily tell if your ad was worthwhile, and whether to go bigger or smaller the following year.