Someone asked me about the Yellow Pages at a seminar I taught last week. I was in a small North Carolina college town where the pace of life is a little slower than it is where I practice.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about the Yellow Pages in quite some time.

Is there still a role for Yellow Pages advertising in our practices?

In my practice, aimed at upper-middle income family law clients in a technologically sophisticated market, we stopped advertising in the phone book long ago. In fact, we haven’t paid those phone directory folks any money in more than a decade. We built our online presence back in 1995 and started moving away from phone directories shortly thereafter.

But every market is different, and every practice aims at a different segment of the market. Should you still be in the Yellow Pages? Should you consider going back if you left long ago?

Maybe so.

My philosophy of marketing is to go where the competition isn’t. Once I find that spot, I test like crazy. If all the lawyers in your market have moved on from the Yellow Pages, then maybe it’s time for you to try it now. If you do it, be sure to use a unique phone number and track your results call by call.

Generally, I think we’re in a post-phone-book world. Most of us find the businesses we’re looking for in alternative ways. But marketing isn’t static: it’s always changing. Advertising in one place might work today and be less satisfactory tomorrow. You can’t draw conclusions from opinions, and you shouldn’t just follow the pack.

Look for wide-open spaces to run your ads. Look for new and different ways to experiment with your marketing. Once you find those places, run your ads, do some tests, and carefully measure the results.

Maybe you’ll find that the Yellow Pages are the perfect place for you right now.