Many tow company owners have a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to digital marketing. They’ve been burned before and are afraid to get burned again. But there’s a very clear distinction between business owners who invest in digital marketing and do well, and those who don’t. Those who don’t do well most likely entrusted their digital strategy to one of those national marketing companies.

You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule right? Well it’s the same way in the towing business. Only about 20% of business owners are successful while the remaining 80% flounder about hoping to get outstanding results from a minimal investment. And these big companies are capitalizing on this fact.

They’ve done their homework and know that swimming against the current takes a lot more effort and gets you nowhere. But going with the flow by providing a cheap, yet ineffective, “solution” to your digital dilemma—hey now that’s a money maker.

At the same time their betting that, because your expectations were high, and the results low, you’ll come crawling back to them—to spend more money.

To break that cycle, below are 7 digital marketing myths they’re selling you.

The Tow Academy 7 Digital Marketing Myths You're Being sold Myth 1

Low Budget PPC Can Be Effective

The first myth you’re being sold is that you can spend as little as $200 dollars per month on AdWords and get a decent ROI.

This might have worked back in 2008, if you had all your ducks in a row. But now that everyone knows that Yellow Page advertising is a waste of money you must have a bigger budget to compete for Google’s limited ad space.

This is supply and demand at work, but you must realize that it’s not just the amount of money you’re investing. If your ad campaign isn’t optimized and administered by someone who’s gotten results for your industry, then you risk throwing money out the window.

One of our clients came to us after getting dismal results from one of those national companies, the company’s name rhymes with rex.

He was spending around $3200 dollars per month on AdWords and getting a conversion rate of around 14%. After a couple of months we lowered his ad spend while raising his conversion rate to over 65%.

He texted me the other day and said his revenue had more than tripled for the month of January 2017, compared to last year.

Here’s his text.

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The Tow Academy 7 Digital Marketing Myths You're Being sold Myth 1

Anyone Can Produce Effective SEO Copywriting

Effective SEO copywriting are the words used on your website that attract the attention of Google while providing relevant content to your customers. If done right it will help build your authority in your market. If done wrong it can harm your digital presence immensely.

The first part to effective SEO copywriting is understanding the customer’s needs and having the ability to translate those needs into content. The second part is optimizing each page using those words.

To begin with, most of those national companies farm-out content creation to areas of the world where, most likely, they know nothing about the towing industry here in the United States. Which means they’re using terms that your customers never use. And if that’s the case, optimizing the pages for those terms, if done at all, is highly ineffective.

The websites with the most authoritative language and the best, most informative content have more visitors who spend more time there. The more time they spend on your website—the higher its authority. The higher your site’s authority—the more often Google presents it during a search.

Every piece of content we create for each page on your site is perfectly optimized to be another solid building block to a well-rounded digital presence.

The Tow Academy 7 Digital Marketing Myths You're Being sold Myth 3

One Size Fits All Packages Get Your Business Found

The way to know if you’re dealing with one of those national web companies is if they try to sell you one of their “One-Size-Fits-All” packages.

One of the problems with those packages is that they are non-specific to the towing industry. Just look at the example below. With this company, for $599 dollars per month you get just $50 dollars in monthly AdWords’ spend. That’s a $50 per month budget.

In some areas AdWords clicks for towing related searches range as high as $17. If that’s the case—this means, in less than three clicks, your $50 dollars, which really cost you $599, is gone. In less than one day your entire AdWords budget is spent.

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Digital marketing needs vary from industry to industry and business to business. If they’re trying to make your business FIT into their program you’re not going to receive the individual attention you deserve.

Another reason these large web companies fail to live up to your expectations is because – You Want To Know Who You’re Dealing With BEFORE YOU BUY.

We understand the inner workings of the towing industry because we’ve been immersed in it for years. My team’s digital strategy starts with getting a handle on your particular market. We work closely with you to learn about the competition, your customers’ needs and habits, and what goals you’re trying to achieve.

Are you looking for:

  • Increased Rankings?
  • More links to your site?
  • Organic traffic to your site?
  • More cash calls from AdWords?
  • Social Media Likes & Engagement?
  • Reviews and Reputation Management?
  • Building-out your site, more optimized pages?

We then provide you with actionable recommendations, specific to what you’re trying to achieve.

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Sharing Towing Related Items On Your Facebook Page Drives Traffic

If you are only sharing towing related items on your Facebook business page you are boring people.

People go to Facebook to unwind and escape the dull-drums of the day. They want to see fun, uplifting, or outrageous items in their feed. When all they see coming from you are images of your trucks, most of the time, they ignore it.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t post photos of your company towing a Bentley, company promotions, or doing accident recoveries, that’s fine too. But you should also be posting things that you would find interesting outside of work.

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Facebook “Likes” Equal Engagement

Here’s a secret Facebook’s not telling you. If your followers aren’t engaged with what you’re posting your posts stop showing up in their feed.

It’s true.

If you have 1000 people who have liked your page but you’re only getting 2 or 3 comments on each of your posts, it’s because very few of those original thousand are seeing your posts.

Like I said before, most people will just keep scrolling if you’re only posting towing related items.  Which means they’re not going to, like, comment, or share. And after a while, once Facebook notices that they’re not interested in your stuff, your posts quit showing up in their feed.

So what gets your followers engaged?

I know it might sound silly, but puppies, kittens, and children. Post close-call videos…and memes that put a smile on your face. You’ll get more likes, more engagement and…down the road, when your followers need your services, you’ll get the call.  Because people buy from those they know.

Yes you need likes but engagement matters much more.

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You Can Only Optimize Certain Parts of Your Website

I actually saw this advertised on a national web company’s website. “We optimize certain parts of your website.”

This can be interpreted to mean one of two things. Either they don’t know how to optimize the entire website, or they’re just not going to do it because of all the work involved.

There are more than 200 factors to consider when optimizing a website. There’s your title tags, your h1 tags, h2 tags, and on and on. And each page should be optimized for one specific term, like towing or roadside assistance.

A partial checklist of items necessary to do all this includes:

  • Titling each image using the same term you’re optimizing the page for.
  • Adding alternative text to your images, so Google’s bots can know what your images are.
  • Properly structured microdata, this tells the bots what your company does, where you are, your phone number, hours of operation, and a whole host of other information.
  • A properly structured internal linking system, linking one page to another. This strengthens the overall search-optimized value of your site.
  • And a whole lot more.

Yes it’s a lot of work but you CAN optimize every part of a website.

But you can’t just stop there, Google places a lot of authority on the clicks your site gets. Activity is HUGE. This means you must have live reviews and social media attached to your site. You must then actively pursue reviews, and create engaging content and post it on social media. Then use social media to drive visitors back to your site. The more clicks you get, the more authority your site has.

The most important thing to remember is, if your entire site isn’t properly optimized to begin with, none of this other stuff is going to make a bit of difference.  Don’t settle for a partially optimized website.

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The Customer Journey Isn’t Important

Clicks matter but what matters most is the desired outcome. You’re investing time and money into your marketing so you want a decent ROI.  Right?

Most web marketing companies will tell you that for online marketing to work, all you have to do is throw up a website, do a little SEO here and there, and spend a little money on AdWords.

Like I said, these guys are just catering to the lowest-hanging fruit. That’s why, most of the time, what you get—is a poorly optimized website and an AdWords campaign that does nothing.

The real reason these guys continue selling you myth after myth is because they don’t understand one simple truth. It’s all about the customer journey.

So what’s the customer journey?

Old advertising and marketing is no longer effective.

You know, guys on television screaming at you. Telling you to “Come on down to Crazy Larry’s Used Car Sale Barn for The Daily Deal.”   We push back at that type of selling.

What works now is walking alongside your customer. Letting them know that you’re just like them. To earn their business they must see you as more than just a guy selling towing services, you must become a trusted friend.

So how do you do that in the digital age and still get a decent ROI on your marketing dollars?

Again…social media.

Ok—you want clicks to your site to build authority right? Because you know that the more authority your site gets the more often it will be visible in search results. And you want likes on your Facebook business page because you know that by creating engaging content you’ll continue to be relevant to your followers. Right?

The whole goal for doing all this stuff is so that, when any of these folks need a tow or roadside assistance, they’ll give you a call.  But it will only turn out this way if you do the dance.

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The customer journey is similar to asking a girl out on a date. At first you’re not even sure she knows you exist, so it’s your job to get her attention. To do that you might wear nice clothes, play sports, or drive a fast car—whatever it takes.

Once you’ve attracted her attention and she starts talking to you, the last thing you want to do is sound like an idiot, so you have to play it cool. You got to make her laugh and keep it light, and then eventually you’ll be considered a trusted friend. And…after a while, if you’re sincere and treat her right you might just get that date.

In the digital marketing world it’s the same way. Getting attention on social media starts with creating an effective Facebook Like Campaign. To get the girl’s attention here you create an ad that’s cute, funny, or uplifting. Then, once she likes your ad and clicks on it, don’t try and sell her anything. If you bombard her with salesy stuff she’s gone.

After she’s liked your ad, your posts will begin showing up in her feed. But now’s not the time to sit back and relax, if you do that she’ll get bored and move on to some other guy. You must continue to entertain her, and you do that by creating and sharing engaging posts.

But in order to clinch that first date, which would be having her use your company’s services, it’s a good idea to include one more step.

Create another Facebook marketing ad using a Facebook Pixel and attach the pixel to your website.

Then create some posts that link back to your website and when she clicks on these posts and lands on your site, the Facebook Pixel you created will allow your ad to be shown to her every time she logs into Facebook. It’s a little like digitally stalking her, but without being creepy.

The point of doing all of this is so you’ll be everywhere she goes. And over time she’ll come to regard you as the go-to-guy in the towing business…because you’re so familiar.

To wrap it up be careful what you get yourself into. There are a lot of hucksters selling web design and SEO who know nothing about properly optimizing your digital presence.