Background Info
Our client operates a towing business. We first started working with him when he hired us to create a new website for his company. After the site was completed and he was happy with the finished product, we asked if he would be interested in doing marketing with us. He agreed to do a consultation but was very skeptical. He had some bad experiences in the past with other agencies and spent a lot of money on online marketing with little to show for it.
The Consultation Phase -
During the consultation, we spoke to him at length about other forms of marketing he’d done to get a sense of why he hadn’t found success. It became clear he’d experienced a problem that we’ve found is very common in the towing industry. The agencies he previously worked with used the same cookie-cutter marketing approach they use for every industry they service. They weren’t trying to account for the unique behaviors of towing customers.
Every industry is unique. Promoting a towing business on social media doesn’t make much sense. People don’t scroll through Instagram or Facebook when they need a car towed. Even driving traffic to a towing company’s website is not the most efficient way to generate leads.
We told our client about our pay-per-call marketing service that’s designed specifically for towing companies. We knew using this system would drive MUCH BETTER RESULTS. We explained that for towing businesses, we ONLY generate phone call leads. After working with many towing clients, we’ve refined and honed our system. We’ve perfected our ability to only display our clients’ ads to searchers in IMMEDIATE need of towing services.
He was cautiously optimistic and willing to give us a shot.
Phone Calls Only – Hot Leads Coming In
The marketing program he signed up for is called Pay-Per-Call Towing Ads. It’s designed to have the biggest impact possible, given the particular behaviors of people who are searching for towing services. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that when someone needs a towing company, they pull out their smartphone, search for a company on Google, and call one of the first companies they find. That’s why we exclusively use call-only Google Ads for towing companies.
That means for this client, ads only showed when searchers were using mobile phones. When someone clicked on the ad, their only option for contacting him was to call right away.
This is perfect for the towing industry. There’s zero wasted time and money spent on people who aren’t ready to contact your company for a towing service. These leads are EXTREMELY easy for converting business into customers.
Helping Our Client Stand Out – Over 20% Click-Through Rate for “Towing Near Me”
Merely focusing on call-only ads isn’t enough to ensure success. Competition in this client’s area was fierce. We had to make sure his ads stood out.
As always, we did extensive competitor research before building out his campaign. Even when we’re familiar with an overall industry, we take time to see if anything is happening in a client’s location that might give us an advantage.
In this case, we found several of our client’s competitors, offering a $50 towing service. This was also our client’s price. We felt that by undercutting these other companies by even a small amount would attract attention to our client’s ads. Rather than posting $50 towing in the ad copy, we posted the price at $49.95.
We also highlighted our client’s response time in the ads themselves. He was confident he could have someone out to a service call in his area in under 25 minutes. This allowed us to highlight one of the main factors that drive purchase decisions for towing services.
By emphasizing the client’s cost and response times in the ads, we IMMEDIATELY gave searchers the two most important pieces of information they likely needed to decide to contact our client. This helped us attain a click-through rate of over 20% for arguably the most valuable keyword possible: “towing near me”. Note: This is 10X the average. The higher click-through rate and corresponding improvement in quality score drove a lower cost for our client and made his budget go further, which more than made up for the nickel discount.
Carefully Selected Search Terms to Get Only the Best Calls
Keywords are extremely important for any Google Ads campaign, but they’re especially important in the towing industry. That’s because there are two reasons someone calls a towing company: to book their service or to find their car after it’s been towed. Obviously, we only want our ads to show in the first scenario. To accomplish this, we need to be extremely careful with the negative keyword list for our towing clients.
For this client, we scrolled through pages of Google results and directories to find every single towing company operating in his area. For each one, we added the business name and possible spelling variations to our negative keyword list. This ensured our ads didn’t show for others in the area, searching for competitors who had “towing” in their business names. Searchers often absent-mindedly click on the first search result they see, so had we not done this, people would have called our client thinking he was another company who had just towed their car.
We also carefully selected keywords based on how people were searching in his area and the HIGHEST possible searcher intent. For example, we saw there was a decent number of people searching “need my car towed” in the locations he was targeting. This is EXACTLY the kind of keyword we wanted to INCLUDE because it has the right intent behind it. Anyone using this search quite LITERALLY NEEDED our client’s service.
By carefully weeding out potential bad phone calls and selecting keywords that we knew would lead to quality phone calls, we obtained a conversion rate of over 30% for his campaign, which is EXTREMELY HIGH. The average is just 4.4%.
Conclusion – A Profitable Campaign and a Very Happy Client
Prior to signing up with us, our client had only endured negative experiences with online marketing. In our best month, we generated 291 phone calls for just $999. That meant high-quality phone call leads for an average of less than $3.50.
For some keywords, we had a click-through rate 10X BETTER THAN THE AVERAGE, and the campaign had an overall conversion rate of almost 7X BETTER THAN THE AVERAGE. This goes to show that paying close attention to what works and what doesn’t for a given industry can drive OUTSTANDING results.
There’s nothing more rewarding for us than providing a reliable marketing service that gives our clients peace of mind and time to focus on what they do best: grow their business.
If you have an existing pay-per-click campaign and you would like us to look at it, click here to schedule a free, no-obligation audit.
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Thanks for sharing this information sir. CTR is so confusing but I got it!