In this episode, OMG Tow Marketing Kicks The Year Off Right, we sat down with the CEO of OMG National & OMG Tow Marketing, Jesse Lubar, who discusses the important role that marketing plays in promoting a towing business and how towers can leverage the new technology behind it. Click play to listen.

Shelli Hawkins:

Welcome back everyone to Episode 13 of the TRAXERO On-the-Go podcast. Welcome to 2024, and welcome to an amazing month that we call January, where all things are new, fresh, and we are excited to get rolling this month with some amazing guests, topics covering all the things towing related. And Laura, we’re super excited to have everybody here. My name is Shelli Hawkins. I’m your co-host also along with Ms. Laura Dolan.

Laura Dolan:

Shelli, thank you so much and as our guest mentioned a little while ago, I’ll pull the curtain back. He called this lucky number 13. So fingers crossed this episode goes without a hitch. Get it?

Shelli Hawkins:

I like it. It is lucky number 13. Great way to start off the year for sure. We are in the middle of a massive storm moving across the country right now. It covered… All my friends in Iowa are reporting to me, they’ve got about a foot of snow, which towers call it pennies from heaven. One corrected me that it wasn’t pennies to heaven. It’s something. Anyways, it’s a great revenue producer for the towing industry. Just promise us to be safe out there, right? And we on the east coast here are covered in rain and north of us, Baltimore north and Boston area are covered in snow. How about you in Ohio?

Laura Dolan:

Yeah. So we had a dusting this morning. I call it a dusting. We had maybe half an inch of snow and it’s melted already. So when I woke up this morning, it was beautiful out. It looked like a Christmas card. It has warmed up a little bit. It has been raining all day. We are under a wind advisory till tomorrow. So very exciting stuff. This is the reason why my husband and I moved to this area because we absolutely love the four seasons, so we are expected to get more snow later this week, so we’re excited for that. So January is usually… We’ve only been here going on three years now, so January is typically more snowy. So here’s hoping we get a little bit more and we could actually play in the snow and maybe throw a couple of snowballs.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love it. Do you guys have a snowblower?

Laura Dolan:

We do-

Shelli Hawkins:

You got your own-

Laura Dolan:

We do. We’ve used it once.

Shelli Hawkins:

Do you happen to know the brand? Because I would love to know if it’s from the Aarons Corporation.

Laura Dolan:

I do not.

Shelli Hawkins:

Because they at one point in time owned AW Direct. So just be like serendipitous type thing coming together. If that would be the case.

Laura Dolan:

I’ll have to make a note to go out in our garage when I get a free moment and look and I’ll let you know Shelli, if I actually don’t. I think we got it off Amazon for what that’s worth.

Shelli Hawkins:

We are excited. Yeah, a little later on, we’re going to talk about a couple of things first, but I’m confident that our podcast guest today has never pushed a snowblower in his driveway for good reason. But we’ll get into that a little bit later. I want to share something really exciting that just happened here at TRAXERO and I could not be happier and I don’t know, just tears might come to my eyes if I talked about this a little bit. But I’m really passionate as you are, Laura, about the towing industry. And we here at TRAXERO use the platform Slack for the majority of our communications. We still use email, but Slack is where it’s at for us, managing our projects, communicating with all of our folks, getting things done. And a part of that is what we call our celebrate channel. I am getting emotional as we speak.

Laura Dolan:

Oh my gosh.

Shelli Hawkins:

A part of that is our celebrate channel, and that is where every single employee here at TRAXERO is given five tacos every single day, seven days a week to give to folks that go above and beyond or help us out in a pinch or something. Like for example, Laura fixed something today for me. So I gave her a taco or three tacos. It’s somebody’s birthday, you give them a taco and we can in the past use these tacos and redeem them for a fun like merchandising type shop with Yeti mugs and T-shirts and dartboards and yoga mats and all kinds of fun stuff for our employees here. We are now able to donate our tacos to cash money to the Survivor Fund, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Laura Dolan:

Wow.

Shelli Hawkins:

And so I literally got in there, donated every single taco, and it came out to be $250.

Laura Dolan:

Oh my gosh.

Shelli Hawkins:

To the Survivor’s Fund. I literally took all my tacos. I’m like, I don’t need a yoga mat.

Laura Dolan:

Right, right.

Shelli Hawkins:

I’ve got 300 Yetis in my house already, and God knows I have a million T-shirts that say TRAXERO. So I saw that. I’m like, I will be doing this right now. And here goes all the tacos. It’s the Survivor’s Fund in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is headed up by the folks of the museum, which is our friends Jeffrey Godwin and Laura Colon, formerly of Tow Times now the executive director of the museum. So excited to see that come into play.

And many, many, many years ago we saw a need to help the folks that are on the roadside every day that unfortunately are struck and killed. And so the Survivor Fund today is that is the allotment of money that is given to towers in the industry that lose a family member. So for example, if the family is a member of the museum at the time of the passing, they will receive $12,000 from the Survivor Fund free and clear. If they’re not a member, they still will get $10,000 from this fund. Thank you so much for our folks and friends and partners down at the museum for putting this into play. So what better way to use my tacos than to give back to our industry? And when I saw the $250, I’m like, yes. How can you feel any better?

Laura Dolan:

Oh, that is amazing. I definitely got to jump on that train. That is wonderful.

Shelli Hawkins:

But I did not cry. It was there. And if I did, oh well, it’s just-

Laura Dolan:

If you did, it’s fine-

Shelli Hawkins:

A wonderful.

Laura Dolan:

We are real as can be on this podcast.

Shelli Hawkins:

When you are in this industry long enough and have clients and know people, you will unfortunately experience that at one time or another, but so grateful for the folks out there that are giving back. So here we go. That’s what I’m excited about today.

Laura Dolan:

That is really exciting, Shelli. Thank you for sharing that with us. I recently had my first experience at the Wall of the Fallen back in September when I was out there for the Tennessee Tow Show. And I’ll spare everybody my emotional experience with it, but I think it’s something everyone should visit at least once in their lives just to get a real feel for the heart and the emotion that goes with this industry and how it affects the families. Yeah. So I’m so grateful that, we as a company, have banned together and created this charity program, if you will. So that is fantastic news.

Shelli Hawkins:

Laura, how was your holiday season?

Laura Dolan:

Our holiday season was very nice. It was very pleasant, a lot of music involved. My husband and I are both involved in the barbershop world, so we did a lot of holiday shows, so that was a lot of fun, hanging out with friends. So yeah, it was a very pleasant season. How about yours?

Shelli Hawkins:

Really great. I spent two weeks in the mountains of Virginia with my mom and dad. One week, the first week I was working from home and then the second week was Christmas to New Year’s where I got to spend time with my mom and dad and then also my sister and her family that live in Greenville, South Carolina, about an hour south of Asheville, if you folks know where that is. And I had some unfortunate events happen on my way home. I got on the road to head back home to Columbia, Maryland, and about an hour into the drive, I met a person. Not a person. I met a thing that let’s call Buck. And of course there’s no pictures to show this deer that I hit, but it was a pretty big deer. And with my 20 years of Wisconsin driving experience and after, I think this is my sixth deer I’ve hit in my life.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, this wasn’t your first?

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh my gosh. No, no, absolutely not.

Laura Dolan:

Oh dear.

Shelli Hawkins:

Not at all. No, this is where you see it. You accelerate and swerve and you only clip the front. If I had not done that, I would’ve hit this thing square, hit square on, and it would’ve been rental car all the way back to Maryland. But the car run and drove all the way home perfectly. And after 266,000 miles and shifting gears for 12 years, I retired. I retired the purple Honda Fit that my towing friends have come to know and love over the years, upgraded to a 2020 Honda Fit and with all the bells and whistles and automatic. So when I go up to New York City or these big cities with Rene, I’m just going to fold it up in my back pocket and call it good so I don’t have to find parking. That’s my strategy with this.

Laura Dolan:

Congratulations on the new car.

Shelli Hawkins:

Thank you.

Laura Dolan:

That’s amazing. So I have a funny question and we’ll get to our guests. We’ve made him wait long enough.

Shelli Hawkins:

We’re just having a good time.

Laura Dolan:

We’re just chatting here. Do you name your cars?

Shelli Hawkins:

So I don’t. I don’t. And I’ve had towers come with me-

Laura Dolan:

I’m surprised-

Shelli Hawkins:

With recommendations for this one. The other one was just the Fit. This one I’ve had a recommendation to call it The Misfit. The Misfit.

Laura Dolan:

The Misfit.

Shelli Hawkins:

Get it? I don’t. Do you Laura Dolan, do you name your cars?

Laura Dolan:

Of course I do. My very first car was named Rhonda the Honda. She was a 1995 Honda Accord EX coupe.

Shelli Hawkins:

What?

Laura Dolan:

Beautiful car. Yep. My second car, her name was Stella. She was a 2011 Honda Civic EX sedan. And then we had the Tesla Model 3. Her name was Guinevere. Stormtrooper Guinevere. She looked like a Stormtrooper. She had those beautiful white interior seats. And we now are the proud owners of a Tesla Model Y named Yves. And it’s spelled Y-V-E-S.

Shelli Hawkins:

And where did this name come from? What’s the story there?

Laura Dolan:

It’s not really a story. We were just thinking of names that started with Y that kind of went along with the whole Model Y thing and we came up with just so many different names from Yzma to Yolanda, and then all of a sudden my husband came up with Yves, Yves St. Laurent. It just fits the whole Tesla genre. And so-

Shelli Hawkins:

Is it red?

Laura Dolan:

It was a perfect fit.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah. Is it red?

Laura Dolan:

It’s white.

Shelli Hawkins:

Okay. Even better. I love it. And I don’t want to attempt to pronounce it. I’m just going to slaughter it.

Laura Dolan:

It’s just Eve.

Shelli Hawkins:

Eve. Yeah.

Laura Dolan:

Eve. Adam and Eve.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love it. And the model Y is fantastic. So you guys-

Laura Dolan:

I love that car.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love it. I love it too.

Laura Dolan:

Love that damn car so much. Anyway. All right, let’s get to today’s guest. We made him wait long enough. So we are very excited. Well, I’m at least very excited today because the topic at hand is something that I’ve been in the business… I’ve been in this field now going on 18 years, and that is the editorial and marketing space. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce our guest, Jesse Lubar. He’s the CEO of OMG National and OMG Tow Marketing. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us today.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes. Thank you, Jesse.

Jesse Lubar:

Thank you guys. Thank you so much for having me. My first car was a 1985 Toyota Celica GTS.

Laura Dolan:

I love it. I love that you just jumped right into the conversation.

Jesse Lubar:

[inaudible 00:11:11] Car of all time.

Laura Dolan:

And did your car have a name, sir?

Jesse Lubar:

Look it up on eBay. It’s beautiful.

Laura Dolan:

Nice.

Jesse Lubar:

No name. No name.

Laura Dolan:

Less common than I thought.

Shelli Hawkins:

It was a standard. I’m assuming you’re shifting gears in that thing.

Jesse Lubar:

Of course. Five speed. It had power windows and door locks, which was kind of like you said, posh at the time.

Shelli Hawkins:

Right.

Jesse Lubar:

Great car.

Shelli Hawkins:

Was that the era where you had the Sony Discman and you put the cassette tape in the dash to adapt to the CD player?

Jesse Lubar:

Yes. Yes. Well, actually, I think this was even before there were CDs, but then later you could take the… I know what you’re talking about, the cassette that had the wire coming out of it.

Laura Dolan:

Yes, I had one of those too-

Jesse Lubar:

You’d hold it on your lap and it would skip.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes, yes-

Laura Dolan:

Exactly. We all know how this goes. Yeah. I did the same thing in my Honda Accord. But then in 2002, we actually did have a CD player installed, so I got to throw that little device away.

Shelli Hawkins:

Bougie. I love it.

Laura Dolan:

That takes me back.

Shelli Hawkins:

That’s awesome. I learned on a 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit Standard H. Yeah. And my dad was my coach, instructor, driver’s ed. Yeah. Laura, how about you? What did you learn on?

Laura Dolan:

Oh, I learned on the Accord. It was my mom’s car that was passed down to me. So the 1995 Honda Accord. My father also had a Plymouth Voyager. Very, very stiff pedals. I hated driving that thing, but I learned on that too. But I actually took my test in the Honda Accord. I can talk about cars all day, you guys.

Shelli Hawkins:

And I did not take a road test and I never had driver’s education. My family moved from Georgia to Wisconsin. I had a good Georgia learners permit, handed it to the DMV in Wisconsin, said, “Can I renew this?” They said, “No problem.” Handed it back to me and I said, “How long do I need to wait before I come back and take the road test?” The person behind the counter said, “You mean to tell me that what you gave me was not a driver’s license, but a learner’s license?” I go, “Yes, yes, yes.” And he looked down at the counter and he looked at me. He said, “I’m not going to go through all that again. You be safe on those roads.” And I walked out.

Laura Dolan:

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I learned to drive in California. I don’t think that would’ve happened to me.

Jesse Lubar:

That’s great!

Shelli Hawkins:

No, not at all.

Laura Dolan:

How about you, Jesse? Did you grow up in Florida or-

Jesse Lubar:

Yes, I did. From New Jersey. Nobody’s really from Florida, but been here since before high school. So I did take driver’s ed and I learned on an athletic field in a 1987 Pontiac Grand Am.

Laura Dolan:

Oh cool.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow.

Laura Dolan:

I love those cars.

Jesse Lubar:

All the driver’s ed’s cars were the same.

Shelli Hawkins:

What a cool car.

Jesse Lubar:

And the football coach was the teacher, and I already knew how to drive, but it took the drivers ed, I think, to get the insurance discount. That’s how they did it down here.

Shelli Hawkins:

New Jersey. You do know what snow blowers are?

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah, I do. I do. And we don’t have them here. It’s only snowed here once in 40 years, I think, in south Florida.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, wow.

Jesse Lubar:

But yeah, we had some good snow storms up in New Jersey more than you get-

Shelli Hawkins:

I bet.-

Jesse Lubar:

In Delaware or in Maryland. Less than you get in, much less than you get in Wisconsin.

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure. So tell us a little bit about yourself and OMG Marketing. Just introduce yourself, your background. You mentioned you’re from New Jersey and a little bit about OMG.

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah. So I’ve been doing what I’m doing since I’m a kid, since I’m 17 years old. My dad started the company, which is still our corporate entity in 1990 in Fort Lauderdale. And we started with a single product that was something that we manufactured and sold called the telephone on hold message. So if you think about anytime you’re on hold with a business or an airline or a hotel or an auto dealer or a tower, we were the guys who write and record and edit and produce and provide the equipment for the messages that you hear.

We built that into a nice business and that was also our entree into the towing business because towing was a big market for us at that time. Thirty plus years ago, there were no cellphones or computers. So the motorists that got stranded calling a towing company, they’re doing it from a payphone or a landline and getting a dispatcher through an old telephone key system and then having to call dispatch from there. And those systems had a plugin for music on hold, and so we would provide the equipment and the custom messages and that is how we got started.

And then as the years rolled along and the cellphones became so prevalent in just about all small businesses, the messages weren’t compatible with cellphones. So we had a big base of customers and they all needed help with marketing. And we got into web development and web hosting and then later into review management and just became very focused on the technology around marketing and have just kind of kept innovating and evolving along the way all the way through today.

Laura Dolan:

So I’m assuming you are familiar with interactive voice response then?

Jesse Lubar:

Sure. I was just talking about it earlier today.

Laura Dolan:

So we just redid our entire phone system here at TRAXERO. And I will just proudly brag for a minute that my husband has recorded all of our IVRs for all of our different phone branches. So if you call TRAXERO, you’ll hear his voice. So just shameless plug.

Jesse Lubar:

Excellent.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah.

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah, that’s a part of the on hold messages is the companies of a little greater size that need the IVRs or the automated attendants basically anything that you could record, we do. And that’s how we kind of got our start. But more commonly was a towing company wanting to have a series of messages about their business so that when they’re busy and they’re putting somebody on hold, maybe they know they need to bring cash or some proof of ownership, just different FAQs that could get answered, and some cross-selling services, a lot of utility with those messages and just, they make you sound very professional.

Laura Dolan:

For sure. And do you provide the copy for those? Do you do the scripts or do the companies you work for provide their scripts and then you, in turn, produce the IVRs for them?

Jesse Lubar:

Our writers will develop the script and then the client is usually the one that we kind of work with to get it just right. Edited. Especially with IVRs, you always need to get the phonetics right so that any proper name you’re pronouncing, right. Sometimes based on where they are in the country, they might pronounce something a little bit different, roof versus roof, things like that.

Laura Dolan:

Right, yep.

Shelli Hawkins:

True.

Jesse Lubar:

So we get that nailed down and approved. And then generally in our business, the client picks out a professional voice talent, either a male or female voice talent and a background music track. And then we mix it and we provide it to the client along with the equipment if it’s going to be plugged into the system. Or a lot of times nowadays it’s just a WAV file that we upload for them.

Laura Dolan:

Exactly. Yep. That’s how we do it too.

Shelli Hawkins:

So fascinating and how things have changed. I remember if we rewind a little bit, going back to like we were talking about earlier in the eighties, you think about what were the opportunities for marketing for a business back then? There were billboards. Of course, Yellow Pages. Who was not in the Yellow Pages and how many towing companies out there start with a one or an A, so they could be at the top of the list. A lot still remain today. There was television, of course, newspapers, and radios. What am I missing? And of course, trade publications, magazines, and that was it.

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

Pre-internet. And you sat down with a consultant or you yourself decided this is going to be our mix, this is how we’re going to put the word out about our towing company, about our business. And it was really simple. Enter the internet and what has happened with the absolute infinite possibilities of marketing your business. And so Jesse, we are excited to delve into this topic about marketing and what that means to a towing company out there that’s getting started. Or maybe they are multi-generational and they’ve really not focused on putting their brand out there in a new way.

We are excited to have you here to talk about all these things specific to the towing industry. I’m going to ask one question. How did OMG get started in marketing? Because you folks do a lot of marketing for the towing industry, which is so incredible. The footprint is so huge for you guys. Anybody, I want you to talk about how people can find you and reach you at the end of the podcast, but OMG is working with other companies outside the towing industry too. How did you stumble across the towing industry?

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah. So I explained a little bit about how we got started and in doing so, there were a handful of different markets that we were focusing on. For us towing and auto body and auto repair was always a really big part of our business. Along the way, we became friendly with the folks at “American Towman Magazine” and we partnered up with them to bring “American Towman TV” to market and that was a weekly vidcast to towers sort of a video, almost a video podcast or video variant of the magazine.

And we really fell in love with the industry and the characters that we met along the way and we got a pretty clear picture of the different challenges that they face. And like you said, everyone needs marketing and advertising. So we focused on the specifics and getting to know the different kinds of things that were important to a heavy operation and how that was different from a company that is just doing light duty and a lot of private property work or maybe trying to up their game and up the image of the company to attract some contract work or municipalities to get them their business to grow and get into the police rotations. So it really just kind of depends on the type of operation and whatever their intent is.

As you know better than just about anybody that I’ve met, there are all kinds of towing companies out there and they all have slightly different needs. And so we sit down, we speak with them, and we assess what they’re doing, what they want to do more of, and then we make a recommendation. I think one thing that’s really interesting in just having done this for so long. I remember back in maybe 2010, 2011, where I’d see, and I’m talking about at a trade show, see a company walk by the booth and they look up at what we are doing and they glance at it.

They don’t really stop to take it in, but I kind of watch the bubble go off of what they think we’re doing and then they go on to look at the tool companies and the wrecker manufacturers and then watching that evolution of the next year, the same guy bee lining in either because he had an epiphany or she had an epiphany that this is something they needed to get started or someone talked to them and said, you really need to get yourself on the internet. And just watching that change over the past 15 years or so has been pretty cool.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fascinating. For sure. As you’re talking through the consultative approach that you have to new customers coming to OMG, I can’t help but draw the same parallel for us here at TRAXERO because as you mentioned, there’s so many different revenue sources for the tower, municipality work, commercial clients, PPI, any type of motor club. Of course cash calls. And so when we sit down and we talk to somebody, we ask them all those exact same questions to match them with the perfect software that’s going to fit for them. And it’s really no different than when you build a tow truck and outfit it. What are you going to use it for? Is it going to be for the auction? Is it going to be for… What are you going to be using it for? Using it in the port as a heavy moving containers and that is going to dictate the type of equipment you put in there and how you outfit this truck and build it. So many similarities.

Jesse Lubar:

Sure. Yeah. I think what ends up happening ultimately is they all will inevitably ask us in their own way, what can I expect to get back for my investment? I think that I need to do some advertising and marketing. I’ve been told that I need to do some different kinds of marketing to get my name out there and get my brand across the internet. But what can I expect to get back for the money? And so what we do is we listen and then we try to educate them and give them what their options are.

And sometimes it’s they have a very limited budget and just simply want to get more inbound calls and we have a product for that. What we normally recommend, if they have the patience and the dollars to invest, is to try to do things in more of a logical and proven manner so that what we’re doing for them is getting them those additional calls and helping to grow their business, but doing it in a way that is going to have some longer lasting results and help them with their ranking when people are searching and just really sort of spreading their brand across their service area.

Laura Dolan:

Jesse, can you speak to some of the trends in regards to some of the pain points and some of the common problems that you see some of these tow companies have that you’ve kind of taken on and remedied for them?

Jesse Lubar:

Sure. I think one of the big pain points and buzzwords that has come up time and time again, and it’s something that we’ve used and other companies that we compete with use, is there’s so many… I was having a conversation recently with Shelli about the motor clubs and the volume of motor clubs that are out there and the different options that are out there. And the way that I look at that is they’re available to help keep the guys busy, keep the trucks going, but never at a dollar amount that they’re satisfied with.

And that’s when you talk about pain points, that is a pain point that I hear probably as much or more than anything else. And so when we can create what we call a cash call for the towing company and showing them different ways to get more of those and be able to rely on them with some consistency, I would say that tackling that subject and coming up with a solution for that is far and above what we get asked the most. How do I get more cash calls? What can you do to get my phone to ring with those kinds of calls?

Shelli Hawkins:

Mm-hmm. And with being in such a highly fast-paced, emotional industry where services needed immediately for the most part for the work that is a sense of on the roadside, that kind of thing, it’s just this challenge. I’m guessing that having the patience to build that brand on top of just this, like I said, the fast-paced and urgent kind of sense that they have day to day in the workplace, how do you manage that?

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah. We try to get them to… And look, a lot of times it comes down to, we’re on the phone, we’re interrupting their day. I couldn’t even count the number of towing companies that have reached out. They have an interest, but just the challenge that we have and that they have in connecting with us at the right time where they can dedicate that time to absorb what we’re saying, it’s a challenge to get them to make the time to really think about it. So one of the things that is really part of the process is how much time are they willing to spend just getting to understand what it is that we can do for them versus I don’t need you to tell me this. I just need you to tell me how you get the phone to ring. And based on that… And a lot of times it comes down to trust because they’re in business, so they’re getting calls from all different kinds of solutions all the time.

And a lot of times that same person, once we’ve proven to them what we can do and what our people are about and the fact that we have an entire team of people that are just dedicated to towing, that does definitely make us unique. They change their tune. So when they’re able to allot the time to listen, it’s the same thing where they’re taking the time to buy a truck, then they’re outfitting the truck and then they’re painting the truck. And I was listening to your last podcast, you were talking about the wrecker pageant at the Baltimore show. If a lot of the people who were listening to this podcast, they understand it because they’ve gone to the shows and they’ve seen it firsthand, but it’s absolutely amazing. It’s unbelievable the amount of creativity and branding that some of these people have put into just a lot of love and a lot of effort.

And it’s like they’re spending that time and that effort and that energy to get their brand out there. And the way we look at it is, if given the opportunity, we’re going to help them get that same message and that same feel out there across the internet by claiming all the different properties that are available and that the business is entitled to and making sure that there’s the right images that have been added, the right calls to action, the right narrative about the business and what they are capable of and just really helping them spread their message about their business in their service area in the specific area where they’re looking to attract those calls. And I think that is something that kind of ties in, if they’re in that mindset, which a lot of times we have to struggle to get them to sit down and listen and absorb it with us and kind of see the vision. But when they do, it really can turn into something great.

Shelli Hawkins:

It just takes that serendipity moment. It takes the aha moment when it clicks and the message that you and your team is giving the customer, the client that you have. And when everything comes together and the magic happens, that’s it. You’re usually like, now I understand. Now I get it. I’ve seen some return on investment. We’re good.

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah. That’s so true.

Laura Dolan:

And I think it speaks to the importance of how consistent your brand needs to be because like you mentioned Jesse, you’re in so many different places, whether you’re online, you’re on a billboard, you’re on a building, you’re doing your messaging for a commercial, you want that messaging to be consistent and everything that comes down to the logos and the colors, you want basically these customers’ customers to recognize them and look at the brand and they’re like, oh yeah, that’s Weil Wrecker or-

Jesse Lubar:

There’s so many-

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes, there are so many-

Jesse Lubar:

Great companies out there. And I think the other thing that we try to look at with them is there’s different channels that we’re able to hit and some of them are going to be channels that you can point to and they’re going to drive calls. Trackable, inbound cash calls. Not on day one, but within a few days of activating with us-

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah. Real quick, when you say channels, I think I know what you mean, but I don’t know that our whole audience will know what you mean when you say channels. So how do you define that?

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah. So just different marketing channels or different ways that the company can market and open up a pathway between the business and the customer.

Shelli Hawkins:

Makes sense. Sure.

Jesse Lubar:

So Google pay-per-click ads is one of the most popular. Your business is on there with a call to action. It’s what we call a click-to-call ad. So the customer is stranded or family member is stranded, they’re doing a search, they see the ad for the business and they click the button and the button calls the towing company. So there’s instant direct ones like that. Then there’s other ones like social media and social media is often overlooked. Not intentionally, but because it’s not something that the average person is going to go to social media when they need a tow. And that’s where it becomes about the branding. I think that success can be measured in part by, if you’re in your local market and you know that Kids Towing is the towing company to go to in my town or Interstate Towing is the company when you’re in my part of Massachusetts and their messaging is reinforcing with photos and with stories and staff highlights and new trucks and all those messages are being directed to people in their service area.

That’s another channel that is powerful, but it’s about branding and it’s not something that is going to necessarily create inbound phone calls today. Just a holistic approach to it and getting all these channels covered.

Laura Dolan:

And I think the one drawback to social media is the manpower behind it because I’m sure a lot of these tow companies, they don’t have marketing as top of mind, so they don’t think to hire somebody who’s specifically going to do their branding on social media or email marketing or things like that. Because I, personally as a consumer, I wouldn’t go to Facebook and look for a tow company. I would go to Google. So yeah. And that being said, I just wanted to circle back, Jesse, because you did mention Google, and I wanted to mention the article that you wrote for the October issue of “American Towman” because you mentioned you write for them and you talked about something that Google was testing way back in 2018, but it hadn’t really come to fruition yet. And that was local services ads by Google and they called them Google Guaranteed or Google Screened. And you mentioned that they were doing a trial run in California and Florida. Has that testing started and has it been successful? What is some of the feedback you’re hearing from some of those tests right now?

Jesse Lubar:

Wow. I’m glad you asked me that. That is something that I’ve spent probably more time focused on than I would care to admit. It has rolled out in Florida and in California. For towing, it’s what’s called Google Screened. So there’s different categories of it, but Google Screened is the one that relates to towing.

And what it actually does is it makes it so that… We believe that the theory behind it is that Google is making a move towards quality over quantity. So basically saying, you need a towing company these are… If you think about the results, the way they look today, it’s a list of companies that are paying to be found followed by map results, followed by some directories, and then followed by organic websites for towing companies. And this program is sort of upending that and saying, these are the companies that we feel or that have proven to us and we’re going to guarantee it, are the best options for you. And the way they do that is by vetting the companies that are there and making sure that they’ve got the right insurance and the right licensing for their specific area.

Laura Dolan:

Sure. Having to be in compliance of all that.

Jesse Lubar:

It’s going very well. The challenge with it is that Google is throttling the results. So they’re balancing between the traditional pay-per-click ads that you see and the Google Screened ads. So over time, it’s going to be something that’s a lot more prevalent than it is today, and we’re watching it closely and we’re actively getting our customers qualified for it and selling it.

Laura Dolan:

So has the nationwide rollout happened yet? What is the status of that currently?

Jesse Lubar:

So currently, the rollout is just in Florida and California. And over time it’s going to roll out nationally, but I don’t have a clear timeframe for it just yet.

Laura Dolan:

Okay, that’s totally fine. I was just curious.

Shelli Hawkins:

This is fascinating. It really is. And how fantastic to have a company like OMG in our space that is pioneering technology like this. I love this. And there’s so much that goes beyond behind the scenes than just going and looking at someone’s website. The website can be here’s how to contact us, here’s our locations, here’s what we do, here’s a little history about us, and maybe here’s our staff. And behind the scenes is exactly all these things that we’re talking about.

Search engine optimization. I want to touch on that a little bit. I learned when I came to TRAXERO, we were aggressively writing blog posts about tons of different topics, not just software related, but safety related and everything you can ever imagine in interviewing folks. And that is because we need things to be out on the internet so that when people search for us or towing software, the information is out there to be grabbed. And just little lessons like that to learn. That being said, talk a little bit about what the tower needs to know about these abbreviated things like SEO, things they may not know a whole lot about and the impact on their business.

Jesse Lubar:

So that’s a great, great question. SEO is a… It’s an acronym I think you call it for search engine optimization. And it’s something that some people actually use it as a noun and some people use it as a way of describing a service that they’ve bought. Some people use it as a way of describing a company like ours. I just switched my SEO and they talk about it like that.

When we think of SEO in our business, we think of what’s called on-page search optimization. And meaning you have a website and the back end of that site is constructed in a certain way where it’s got the right keywords that are going to attract those search engines to you. And so in a company where you’re offering a suite of comprehensive towing software services like TRAXERO, SEO is a very important part of that. But in the towing business where it’s a very hyper local kind of a thing.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes, yes.

Jesse Lubar:

What we do is what’s called off-page optimization. So that’s not to say that modifying your website can’t have some benefits to you, but most of the benefit that you’re going to get is going to be in what’s called off-page optimization. So that’s basically optimizing everything. That’s not your website. So you need a website because you just need to have a strong representation of your company, but you don’t necessarily need to be that concerned about consistently modifying and updating it with different information. What’s more important is that you go out and you gather the directories, the search sites, the social sites, the review sites, and you make sure that your best foot is forward there, where you’ve got what’s called the NAP information, which is your name, address, and phone, consistent across all of those different sites that you’ve got the right pictures for your business. You’ve got the right phone number.

Sometimes people will change their web address over the years and they’ll have a few different website domains that are listed on different directories. You really want to start by getting your arms around all that and optimizing it either on your own or with the help of a company like OMG. That is what could have a much bigger, faster impact for you than being overly concerned with true SEO and optimizing the content on your website. If you just think about it logically, you do any kind of search for towing right now, today for any kind of service you could think of, when do you actually get to the websites?

It’s way down. It’s on page two, page three. Before that, you’ve got the ads, you’ve got the maps, you’ve got the organic Google listings, you’ve got directories that come first, then you’ve got the website listings. And the fact is that, especially in the telling business where almost all of the traffic is coming from a mobile device, they’re not going to that third page, fourth page to find you. So you can make a lot more impact by optimizing all of your internet properties that you’re able to claim on behalf of your company. Think about your Yelp page, your Bing page, your Yahoo page, etc. Your Apple Maps. There’s so many of them. And really starting out by getting a true handle on that is what we recommend 99% of the time first.

Laura Dolan:

And again, it comes down to consistency, which is basically the foundation of brand building. Like you said, you got to make sure your name, your company, your phone number, your URL, your location, that everything is listed everywhere. So there’s no gaps in that kind of communication. Have your hours listed, have your multiple locations listed, your headquarters listed, everything that would help contribute to them making sure they’re looking at the right company.

Because as Shelli and I have seen, there are multiple tow companies out there that have the same name.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes. Yes, they do.

Laura Dolan:

I want to make sure I’m looking at the right Bill’s Towing, for example, or the right ABC Towing, because I will go on Facebook and I will follow companies so that they’re aware that we exist, which is one of my strategies. And I will see four or five different pages of the same name, but they’re completely different companies because they’re in completely different locations. So yes, consistency is key.

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah, no doubt about it. It just makes the most sense to… Google is for good or bad, right or wrong, in control of almost all of this. And they look at three things when somebody’s searching. It’s distance, relevance, and prominence. And so it’s how far away are you from the person searching for a towing company. It’s how relevant is the information that they’re putting out there on their website, on their Google page, on their other directories. And how prominent are they, meaning I want to show the people who are searching the best result. So a business that has a website that is built with modern code and a company that has 500 reviews, perhaps is more prominent than one that has two reviews and no website.

Shelli Hawkins:

Right.

Jesse Lubar:

And those are the things that affect rank and rank is what gets you those cash calls without having to pay for them, which is sort of the holy grail here of-

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes.

Jesse Lubar:

Internet marketing for your towers.

Shelli Hawkins:

Indeed. Navigating the waters of marketing are challenging. And you have done a fantastic job today outlining, highlighting the process, the importance. We went all the way back to the eighties and what that looked like all the way to today in 2023 and what’s happening in the future-

Laura Dolan:

24.

Shelli Hawkins:

That one. Did I say 2023?

Laura Dolan:

Yes, you did. But that’s okay. It takes me in the entire month of January to make sure I’m in the right year every year.

Jesse Lubar:

If you get to March, then you know, you’ve got to check yourself.

Laura Dolan:

Exactly. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Jesse. Just a couple more things. I want you to tell our audience how they could find you, and really quick just lay out what the onboarding process looks like for new towing customers who want to leverage your services.

Jesse Lubar:

Sure. The onboarding process is probably the most important part of our entire operation. It’s actually where our most skilled folks are, because a lot of times that’s where we’re really… When they’re buying something from us is different than when they are shifting gears into saying, okay, well how am I going to maximize this for myself? And that’s where the onboarding team comes in and gets to know a little bit more about their company.

Sometimes we end up making some tweaks to their package to make it so that it’s just right. But usually within 36 hours of when they sign up, they get a call and/or a Zoom meeting and we learn a little bit more about their business. We go over the timeframe with them and usually, depending on the product, within a week or so from there, they’re starting to see some activity from us.

We also have what’s called OMG Insite, and that is our client portal. They go to OMGinSite.com and they can check on their progress, get proof of work and proof of performance anytime they want. So we get them set up there and it takes about a half hour call sometimes, depending on the situation, an hour, if they have it. But we really want to kind of set them off on the right trajectory and that’s how we do it.

Laura Dolan:

That’s awesome. So can you tell our audience how to find you? What’s your website if they want to reach out to you personally?

Jesse Lubar:

Yeah, sure. So the easiest way is just to, you could talk to us on Facebook, OMG Tow Marketing on Facebook or omgtowmarketing.com, you can chat with us there. Make an appointment, give us a call. Our phone number is (800) 789-4619, and you could also see us at five or six tow shows every year. So I guess the next one will be in Florida. We’ll see you on our home turf in April. We make it easy for you to find us if you’d like. We’d love to hear from you.

Laura Dolan:

Excellent. Excellent. And I will make sure to put all that information in the show notes of this podcast. For those of you listening to us, you can’t see right now, but I’m actually wearing an OMG Tow Marketing beanie that I got from the Baltimore Tow show, so I’m excited to see what kind of swag you guys deal out in Florida. I’m assuming it won’t be beanies since it’s April and

Jesse Lubar:

It’ll be something good.

Laura Dolan:

98 degrees and 100% humidity at that time.

Jesse Lubar:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

Thank you so much, Jesse.

Laura Dolan:

Yes, thank you.

Jesse Lubar:

Thank you.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you very much. Happy New Year. And thank you all so much for tuning into this episode of TRAXERO On-The-Go.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the TRAXERO On-The-Go podcast. For more episodes, go to traxero.com/podcast and to find out more about how we can hook your towing business up with our towing management software and impound yard solutions, please visit traxero.com or go to the contact page linked at the bottom of this podcast blog.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay