This Mistake Can Kill Your Marketing Gainz

Think your sponsorship didn't work because nobody called that number on the banner? Think again.

Most plumbers are making a critical tracking mistake and it's costing them hundreds of thousands in lost leads.

Here's the problem: customers don't work the way you think they do. They see your sponsorship, feel good about you, and then weeks later when they have an emergency, they search Google and call from there. Your data attributes that lead to SEO. But the truth? That sponsorship was the real reason they called.

This is the "messy middle" the invisible gap between when someone first hears about you and when they actually pick up the phone. And if you don't understand it, you'll keep cutting off marketing sources that are actually working.

In this episode, Tyler Williams walks you through:

• Why call tracking numbers on sponsorships lie to you
• How customer behavior actually works (it's not one-to-one)
• The difference between lead generation and influence
• Why brand awareness is the most misattributed marketing metric
• How to build a marketing strategy that accounts for the real world

If you've ever wondered why your data doesn't match your gut feeling about what's working, this episode is for you.

Ready to get clarity on your marketing?

Schedule a free consultation and we'll audit your current strategy—no sales pitch, just honest feedback on what's actually driving your business.

Find more marketing resources for plumbing companies of all sizes at Mammoth Marketing. 
https://mammothforplumbers.com/

Find Tyler Williams on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/@tylervideos

Tyler Williams is the Owner of Mammoth Marketing an agency dedicated to helping plumbers (Clients or not!) grow their business through new customer connections.

Transcript

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All right, plumbers, everybody wants to know what marketing sources are giving them leads, but you can make some fatal mistakes because if you cut off the wrong marketing source, you can kill your entire lead flow. And I want to show you an example of how you can do that on accident super, super easily. So pay attention, this is a good one. Let's get going. So for those of you who don't know, I'm Tyler Williams. I run a marketing company called Mammoth, and we work with plumbers. Um, however, I don't like to hold anything back and I like to brainstorm and I like to teach to people like you. Hopefully, you're a plumber while you watch this. But today we're gonna talk about a situation that came up for my crew, and then we kind of talked it out, and here's what we came to. So we had a client who was like, hey, I want to do a sponsorship. Okay. So he wanted to be a sponsor and he was going to get a banner at a local sports game. And I am a big fan of this, by the way. I think more of you need to be doing community engagement pieces, but there was one key thing here. He said, then I want to put a call tracking number on it so that way the attendees or the parents largely can call me, and then I am going to know how much money I have made off of the sponsorship. Now, some of you might already be like going, hmm, there's a problem there. And if you don't, well, I'll spell it out for you. That's why we're here. Um, so there is an issue because the attention of this person is not on their plumbing problem, it's on their child who is kicking around a soccer ball at this game, right? And so she or football, if you're in Europe, by the way, because I know we have some some uh listeners abroad or viewers abroad, but um so what she does is she sees this here, this sponsorship banner. But do you think that she's gonna stop for one second and she is going to write down this number? No, she's not. She is more interested in this. And what you are doing when you are building something out like this is you are using this not as a lead source, you're using this as a goodwill builder because this woman is your target demographic and you want her to feel good about you and your company. So this method of tracking and attributing revenue can set you up for some pretty big failure on analysis. And this is why stats are a little bit tricky. Because ultimately, what will happen is if you put a call tracking number on there with the intent for people to call, you nobody's going to call. And then you're going to say, you know what? That didn't work. We don't believe it sponsorships drive calls. We don't believe that things like that actually push our business forward. Our customers don't come from it. Because you expected a call tracking number to show you the proof, right? But the proof was never there and it was never going to be there because that's not the path of the user journey. So, what you typically have is you run a sponsorship banner, you end up seeing it being seen by the user, your audience, right? This woman right here. And then she ends up doing nothing for a long period of time. Until, well, suddenly there's a problem in the home. This is not a heart or whatever. That's a water drop. I'll just tell you what it is. Um, and then that is when she is going to call a number. What number do you think she's gonna call? She's definitely not gonna call that little number that you put on the sponsorship banner because this here, this might have been two weeks of time. And you think, oh, well, the number, if she came from this influence, that's gonna be the number. But no, she ends up going to Big Daddy Google and she ends up getting a number from there. And you know what that number makes everything look like? That number makes the lead that came out of this look like SEO. And so then you cut this off, and you are attributing the success of the campaign to SEO. So this is a bit of a tricky thing, and and I have dealt with this and seen this so many times where um people are expecting lead sources in human behavior to just work one-to-one. And it almost never does. You got to remember that marketing is this big machine, and there's this thing that we like to call the messy middle, and that's really this. Because realistically, if you were doing this well, you would know roughly where she lives based on where this game was and what kind of schools that are uh from this, then you would probably be targeting her with other things as well, like meta ads. And that meta ad might just be a five-star review ad, just to make sure that she doesn't forget that you care about her son and you're a good plumber. So then what does she do? Does she end up like, does this end up being what she calls from? No, it still goes all the way through here, and then it gets attributed to SEO. And now you have two points of influence on this. You've got meta and you've got the sponsorship. But what I see happening is people putting things like call tracking numbers into something and expecting a one-to-one relationship of, hey, this is where this lead came from. And even if you were to say, Where did you hear about us? She is not going to say, oh, I saw a banner three weeks ago on a fence at my son's soccer game, and that's the reason why I called you. No, she's gonna be like, Well, I saw your meta-ad, or I saw you on Google. And none of this would have happened if you didn't have the true source. And this is the way marketing works. This is the way like brand awareness works, things outside of lead generation. And often the brand awareness aspect of marketing is attributed to SEO, which is kind of a problem because SEO is really not supposed to include branded keywords if you're trying to measure it directly, right? But it usually does when people run reports, all this stuff. Um, there's all sorts of filters and things. But I wanted you to understand how the human behavior works with these things because it's so easy for you to cut off a marketing source because you didn't think that it was real, when in fact it was super real. So another thing for you to understand is there is a point in time where you start. There is another point in time where you end. Now, if this is the timeline of influence. Wow, that's a long thing to say while I'm trying to make a video. All right, if this is the timeline of influence, often many of you are expecting, hey, we started this thing, this ad is going to run for one week. And at the one week mark, we determine if it's a pass or fail, if it worked or it didn't work. But that's not the way that people work. So what you end up needing to realize is the effects of this when you are doing brand awareness or things along those lines, the effect of this start might actually go all the way down to here. And it does decay. But the end of the campaign was here, but the end of the awareness is here. And the more that you do elements like this, the longer that things stay on this trajectory. Because it might be down all the way to here, where you end up getting the phone call. And again, you're gonna attribute it to SEO, but then you are like, oh man, our SEO is rocking, but it started at your campaign level back here when you ran a good giveaway for back to school backpacks, something like that, right? And so you gotta remember that when you do a campaign, this person, this Sally that we all know, love, and want to give us money, wow, she's got weird teeth. Um, that Sally, she enters your world here. But then she has to wait. And what does she wait for? She waits for a problem. Again, it's not a kidney or a heart or whatever organ that looks like. That is water. Um, and until she has a problem, she has no reason to call you unless you're doing some direct response marketing. I'll cover that in another video. But this is influence. And influence is really, really important for you to be building. Because if you don't build influence, you are always going to be the commoditized plumber inside of the market. She doesn't care who you are, she doesn't care that you care about what she cares about, which is her child. And so she just doesn't trust you enough to be the one that she calls. Because the other thing that happens when you start doing influence, you get them to go to Google, okay, because that's where they do most of their stuff. And I know AI platforms are starting to road this, all that stuff. We'll deal with that later. But what ends up happening is she does not Google Plumber, she googles you. If she googles plumber, she is going to be facing about 10 other plumbers. And then she's going to choose solely based off of reviews, photos, and metrics like that. And some of that is also tied into your SEO work. So if you can build influence, you end up building bridges and pathways. But here's the thing these bridges, right, they have to be maintained. You can build the bridge, but you got to keep putting the planks down so that way the people still walk across it and come to your business and hand you money for services. So influence is huge, and not a lot of plumbers are talking about it. Not a lot of plumbers understand how it works. And that's why I wanted to cover it here. So if you want us to look at your marketing stack, kind of give you some suggestions on what you could or should be doing next, go to mammoth forplumbers.com, schedule a consultation. My team would be happy to give you an hour to diagnose and we'll tell you if, hey, as an agency, is there any help that we can offer here? Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't, but you still get the free hour. If you're a plumber, if you're a drywall guy, it's going to be $1 million per consult. Sorry, that's just the breaks, folks. Anyway, you have a good one, and we'll see you on the next one.