This NADA was riddled with the Microsite buzz or at least where I was. I heard more than a few sessions on this topic and it amazes me sometimes that these “Experts” who talk about microsites and conversion still think that if you just throw a Microsite out there it will instantly get traffic or if you build a lot of them somehow visitors will just trip into them.

Just quit it…Please!

Don't ruin a good thing before it ever gets started with these crazy notions of volume of sites and bad content.

A Microsite is:

1.       Written and designed for a specific audience

2.       Optimized to the visitors intent

3.       Fulfills the promise made by the ad that drives the traffic

4.       Simple easy to navigate with a specific purpose

5.       Ultimately visitor generated through testing

A Microsite is not:

1.       A deep link landing page within your Random Access Website

2.       A duplicate of your Random Access Website

3.       A copy of a vehicle brochure online

4.       A duplicate of a vehicle listing (Your VDP)

I have heard there are now vendors duplicating the VDP (Vehicle Display Page) of your website or online listing into a Wordpress site and calling this a Microsite… Are you kidding me!

That’s just what you DON'T want to do: take something that is converting terribly, pay more money to duplicate it several times so we can get bad conversions for more money in other places…REALLY?

Dealers please understand what your goal is with conversion marketing through microsites before you jump in with these crazy Microsite schemes.

Vendors that are pushing this, stop understand what a Microsite is for before you get into conversion rate optimization. Don't just jump into this because it’s the buzz word of the day.  

Larry Bruce @pcmguy

This NADA was riddled with the Microsite buzz or at least where I was. I heard more than a few sessions on this topic and it amazes me sometimes that these “Experts” who talk about microsites and conversion still think that if you just throw a Microsite out there it will instantly get traffic or if you build a lot of them somehow visitors will just trip into them.

Just quit it…Please!

Don't ruin a good thing before it ever gets started with these crazy notions of volume of sites and bad content.

A Microsite is:

1.       Written and designed for a specific audience

2.       Optimized to the visitors intent

3.       Fulfills the promise made by the ad that drives the traffic

4.       Simple easy to navigate with a specific purpose

5.       Ultimately visitor generated through testing

A Microsite is not:

1.       A deep link landing page within your Random Access Website

2.       A duplicate of your Random Access Website

3.       A copy of a vehicle brochure online

4.       A duplicate of a vehicle listing (Your VDP)

I have heard there are now vendors duplicating the VDP (Vehicle Display Page) of your website or online listing into a Wordpress site and calling this a Microsite… Are you kidding me!

That’s just what you DON'T want to do: take something that is converting terribly, pay more money to duplicate it several times so we can get bad conversions for more money in other places…REALLY?

Dealers please understand what your goal is with conversion marketing through microsites before you jump in with these crazy Microsite schemes.

Vendors that are pushing this, stop understand what a Microsite is for before you get into conversion rate optimization. Don't just jump into this because it’s the buzz word of the day.  

Larry Bruce @pcmguy

Who are we putting in charge of our business?

As I watched this video of Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason apologizing for a business in Japan that couldn’t handle the orders that Groupon generated for them over New Years I couldn’t stop thinking; VIDEO

“Here is a vendor that set a marketing strategy in place for a business using price positioning and email executed on it and then when the business wasn’t prepared to deliver, HE’S apologizing to HIS customers for it?” A nobal gesture.

This is amazing, these businesses that work with Groupon have virtually no margin in what they sell through that channel, they are told what they need to price or discount their services at to work with Groupon and all the while making the customer more and more loyal to Groupon, Yes Groupon looks at the customers at their customers not the businesses customers…

How did Groupon get their customers? Do they have a product to sell? NO they got those customers on the backs of the business they convinced to deeply discount their product to get Groupon the loyalty they have at the businesses cost not Groupon, in fact Groupon got paid to do it.

"Groupon bought its loyalty with money from its clients"

HMMM who does that sound like in the Retail Auto Industry?

Wake up dealers take charge of your own marketing or you’re going to end up like these small business sheep that follow Groupon to the slaughter.

Who are we putting in charge of our business?

As I watched this video of Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason apologizing for a business in Japan that couldn’t handle the orders that Groupon generated for them over New Years I couldn’t stop thinking; VIDEO

“Here is a vendor that set a marketing strategy in place for a business using price positioning and email executed on it and then when the business wasn’t prepared to deliver, HE’S apologizing to HIS customers for it?” A nobal gesture.

This is amazing, these businesses that work with Groupon have virtually no margin in what they sell through that channel, they are told what they need to price or discount their services at to work with Groupon and all the while making the customer more and more loyal to Groupon, Yes Groupon looks at the customers at their customers not the businesses customers…

How did Groupon get their customers? Do they have a product to sell? NO they got those customers on the backs of the business they convinced to deeply discount their product to get Groupon the loyalty they have at the businesses cost not Groupon, in fact Groupon got paid to do it.

"Groupon bought its loyalty with money from its clients"

HMMM who does that sound like in the Retail Auto Industry?

Wake up dealers take charge of your own marketing or you’re going to end up like these small business sheep that follow Groupon to the slaughter.

Read an article yesterday in Automotive News about Microsites and Acton Toyota "1 Web site? Why Stop there?". I was absolutely thrilled to see that Post-Click-Marketing is finally getting some long overdue credit in the space and from Automotive News to boot.

However Acton hasn’t even scratched the surface with Microsites and Post-Click-Marketing and in fact in many cases is doing it the wrong way and is wildly successful even when handicapped. This should prove without question that your dealership needs to consider a strategy around microsites and conversion optimization.  

The good news is Acton is beginning to understand the basic premise behind what a Microsite is supposed to do:

"Focus the visitor on a specific offer and message"

However to do that there is so much more that should be done and isn’t being covered in the Automotive News article. Below are a few rights and wrongs about what can be taken away from this article and microsites.

·         Doing It Right – Acton is using a Microsites focusing messages on Warranty offers and Lease Specials, Great but there is so much more, product specific offers, social programs, push marketing offers I could go on but I don't want this post to get out of control.

·         Doing It Wrong – These sites cost as little as $2000…WHAT THE?… if you have $2000 invested in a site you can’t walk away from it if its not working, that much money also indicates too much time investment in the Microsite and changes are not going to be easy all very bad for a Microsite. A Microsite, Landing Page or Conversion Path needs to be light, agile (created in an hour or 2) and most of all disposable.

·         Doing It Right – They are separating the sites as stand alone, not as pages within their RAW (Random Access Website). This does help the sites with their own individual SEO and it does help the main website with back links increasing its SEO value.

·         Doing It Wrong – The main value of an offsite Microsite is that you can eliminate distraction and guide the customer down the path to conversion, that’s what microsites do they convert. As you can see from this image of the lease site this is a copy of their main site with all the Random Access distractions and navigation of the main site. How many people get lost and pulled away from the message of the site with this distraction? Answer…A LOT!  

·         Doing It Right – Acton has dedicated people handing the lead conversions that come from their three sites that are getting 14000 visitors per month according to Automotive News and this staff is on a separate floor from the main sales staff. According to GM Mike Hills “It’s a business with in a business”. The team at Acton is made up of 9 dedicated Internet Sales People, 2 Online Sales Managers, an e-Commerce Manager and a fulltime graphics designer. This is a good staff size for a store this size.

·         Can’t Say “Doing it Wrong” here as I don't know what the specific duties of each of these people, I will offer a bit of experience here instead, 3 managers are “Over Kill”. According to the article the store is selling 350 to 400 units per month and only 35% of the leads are handled by the Internet team, so what do these 3 managers do?

A suggestion: Instead of having 3 managers have one in that team be a data analytics director and the other be the team lead, this will give you a significant advantage assuming you are setup to capture all the Web Session data needed to optimize each Microsite. The e-Commerce manager should work with the analytics director and the Team Lead weekly to get the data analysis and cross reference that with what the Team Lead is seeing and hearing from the team to plan test waves, site offers and changes based on visitor behavior.

·         Doing It Right – Acton Toyota is updating content virtually in real time. A great advantage of Microsites if they are set up right is that dealership personnel can update the content in a matter of minutes.

·         Doing It Wrong – Form what I can tell from these sites that Acton has, without some significant back end tools to change the content on these sites it will require a developer to do it. Ideally you want to be able to change your site without IT involvement, “This puts marketing back in control of  the online marketing process”

·         Doing It Right – Clearly from reading the article Acton’s e-Commerce Manager has thought about the content from the perspective of the user. All too often I see dealers go into this process thinking “What do we want to tell our audience?” instead of thinking “What does our audience want to hear?” Kudos to Brun for having that perspective and approach.

·         Doing It Wrong – It’s not enough just to think about the content from the user perspective you have to know it’s what your users want. A 4% conversion rate is ok and double what the most in the industry are getting but there is much more conversion available when you start letting the visitors tell you what's working using split testing instead of trying to guess.

To wrap this post up while there is no doubt that Microsites are expanding the reach of Acton Toyota and will expand the reach of your dealership, don't get pigeon holed into thinking that that’s all microsites do. Expanding your reach is a side benefit the real benefit in microsites is conversion optimization, customer experience management and the ability to produce, test, optimize and repeat with minimal effort in virtual real-time time and ideally no involvement from development.

This is a great start but there is so much more potential. A dealership needs to be looking at having hundreds of microsites not just few.

Hope that helps,

Larry Bruce @pcmguy

Read an article yesterday in Automotive News about Microsites and Acton Toyota "1 Web site? Why Stop there?". I was absolutely thrilled to see that Post-Click-Marketing is finally getting some long overdue credit in the space and from Automotive News to boot.

However Acton hasn’t even scratched the surface with Microsites and Post-Click-Marketing and in fact in many cases is doing it the wrong way and is wildly successful even when handicapped. This should prove without question that your dealership needs to consider a strategy around microsites and conversion optimization.  

The good news is Acton is beginning to understand the basic premise behind what a Microsite is supposed to do:

"Focus the visitor on a specific offer and message"

However to do that there is so much more that should be done and isn’t being covered in the Automotive News article. Below are a few rights and wrongs about what can be taken away from this article and microsites.

·         Doing It Right – Acton is using a Microsites focusing messages on Warranty offers and Lease Specials, Great but there is so much more, product specific offers, social programs, push marketing offers I could go on but I don't want this post to get out of control.

·         Doing It Wrong – These sites cost as little as $2000…WHAT THE?… if you have $2000 invested in a site you can’t walk away from it if its not working, that much money also indicates too much time investment in the Microsite and changes are not going to be easy all very bad for a Microsite. A Microsite, Landing Page or Conversion Path needs to be light, agile (created in an hour or 2) and most of all disposable.

·         Doing It Right – They are separating the sites as stand alone, not as pages within their RAW (Random Access Website). This does help the sites with their own individual SEO and it does help the main website with back links increasing its SEO value.

·         Doing It Wrong – The main value of an offsite Microsite is that you can eliminate distraction and guide the customer down the path to conversion, that’s what microsites do they convert. As you can see from this image of the lease site this is a copy of their main site with all the Random Access distractions and navigation of the main site. How many people get lost and pulled away from the message of the site with this distraction? Answer…A LOT!  

·         Doing It Right – Acton has dedicated people handing the lead conversions that come from their three sites that are getting 14000 visitors per month according to Automotive News and this staff is on a separate floor from the main sales staff. According to GM Mike Hills “It’s a business with in a business”. The team at Acton is made up of 9 dedicated Internet Sales People, 2 Online Sales Managers, an e-Commerce Manager and a fulltime graphics designer. This is a good staff size for a store this size.

·         Can’t Say “Doing it Wrong” here as I don't know what the specific duties of each of these people, I will offer a bit of experience here instead, 3 managers are “Over Kill”. According to the article the store is selling 350 to 400 units per month and only 35% of the leads are handled by the Internet team, so what do these 3 managers do?

A suggestion: Instead of having 3 managers have one in that team be a data analytics director and the other be the team lead, this will give you a significant advantage assuming you are setup to capture all the Web Session data needed to optimize each Microsite. The e-Commerce manager should work with the analytics director and the Team Lead weekly to get the data analysis and cross reference that with what the Team Lead is seeing and hearing from the team to plan test waves, site offers and changes based on visitor behavior.

·         Doing It Right – Acton Toyota is updating content virtually in real time. A great advantage of Microsites if they are set up right is that dealership personnel can update the content in a matter of minutes.

·         Doing It Wrong – Form what I can tell from these sites that Acton has, without some significant back end tools to change the content on these sites it will require a developer to do it. Ideally you want to be able to change your site without IT involvement, “This puts marketing back in control of  the online marketing process”

·         Doing It Right – Clearly from reading the article Acton’s e-Commerce Manager has thought about the content from the perspective of the user. All too often I see dealers go into this process thinking “What do we want to tell our audience?” instead of thinking “What does our audience want to hear?” Kudos to Brun for having that perspective and approach.

·         Doing It Wrong – It’s not enough just to think about the content from the user perspective you have to know it’s what your users want. A 4% conversion rate is ok and double what the most in the industry are getting but there is much more conversion available when you start letting the visitors tell you what's working using split testing instead of trying to guess.

To wrap this post up while there is no doubt that Microsites are expanding the reach of Acton Toyota and will expand the reach of your dealership, don't get pigeon holed into thinking that that’s all microsites do. Expanding your reach is a side benefit the real benefit in microsites is conversion optimization, customer experience management and the ability to produce, test, optimize and repeat with minimal effort in virtual real-time time and ideally no involvement from development.

This is a great start but there is so much more potential. A dealership needs to be looking at having hundreds of microsites not just few.

Hope that helps,

Larry Bruce @pcmguy

“The only thing you’ll will need is crowd control”

That was the tag line I used when I first started “Outside The Box Marketing” in 1997, that business was a direct mail marketing company for event sales, you know these sales we’ve all done them:

·         The Gorilla on the roof

·         Burgers and hotdogs on the grill

·         Greeters in short skirts

·         The red and the blue balloons (do you remember what the blue balloon meant?)

·         100,000 pieces of zipcode saturation mail

All equaled then a mass of people on the lot. I can still remember the look on the faces of the GM’s and dealers we did this with back then…Big smiles on their face, beatin on their chest “look at what I have done” as they looked over the sea of people on the lot.

The problem I kept seeing is that the board wasn’t increasing much over their normal Saturday. For most of my competitors this didn’t bother them they were fulfilling a need for TRAFFIC and they saw this as doing what the dealer wanted them to do and never looked beyond the actual perceived need of the dealer.

My dealer background wouldn’t allow me to do that, I knew there had to be a better way so I sold that business and started AIMData in 1999 and the rest of that story is for another post.

The point is we are repeating this cycle of TRAFFIC only now it is online not on the lot.

I have been challenged by some in the automotive community that say:

“Wouldn’t you rather have the customer on the lot, that is what our service does…get’s them to the lot”

Here is what I have to say to them:

“Until someone invents a brain scan that can tell the thoughts of a customer as they enter the lot, NONE of us know why the customer came on the lot”

“As a marketer or a marketing company in this industry to say that your marketing brought the customer to the lot is a REDICULOUS statement to make.”

More often than not the reason a customer just shows up on the lot is a combination of several messages and you don't know which one of them set the action in motion. This has always been the problem with traditional media and why John Wannamaker first said “I know 50% of my advertising is wasted…I just don't know what 50%”

Enter Conversion Marketing:

With conversion marketing you know exactly what got the response you wanted, whatever that is a form, a call, an email, a friend or follow you know. You know because you can track it down to the page where it happened and you can see the path the customer took to get there.

To a marketer this is more important than lot traffic, why? Because we can see the behavior and test what gets more of that behavior. Then we can take what we have learned and apply it to traditional media making it more effective to get the behavior we want there.

Conversion is the most important thing to your marketing because it is the only thing that is absolutely Trackable down to view of the offer that is being presented. This is why I get so upset when I hear some vendor spinning a dealer up about traffic, when I hear some online marketing company or listing company talking about how they got the customer to the lot. Its just spin to sell more their product its not helping the dealer if you really want to help the dealer, show them and tell them about what you are doing to get more customers to ACT  not LOOK… as a dealer I need action:

“Eyeballs on site, fictional customers that came in maybe because they saw your ad or listing don't help me nor do they interest me.”

In the famous words of a great marketing campaign from the 90’s “Show me the conversions”

I’ll be talking a lot more detail on a Conversion Marketing Strategy, what it is, how you can do it and how it will help you cut your advertising costs and raise sales at the Internet Battle Plan in ATL on the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th of this month Click Here for more info on that event. If you can make it I hope to meet you there. If not stay tuned I will share as much as I can online over the next few months.

Larry Bruce

@pcmguy

“The only thing you’ll will need is crowd control”

That was the tag line I used when I first started “Outside The Box Marketing” in 1997, that business was a direct mail marketing company for event sales, you know these sales we’ve all done them:

·         The Gorilla on the roof

·         Burgers and hotdogs on the grill

·         Greeters in short skirts

·         The red and the blue balloons (do you remember what the blue balloon meant?)

·         100,000 pieces of zipcode saturation mail

All equaled then a mass of people on the lot. I can still remember the look on the faces of the GM’s and dealers we did this with back then…Big smiles on their face, beatin on their chest “look at what I have done” as they looked over the sea of people on the lot.

The problem I kept seeing is that the board wasn’t increasing much over their normal Saturday. For most of my competitors this didn’t bother them they were fulfilling a need for TRAFFIC and they saw this as doing what the dealer wanted them to do and never looked beyond the actual perceived need of the dealer.

My dealer background wouldn’t allow me to do that, I knew there had to be a better way so I sold that business and started AIMData in 1999 and the rest of that story is for another post.

The point is we are repeating this cycle of TRAFFIC only now it is online not on the lot.

I have been challenged by some in the automotive community that say:

“Wouldn’t you rather have the customer on the lot, that is what our service does…get’s them to the lot”

Here is what I have to say to them:

“Until someone invents a brain scan that can tell the thoughts of a customer as they enter the lot, NONE of us know why the customer came on the lot”

“As a marketer or a marketing company in this industry to say that your marketing brought the customer to the lot is a REDICULOUS statement to make.”

More often than not the reason a customer just shows up on the lot is a combination of several messages and you don't know which one of them set the action in motion. This has always been the problem with traditional media and why John Wannamaker first said “I know 50% of my advertising is wasted…I just don't know what 50%”

Enter Conversion Marketing:

With conversion marketing you know exactly what got the response you wanted, whatever that is a form, a call, an email, a friend or follow you know. You know because you can track it down to the page where it happened and you can see the path the customer took to get there.

To a marketer this is more important than lot traffic, why? Because we can see the behavior and test what gets more of that behavior. Then we can take what we have learned and apply it to traditional media making it more effective to get the behavior we want there.

Conversion is the most important thing to your marketing because it is the only thing that is absolutely Trackable down to view of the offer that is being presented. This is why I get so upset when I hear some vendor spinning a dealer up about traffic, when I hear some online marketing company or listing company talking about how they got the customer to the lot. Its just spin to sell more their product its not helping the dealer if you really want to help the dealer, show them and tell them about what you are doing to get more customers to ACT  not LOOK… as a dealer I need action:

“Eyeballs on site, fictional customers that came in maybe because they saw your ad or listing don't help me nor do they interest me.”

In the famous words of a great marketing campaign from the 90’s “Show me the conversions”

I’ll be talking a lot more detail on a Conversion Marketing Strategy, what it is, how you can do it and how it will help you cut your advertising costs and raise sales at the Internet Battle Plan in ATL on the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th of this month Click Here for more info on that event. If you can make it I hope to meet you there. If not stay tuned I will share as much as I can online over the next few months.

Larry Bruce

@pcmguy

It has been suggested that we start an #automarketing tweet chat. So as is my fashion I just went ahead and did it.

Please join us every Wednesday 12pm to 1pm CST (Central Time) for #AutoMarketing Tweet Chat. This is your chance to engage with some of the most talented and brightest in the Auto Marketing space we will be discussing sales & service marketing from Social Media to Traditional and everything in between.

To follow the stream easily go to http://tweetchat.com/ and sign in with your twitter account if you don't have a twitter account this is a great reason and opportunity to get one go to www.twitter.com and sign up it's free and if you don't use it for anything else but to learn from the #automarketing tweet chat forum it will be worth it.

So come jump in the conversation,

Larry Bruce

@pcmguy

It has been suggested that we start an #automarketing tweet chat. So as is my fashion I just went ahead and did it.

Please join us every Wednesday 12pm to 1pm CST (Central Time) for #AutoMarketing Tweet Chat. This is your chance to engage with some of the most talented and brightest in the Auto Marketing space we will be discussing sales & service marketing from Social Media to Traditional and everything in between.

To follow the stream easily go to http://tweetchat.com/ and sign in with your twitter account if you don't have a twitter account this is a great reason and opportunity to get one go to www.twitter.com and sign up it's free and if you don't use it for anything else but to learn from the #automarketing tweet chat forum it will be worth it.

So come jump in the conversation,

Larry Bruce

@pcmguy