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

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

Ok this isn’t a post about me or is it…the lines are getting blurry aren’t they. Yesterday I read I read 7 articles all having to do with social media many others but that was the biggest portion. Here they are if you would like to read them.

10 Social Media Trends for 2011

The 4 C’s of Social Media

The Difference Between Friends, Fans and Followers

Creating Your Own Brand Network Like Oprah Winfrey - Sent via twitter from Brian Clark @copyblogger a blog you should read daily if you are marketing on the net

Facebook eCommerce the Future of Online Shopping by JD Rucker he always makes me think differently

Improve Your Influence by Chris Brogan another guy everyone should read daily its no wonder he’s an overnight success

25 Ways to Get More Social Media Followers from Hubspot another blog  I read daily and you should too.

Aside for the obvious that social media is big, it occurred to me that there needs to be a place to pool all your social media sites together so people can get the information they want about you when they want it, the way they want it… sound familiar?

“I want what I want, when I want it the way I want it and I’ll get it” my online customer mantra.

Then I get this article from Mashable AOL Acquires About.me 4 Days After Official Launch well that proves my second mantra about the web one I got from Tim Ash @Tim_ash “There is nothing new under the sun on the web” it seems that About.me has done it or at least started the era of social aggregation.

One place for all your social connections, one place to allow your friends, fans and followers to get to the social connection site of their choice to connect with you.

So what does this mean to you on the floor? Well I have said since the early 90’s customers are not shopping for a car they are shopping for a salesperson. Here one place where your salespeople can place connections for all their social connections, for now there will be more on this site soon.

So what do you need to do now? Get all your personel to go to About.me now get their profile while they are plentiful. Secondly look at building a page in your website with links to these about.me pages so your customers can see what your people are all about. 

Also get you dealerships name, this is subjective but I think this will become a big deal for companies too and it’s free so get your dealerships profile there now.

This is an app to watch if they do it right it will the gateway into a person’s online social world.   

Larry Bruce @pcmguy.com

A few days ago I posted “Good News and Bad News about Microsites and Landing Pages.”  

In that post I said that many dealers are getting microsites, which is good; however they are getting them for the wrong reasons, and that’s bad. I don't see a lot of strategy behind most microsite initiatives and, to be honest, there are more than a few vendors selling them with no strategy at all, and for all the wrong reasons.

I have had several requests to go into some detail on this so I will in this post.

Microsite and landing page optimization is not a onetime thing; it’s an all-the-time thing. Microsites and landing pages focus traffic on specific offers, promotions, and messages, and are designed to remove distraction and logically lead the visitor to conversion.

To achieve real improvements in your conversion rates, optimization needs to be a part of your marketing culture – it needs to be a habit. In the spirit of Franklin Covey’s book, here are nine habits required to develop a highly effective conversion marketing strategy:

1. First, understand your traffic driver types and how you intend to used microsites or landing pages with them. It takes both traffic drivers and landing conversion to make a good conversion marketing strategy work.

There are three traffic driver types:

a.       Continuous: Continuous traffic drivers are ongoing messages. Think of them as your autonomic marketing, like breathing. These messages are the lifeblood of your conversion marketing strategy. Your landing pages for these traffic drivers are the key to success. The higher your conversion rate, the more money you can comfortably spend on these traffic driver channels.

                                                                           i.      Example: Search Marketing (product site, etc.)

                                                                         ii.      Example: Service Reminders mailings and emails 

                                                                        iii.      Example: Declined Service mailings and emails

These marketing messages are ongoing. By using microsites and landing pages for each, you can communicate more, allow the user to get to the content they are looking for quickly, and convert more from each channel.

b.      Campaigns – Campaigns are just what you think they are: special offers and promotions. From your dealership and my be in conjunction with other offers going on at the time. Campaigns should be unique to your store, have a clear store-driven value proposition, and most importantly, a single clear call to action. So many times I see email campaigns that are three paragraphs long with no clear value proposition and no call to action, then a link to, of all things, the dealership’s Random Access Website (RAW, I love that acronym) home page. You couldn’t be more irrelevant to the customer you’re interacting with. Please—stop doing this.

Microsites and landing pages make it easy to overview the offer in the channel and then allow the visitor to land and go to the content they want to see, rather than trying to squeeze all the information into the channel, where users read only a small portion and then, not finding what they want, move on. Then, to make matters worse, you deliver them to the home page of your site—which has nothing to do with what you were talking about in the channel—and expect the visitor to somehow just know what to do. Use your landing page to shorten your channel conversation and let the visitor get to the content they want to see fast.

c.       Events and Cause Marketing – These usually happen, at most, once per quarter. Examples of these are OEM events, Lexus December to Remember, Toyotathon, Honda Mr. Opportunity, etc.

Cause marketing examples: We are now creating them for clients like Toys for Tots, the Make a Wish Foundation, etc.

Your microsites for these types of clients will connect your unique selling proposition with the event or cause, allowing you to compete for attention at the search marketing level with the OEM and the cause alike, which helps both you and the cause achieve your goals.

2. Not all traffic and clicks are created equal.

There is some traffic you just don't want, particularly when it comes to search marketing. Many times I see vendors bid on generic broad-match terms in an effort to show the dealership that they attract a lot of traffic to their sites, only to end up with a high bounce rate and no more leads than they had before. Conversion marketing isn’t about traffic – it’s about the lead, the sale, or the Facebook friend and/or follow, and everything you do should optimize that conversion.

Make sure you are bidding on converting keywords and phrases, and make sure they are at least phrase matches or, preferably, exact matches. Finally, above all else, make sure your landing page matches your ad and fulfills the promise it makes to the consumer.

3. Inject conversion optimization into your organization’s marketing culture.

Just because you know you need to implement an effective microsite and/or landing page optimization program, it doesn’t mean that everyone is on board. Help your dealer, management team, website vendor, marketing vendors, and other teammates understand that conversion optimization directly impacts the dealership’s bottom line, and that implementation is a top priority. This may not be easy, but if you continuously build the case for conversion optimization, you’ll ensure that nothing gets in the way of your conversion marketing strategy.

4. Begin with the end in mind.

Start every new test, every new program, and every new initiative with the end in mind. What are your goals for the offer and for landing page optimization? What's the conversion funnel going to look like? What kind of conversion rate improvement do you want to achieve? By beginning with the end in mind, you’ll make sure you take all the required steps toward boosting your conversions, and, along the way, you’ll be able to easily evaluate the effectiveness of your programs.

A boost to your work ethic, and a boost to your results.

5. Work in real time.

Online marketing moves at an exhilarating pace, and so should your landing page program. You’ll achieve the best results by minimizing the time in between landing page launch, analysis, and new tests. The longer you drive traffic to ineffective landing pages, the more gross profit you’ll lose. You should work to design and implement Microsite and landing page in a day or less.

6. Think outside the box. Differentiate.

Think beyond single pages and generic experiences. When you’re a visitor clicking on multiple ads, landing page sites can start to look alike: a form here, a headline there, a hero shot over there. But you’ll get noticed in a sea of competition if you start to think outside the box. Add a widget. Test a vehicle selector. Try video. Add a little Flash. Eschew generic. Differentiate.

7. Start with macro tests, then fine tune elements with micro tests.

Begin your testing program with macro-level, A/B tests. Test completely different experiences against each other, and once you find champions, fine tune the elements of your pages (hero shots, headlines, etc.). Start big. Continue small. Don't just test content test offers and price by geography.

8. Don’t wait for perfection. Just get the ball rolling.

The best Microsite/landing page critics are your visitors—not your vendor, your management team, and especially not you or your dealer. Don’t wait to launch a test until you think your landing page is perfect;  launch it and let your visitors tell you what works, and what doesn’t.

9. Never settle. Always be testing.

Unless you’re converting at 100%, you must always look for the next opportunity for optimization. Revel in the glory of your wins, but don't be afraid of failure. Learn from it, but move on to the next step. As soon as you’re satisfied with the status quo, your results will suffer. Never stop optimizing, and never stop testing. Always look for the next opportunity for improvement.

I hope this helps get your dealerships started on a conversion marketing path. 

Larry Bruce - @pcmguy

I have been in an interesting discussion on dealerrefresh.com with dealers, vendors, representatives of ATC and Cars.com over the last few days regarding the recent ATC acquisitions and their implications on dealers and this discussion has morphed into how to measure ATC, Cars and eBay Motors as classified listing services.

I have made my position very clear on this “You measure by conversion” Lead, Call, email or chat. However this discussion did morph into whether or not VDP views (Vehicle Display Pages) were a valid measurement and did they help the dealer?

This prompted me to do a thorough analysis from a conversion stand point of the listings and VDP view within each service ATC, Cars and eBay. Below in this power point is are my findings. I will leave it to the dealers to use this data to make up your mind as you will and to lend whatever wait you deem necessary in using it.

Monday morning I am sitting at my computer with my peripheral vision on my twitter feed when I see @jimziegler tweet “Alpha dog is on the point”. Now I have seen this tweet before and not really thought about it too much until someone tweets back “jim what is the point?” Now to set this up for you people that haven’t sold cars in a dealership before the point is a place on the lot usually around where the customers park where all of the salespeople will congregate and wait for an up (if you don't know what an up is ask someone who sells cars, can’t explain every car term not enough time or room on this post).

That’s  when an interesting analogy occurs Jim’s tweet back “I am on social media communicating with my customers and friends” and it hits me Social Media is the new “Point” for your dealership, the “Virtual Point”.

Now instead of the salespeople out on the physical “Point” smokin and Jokein they are on the “Virtual Point” communicating and updating friends and customers on happening in the dealership and their lives, which if you have ever sold cars retail you would understand they are one in the same.

On this same day I read a blog post “Are You Building A Social-Ready Organization” in this pot the author Alan See Says “At a high-level social media marketing is about influencing the customer experience by engaging in dialogue with the customer in order to build a trusted relationship over time.”

Again I think back to my basic car training:

Step 1 – Meet & Greet , now look at Alan’s statement above “Influencing the customers experience by engaging in dialogue with the customer” same thing.

Step 2 – Establish Common ground – Now look at the rest of Alan’s statement “In order to build a trusted relationship over time” again same thing.

Now anyone that has ever sold cars knows that if you don't get these two you're not likely to sell the car and even if you do it’s a mini commission and a bad CSI survey.

So think about what you are doing if you are a dealership that is blocking your salespeople from Facebook would you block them from the lot and the “Point”? If you are a salesperson who is not using social media will you go to the dealership tomorrow and not get out on the “Point”

How are you looking at this?

Good News… I am seeing and hearing a lot more dealers thinking about using microsites and landing pages.

Bad News… I don't hear a lot about the strategy behind their use or what they intend to use them for.

It reminds me of the early CRM years when a lot of us rushed to get us some of that CRM without understanding how we would implement CRM in our store. I wrote an article for Dealer Magazine back then called “Just Because You Built It Doesn’t Mean They Will Come”.

“Just Because You have a Microsite, Doesn’t mean they will come”

If you are building a Microsite in WordPress thinking that it will have some magical SEO value and be so optimized that you will get all this traffic and somehow sell more cars as a result, I hate to be the one to break it to you but…

IT WON’T

All you will succeed in doing is placing property on the web that requires your time, effort and mone for you to try and rank, takes your focus off of the ball trying to get traffic to it, which ultimately produces very little. You become frustrated and just quit leaving the sites out there that you paid good money for to die in internet wasteland.

If you think you are going to use Microsites & Landing Pages as an offsite SEO mechanism to build back links.

“This is a tactic not a strategy”

Back links from you Microsite network are a good side benefit but they are not what Microsites and Landing Pages are for.

The best Microsites and Landing Pages are the ones that convert. Call them High Performance Landing Pages. High Performance Landing Pages have 4 characteristics. They are:

Engaging

Dynamic

Disposable

Aagile

An Engaging landing experience uses an arsenal of tools like flash, video, social media and pre-conversion segmentation to capture and keep the user’s attention and drive them through conversion.

Dynamic landing experiences are those that are highly context specific, perhaps even personalized with content based on where the user has come from, what they have searched on or what they’ve done in the past. They aren’t static, they are specific.

Most importantly, landing pages should be Disposable. The best online marketing campaigns employ continuous testing for continuous improvement and that means we can’t get too tied down to any one landing page concept. We can’t invest so much into a landing page that it becomes too expensive to trash it and move on if it’s not working.

Finally Agile Landing pages need to be conceived, executed and launched in minutes, hours or days. Not weeks or months. I hear dealers every day who can’t get Microsites or Landing Pages developed and launched in under 4-12 weeks. That’s too long… Way too long. A 4-12 week development cycle on a landing page probably means that too many resources are being spent on the page and you are paying a lot of money to have it developed - from IT to agencies to marketing resources, and it probably means it is no longer disposable as well.

So, take a look at your landing pages. Can you use the words engaging, dynamic, disposable and agile to describe them?

We were all taught the 10 step road to a sale when we were little in the car business.

Step 1 – Meet and Greet: Walk confidently up to your customer, extend your hand and say “Hi Welcome to ABC dealership my name is Larry, and you are?” Firm hand shake look the customer in the eye.

Anyone who has ever sold a car knows the importance of this step. It sets the tone for the rest of you sales process with that up. Get it right you’ve got a 10x better chance of selling that up, get it wrong and you're up will immediately start looking for ways to bail.

Visitor landings are ups driving on to your digital lot. So what's your meet and greet like?

A confident, strong handshake viewed as trustworthy and engaging?  A wimpy, sweaty handshake depicting nervousness and mediocrity or the blow off like when someone puts out their hand, invites a handshake, and just as they’re about to shake hands, they lift their hand up quickly and says “syke!”.

In the digital world we live in today your ad is the invitation to shake hands — the extended open hand. Your landing page is the connection, the actual handshake. The “Hi Welcome to ABC dealership my name is Larry, and you are?” and sets the tone for a deeper conversation and / or purchase.

Are your landing pages wimpy, strong, or do they blow off potential customers? Here are three basic types of landing page meet and greets.

The sweaty palm (the deep link or single dynamic landing page)

Sending your traffic to a deep link or a dynamic landing page is easy, but it’s also wussy handshake, like a sweaty palm. Sure, there’s no work involved — you simply take the most relevant page on your site and send your paid traffic there. But when you invite a user to click on your ad with a specific message, and send them to an informational deep link that doesn’t clearly match the message of your ad, you disappoint the user and they lose confidence in you. Like when you meet someone with a sweaty, wimpy handshake.

The blow off (the home page)

Sending your paid traffic to your home page of your random access website is the ultimate in disrespect. For example you do a email or a search marketing campaign on special offer. Your email / ad is all about this offer and puts its hand out with the offer, but links directly to your home page — no mention of the coupon code to be found. SYKE! This is a complete blow off. You dangled the offer right in front user, only to disappoint them with no mention of the offer on your home page. Don’t stick out your hand unless you can deliver the goods.

The confident (the message matched experience)

Ah yes, the confident landing page. This handshake is well-designed and on-target. It’s slick and adapts easily to different people or segments. A confident landing page is message-matched, features high-quality design & delivers a great brand experience. This is the type of landing page that “Hi Welcome to ABC dealership my name is Larry, and you are?” and the type of landing page that delivers the goods and converts visitors.

Remember, first impressions count. Don’t blow off your potential customers with a wimpy landing. Put your hand out and deliver a great handshake.

This is a short post because you need to read evey one of the 32 proclaimations in this Manifesto. Then think before you post or comment ever again.

Proclaimation #1 - There are tools. There are people who use the tools. And then there are people who are tools. Know the difference. 

You can read the rest here http://bit.ly/socialmanif

Pay paticular attention to #19, #31 &#32