There is a lot of misdirection of auto dealers on what microsites and landing pages do. Even more on the number your dealership should have and what content should they have.

WHAT MICROISTES AND LANDING PAGES DON’T DO!

Microsites and landing pages DO NOT spread your dealership a wide net helping you pick up traffic. This is a common misconception put forth by some web marketers in automotive that really don’t know what to do with a microsite. The web is far too big and search engines are far too smart now for you to trick them with volume.

What Microsites and Landing Pages do…do

They focus the visitor on a targeted message allowing the visitor to choose their own easy path to information and ultimately conversion.

We believe a dealership should have 50 plus microsites per franchise in some cases here is a list of what we believe they should be:

• Store Branded Microsite
• OEM Branded Microsite
• Traditional Marketing Microsites
• TV offer sites
• Radio offer sites
• Email marketing sites
• Direct mail marketing sites
• A microsite for each model you sell
• A microsite for the following used car types:
• SUV
• Compact
• Full Size Truck
• Small Truck
• Convertible
• Sedan
• Van
• Mini Van
• Vehicles under 10K
• Vehicles 11K to 15k
• Vehicles 16K to 20K
• Great Vehicles for first time drivers
• Car Buying Microsite
• Financial Needs Microsites
• Special Finance Microsite
• First Time Buyer Microsite
• Leasing Microsite
• Service Maintenance Microsites
• Express Oil Change
• Tire Microsite
• Battery Microsite
• Customer Pay Microsite

The real tricky part is that you may have as many as 3 versions or more of each site based on geo location and or channel driving traffic to that site. This is easiest managed from a single login landing page management platform where you can clone and tweak sites and pages without code keeping IT out of the marketing effort, that usually where the bottleneck is.

The whole point of having microsites and landing pages in the first place is to tightly monitor your analytics see what is working and what is not in a short time make changes and split test them. Having an integrated enterprise analytics system is key to making any microsite strategy work.  

The bottom-line microsites are the conversion work horses of your complete marketing strategy they purpose is always to convey the message or offer in concise easy way and give the visitor the quick information they need to convert to a lead.

Hope this helps,

Larry Bruce @pcmguy