Great post on Hubspot  by Brian Whatley on Marketing Automation. I love infographics because  they are so cool, but sometimes its hard to take away good info from them. Here are my take aways from this great infographic.

1. Marketing Automation is movin away from push & interpution to inbound & permission what that means to you is that the ways we traditionally think about marketing have chage from targeting people to targeting intent an being there when customers go to find things.
2. Marketing Automation the way we currently define it (automated emails and targeted push marekting) is being filtered out more and more by our customers. If you arent adding value (your just pushing and offer) then you are being screened out more and more.
3. To get back in the game you will need to provide TARGETED CONTENT not targeted offers you will need to make it easy to get the why and the how to do business with your dealership.
4. Humans are still human and a relationship will still be needed to sell them anything but the way you communicate with those humans is changeing and redefining  what that relationship is…for  the better.

Marketing Automation is the use of technology and software to help move prospects and leads through your sales funnel. As part of a whole inbound marketing philosophy, you can use marketing automation to help take the leads you’re generating from blogging, social media, and other sources, and make them more sales-ready. While marketing automation doesn’t help you generate newleads and can be challenging to use effectively, it’s important to be knowledgeable about it and understand when marketing automation can or can’t help your business grow.

Read more: 

We’re all aware of how important click-through rates are in determining your Quality Score but Google’s recent update now places greater emphasis on the importance of landing pages.

Alongside the undoubted effect such pages can have on improving conversion rate we’ve compiled Top Ten Tips for anyone looking to either build or choose the best possible landing pages for their campaigns.

1. Provide the best experience

We like to use the phrase, “think humans and the robots will follow”. This means providing the best possible experience for your users in terms of site navigation and usage etc.

Speed is becoming a growing factor not only in the Google algorithm (see this post from Matt Cutts last year) but tests by Google and by Amazon indicate users are increasingly using speed as a determining factor in where to purchase.

You can see how fast your site loads on Google’s Developers site. 

2. Would you buy from you?

Get someone impartial to take a look at your site, what does it communicate in the first three to five seconds? Does it give a feeling of trust? Is your brand immediately obvious? What about purpose?

Without these things being clear you’ll struggle to achieve the conversion rates you want.

Read More

These are some really good ones so we thought they would be great to share.

I put this on Slideshare over a year ago and the debate still rages on….

This report by Hubspot shows the power of combining Blogging, Content and Social. What we found dealers need is the strategy for integrating these marketing mediums and the execution to get it done.
We created OnlineDrive to do just that;

Give your dealership the strategy for Inbound Marketing, work with you to refine that strategy then execute that strategy.

OnlineDrive Professional Services will…

• Provide a market evaluation to identify your top performing areas and vehicles and tie that to an online inbound marketing plan.  
• Provide a custom website you control, completely own and can easily manage FREE OF CHARGE! 
• Set your business up with targeted Search marketing to optimized leads and identify your top performing keywords quickly.
• 50+ Landing Pages and Microsites to get visitors to the most relevant content easily and increasing your conversion.
• Create a content strategy delivering 30+ blog postings and press releases then implement and manage it for your dealership to get you found online by the most profitable prospects
• Create a social media & sharing strategy including 10 posts for Facebook and 10 posts for Twitter each day that is optimized to your audience so they listen to your message and keep your existing customers coming back to your site and your business.
• Let you see how your Inbound Marketing is working for you in an easy to read dashboard & automated delivery of reports direct to your inbox each day.
• Work with you dealerships staff to create highly effective inbound marketing strategies integrating:
• Behavioral Marketing & Targeting on your dealerships website
• Website specials and offer management
• SEO strategies onsite & offsite
• PPC strategies & campaigns
• Landing page management
• Conversion rate optimization of all inbound traffic
• Content marketing
• Social sharing and marketing 

Download Hubspot Study Click Here                                                                                    

Contact our Client Support at 713.893.1672 or client@micrositesbyu.com for a free market & online competitive analysis.

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

Some people have heard me say this in the past
“It’s not your website provider’s job to give you a working website. It’s their job to give you a functional one; it’s your job to make it work”

What does that mean…REALLY?
       • It’s Your Job – to know what keywords to rank for
       • It’s Your Job – to create good content to make that site rank
       • It’s Your Job – to work to get the backlinks to your site

At the end of the day that is exactly what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Keywords, Good Content & Backlinks it is really that simple and also that hard…Why?

Because we have been conditioned to think our website provider is going to do it for us. I can’t tell you how many times I hear website providers tell dealers “Our sites rank better and have better SEO than what you have now” and how many times dealer change website providers because they think the new website will be the magic bullet to get them ranked better, more traffic and more leads…WRONG!

In fact the website is pretty much worthless without the right online marketing strategy.

“Reality… the website should be FREE”

It is the tool of the online marketer not the online marketing strategy and that’s why I say…

“You don’t need a website provider you need a web marketing company that provides websites”

Without the marketing the website has NO VALUE.

What does a good online marketing strategy look like? Like this:

Now here comes the sad part ¾ of this you can’t even do because you lease you website presence from your provider you don’t own the property, and even if you did manage to find a good way to optimize your site it would only be a matter of hours before the other guy down the road on the same website platform had it too.

“The Law of equal incompetence” You can be no better than the network you’re on.

“AS LONG AS YOU LEASE THE PROPERTY YOU CAN GET NO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE”

So what’s a web marketer to do? Optimally:

1. Get your own website 
2. Start an aggressive PPC & landing page campaign find the keywords that convert and start your online marketing efforts with them
3. Create a lot of good relevant content in your website 400 pages plus around those keywords
4. Get a wordpress.org blog make sure you set it up as a subdomain of your website
5. Create 30 plus relevant SEO optimized blog posts per month around your target keywords 
6. Profile your customers & Facebook friends for interests 
7. Share through social 20 pieces of content per day relevant to your audience 
8. Integrate your social campaigns to your web presence to get the maximum traffic, SEO & conversion value 
9. Create at lease 50 Microsites, Landing Pages and / or Conversion Paths to focus traffic on a specific offer and provide easy conversion
10. Use behavior targeting to drive organic traffic to high converting landing pages 
11. ABT (ALWAYS BE TESTING) Split test everything often

I hope this post gets you thinking about your website and web marketing in a very different way, that was my goal.

If you want to know more or have questions we do a webinar on these very topics every Tuesday 1pm Central Standard Time , Click Here – Own Your Web Presence

Hope this helps

Larry Bruce – @pcmguy