Dealers everywhere are starting to realize their advertising dollars are better spent on the internet as opposed to some other more traditional media. Not to say that advertising, such as direct mail, is not an effective method to pinpoint a target audience, internet marketing is becoming similar to newspaper advertising.

17 years ago when I started in the car business, advertising in the newspaper was a staple of any ad budget. Dealers felt they had to be in the paper to attract customers or else their competition would steal their market share.

Today, dealers feel the same way when it comes to the internet. Every dealer is trying to figure out a way to increase their visibility through higher placement in internet searches specific for car sales.

Have you heard of micro sites? These are web sites designed to attract customers at specific times in the buying cycle and ownership cycle.  For instance, there are sales micro sites like HondaBatonRouge.com that attract new car buyers during the early stages of their buying process or as it is referred to, the “information gathering” stage.

The key to turning a well designed micro site into a lead capturing vacuum is to pair it with a combination of search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing to own your local searches.

What can micro sites and digital intelligence marketing, as we like to call it, do for you that your regular website can’t?

The overall Vision

The purpose of these micro sites, technically speaking, is to be a trap for the search engines. They are designed from the beginning to rank high and to take over local search. It’s a one stop research portal that brings in customers from the very beginning of their “buying phase.” It’s widely known that when a customer begins to research they could be three month, six months, and a year or further away from actually making a purchase. That’s why it’s important to build top of the mind awareness as early on as possible so that when the customer decides it’s time to buy they will remember the time spent on the micro site. That’s not to say that some people won’t submit a lead their first visit because quite a few will.

The Conversation

The internet has undergone tremendous changes over the years and the biggest has been the change from information gathering to information sharing. The internet has evolved into a Social Media machine. Everyday there are conversation happening all across the internet in tens of thousands of forums, social networking sites and in chat rooms, just to name just a few. Unlike traditional communication everything said is logged, every communication saved in databases and on websites that are constantly crawled by the search engines and indexed for the world to see. It’s in knowing how to find these conversations that a whole world of car sales open up. Imagine being able to find people talking about buying a car in your local market or talking about being turned down for a car loan what could you do with that?

Now imagine one of our micro sites being right in the middle of one of that conversation, the contents of the site speaking directly to your future car deal. These conversations happen every day and are repeated multiple times every hour by hundreds of people in your local market… we bring those conversation to you.

Behind the Veil

The physical part of the site, the part of the site that’s seen, is just the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s the pretty face of a multifaceted search marketing approach that includes hundreds of videos across hundreds of websites, dozens of social networks and countless blogs and micro-blogs all of which will bring local traffic to the authority on your specific make and model, our micro site. For each page that is visible on the site there are dozens of pages of high quality content and videos that are made to bring traffic to that specific page. As time progresses the long tentacles of these sites will reach into every search phrase that says Honda or Ford, Mazda or Toyota, Chevy Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade to name just a few.

The end result is you will dominate your local searches and that translates into increased market share!

Next Generation Dealer Services is developing micro sites for every phase of the buying cycle and ownership cycle including new cars, used cars, service, body shop, accessories, and even aftermarket warranties. It is time to embrace the future of marketing in the car business and that marketing is on the web. Many battles are won with good intelligence so why not win the battles on your own sales home front.