Internet Marketing Scam Alert

Many are not aware that I returned to the car business running and Internet sales department. As an Internet Marketer I am always looking for ways to expand my reach and it is no exception as an Internet Marketing Manager for a car dealership. Knowing what I know about online marketing I started researching vendors in the Micro Site Market place and found some interesting things that are accepted in the industry.

For those those that don’t know a Micro Site is a landing page used by car dealers as an extension of their main website to capture leads. It can be completley generic, model specific or even very niche targeted, but it is a separate branding message and lead generation source for the dealer. If used properly it can provide huges SEO benefit or used in PPC marketing.

What I am finding from the Micro Site providers is that they charge exorbitant fees for dealers to use a landing page that they do not own. At prices ranging from $200 to $600 a month for the vendor to maintain control of the property. At those kinds of fees you would expect to own the property outright at the cost of a one month payment for design work alone and minimal hosting cost should be less than $10 per month.

It is amazing that dealers do not understand that they are basically renting a property that these vendors try to tie them into a contract for a year or longer pushing the real cost up to at a minimum of $2400 to a more realistic industry norm of around $3600 a year. As someone who markets many different products online using small 3 page landers (Micro Sites) it is amazing that dealers do not see through this.

While some of the technology that these providers do use meets the industry norm such as XML form captures and inventory integration it is amazing that dealers willing pay the fees for these properties, that they do not own, just for these reasons alone. Inventory integration on a micro site is really not needed to capture leads for specific models and even then if the page is designed properly the inventory could be framed in or linked out to the dealers main site. The XML form integration is used by the Internet Lead Management software to process leads in an automated fashion which still could be accomplished by a person responsible for managing Internet leads at the dealership if a suitable alternative can not be found to push the leads in an XML format.

Let’s face it an Internet Lead for a car dealer is worth considerable more than one for a small ticket item and deserves human interaction immediately and not placed in some automated system to handle the whole process if the dealership is serious about using the net to sell more cars. That does not mean that you do not use automated follow up on unsold leads, to think differently than that would be insane. However actually having a human place that lead in the follow up system, the ILM, would encourage that individual to consider the lead as a valuable asset to the business and take the necessary steps to convert them to income for the business and the individual.

Don’t get me wrong, micro sites are the future for online automotive marketing but to tie yourself into a contract for thousands of dollars per year for a property you do not own is a poor investment of your advertising dollars…