There are still lots of things on the Internet that just don’t make sense from a marketing perspective.
One such common practice is for an independent dealer to link back to the manufacturer’s site for product information from his site. The problem with this fairly common practice is that the consumer gets lost in a circle of confusion. They see products and product categories that the dealer just doesn’t sell. They can even use the dealer locator to find another dealer for the same products in the area. And, if the consumer started at the brand site they get totally confused as they go around and around. This is a bad situation for everyone.
The best solution we’ve worked on with major brands is to build microsites for dealers that rely on filtered product feeds from the brand site.
Then you can link to these sites from your dealer locator, dealers can link to them from their local site and they work as landing pages for Google AdWord buys among other things.
These sites also become a great marketing channel as you can publish national and regional ads to these sites at a moment’s notice without additional cost.
Most importantly, consumers love it as it takes the confusion out of the process.