Having successfully built the brand new Suzuki Motorcycles website, with its popular Build Your Bike feature, it was time to build a microsite for each Suzuki dealership. Each microsite draws much of its content from the main Suzuki website, but features information specific to the dealer: its offers, its range, its stock and its opening hours.
Case study · Automotive & transport
Suzuki: a bold micro-site makeover.
After building the new Suzuki Motorcycles website, we were asked to give every Suzuki dealership a website of its own: one that shared the parent brand’s content but spoke for the local dealer.
- Sector
- Automotive & transport
- Channels
- Website
Website projectDigital experience
The challenge
What needed to change.
The challenge was all in the planning. As there are 100+ dealerships, we decided to build five microsites first, in order to test the functionality, before doing a mass rollout.
One of the biggest new developments was the Find A Bike module, which shows the customer which bikes each dealer has in stock. Getting that right at dealer level, and getting it right once so it could be repeated more than a hundred times, was the heart of the job. Every decision had to hold up not for one website but for the whole network.
Approach
How the work took shape.
Together with Suzuki, we combed through the existing main website, deciding which components would be pulled through to the dealer microsites, which content would be locked and which would be editable. We also worked out which areas required modification or reworking, and what needed to be added. Those decisions set the template for everything that followed.
We built one version of the dealer website and worked through updates and new ideas as they came to light, such as changing the way the dealer locator functioned and looked. Then we created five dealer websites and gave them to the dealers to play with, customise and test drive, before rolling out the entire dealership range.
The pilot group gave us real feedback from the people who would be using the microsites every day, so the template we rolled out to the rest of the network had already been tested in dealerships rather than in theory.
The shift
Five dealers tested it before a hundred received it, and that order made the rollout work.
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The work
The work, up close.
Each microsite is co-branded and can be managed by the dealer. It is a powerful business asset where they can promote their unique offers, range, pre-owned bikes, social media, about information, opening hours and more.
The Find A Bike module sits at the centre, showing customers which bikes that dealer has in stock.
The response from dealers has been extremely positive. They appreciate that the majority of content is automatically fed from the Suzuki parent website, so their website always looks great and features the latest campaigns.
For Suzuki, the network now speaks with one voice while every dealership keeps its own identity, and a campaign launched centrally reaches every dealer website without anyone at the dealership having to touch it.
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