On March 31, 2009 Ford Motor Company announced the details on their Ford Advantage Plan which is similar to the popular plan announced months ago by Hyundai.  In a nutshell the Ford Advantage Plan lets you buy or lease a new Ford, Lincoln or Mercury vehicle with the peace of mind of the Ford Payment Protection Program.

I have provide a link to page to the Ford Advantage Plan Q&A Sheet which has more details on the offer, but here is the high level details:

• It pays the monthly amount due on your new vehicle purchase/lease up to a maximum monthly benefit of
  $700, for a maximum of 12 Benefit payments
• Benefit is paid directly to your financing source
• No cost to you
• It is important for you to continue to make your monthly financing payments on your account until you have received notification that your Benefits have been approved in order to maintain your current account status

With Ford’s move into a payment protection plan it would seem that the Automotive industry has done enough research to show that the only way to get people to buy a new car is to limit their downside risk. 

Building Consumer Confidence

This makes complete sense to me since everyone I speak with is focused on conserving cash, if they have it. This is one block is the slow rebuilding of consumer confidence, but will it be enough to pump up Ford’s car and truck sales? 

Dave Wilson, President of Preston Ford commented on the plan “I’m very excited that we have some good news to offer Ford car buyers in Maryland. With many people facing the prospects of layoffs, this actually may give some people the peace of mind that they can afford a new car.”

Taking this to heart, David requested that we build a quick microsite for the Ford Advantage Plan to service his Ford customers in Maryland, Delaware and northern Virginia.  David purchased the domain www.fordadvantageplan.net and we posted the information on the Ford Advantage Plan for his customers to read. 

The website design makes it easy for his sales staff to refer customers to information when they are on the phone or my email. Preston Ford believes that while this program is being tested, they should get out and spread the word.  It also makes it easy for anyone visiting this website to click through to his Ford website or any of the other brands in their family of fine cars.

Building Microsites – How Much Time is Involved?

This project took about 5 hours of programming resources which made the site very affordable for Dave to test.  Once we create a template for a automotive client, creating additional marketing websites is very easy.  The added bonus is that Preston Ford owns the website code and it only costs him under $100 a year to host the website. 

This microsite is not a Wordpress site, but a basic HTML template that we had create for their Preston Autoplexlanding page.  Websites that only have a few pages on them normally don’t rank very highly outside matches for their domain name.  In this case, the domain name is an exact match for the Ford plan so it was worth a test.  In the coming weeks we will see if we can add any additional information to the website and then watch how it ranks.

Tags: ford advantage, ford advantage plan, ford car sales, preston ford