CTE (formally Carolina Tractor and Equipment Company) serves customers and maintains partnerships with companies representing a variety of industries through different divisions—Carolina Cat and LiftOne. Nikki Maple is the Digital Marketing Manager at CTE. In this role, she manages all aspects of CTE’s digital marketing, including multiple brand websites.
Moving beyond an outdated website platform.
Nikki manages all aspects of digital marketing, including multiple brand websites. If the marketing or asset touches the internet, Nikki probably oversees it in some way. When she started running several campaigns, she ran into some difficulties with updating the existing site.
"I needed an easy solution to build web pages for a lot of the promotions we run. Our website at that time was built on a platform that didn’t provide a lot of flexibility to meet our needs."
Since the existing website made it too difficult to make edits and updates, Nikki had to rely on web design firms and outsourced resources.
"If we ever wanted to build a dynamic webpage, we would have to contact the web agency, and pay a ton of money to have them build us a new template."
In addition to the extra budget to make updates, Nikki realized she needed a faster solution so she could get web pages up and running to support her campaigns.
"I knew that I needed to shorten my page development time; with the old platform and working with agencies, it would take a day or more. I wanted to cut that time down to minutes or hours."
A dynamic approach to building web sites and web pages.
After researching a few different options, Nikki discovered how easy it was to create dynamic web pages in Makeswift.
"Everything we looked at was not meeting our needs. With Pardot, you needed to write HTML just to build simple landing pages, and Wix didn’t meet our needs for dynamic pages. I couldn’t find the right tool to create pages and websites efficiently until Makeswift."
Nikki quickly realized that Makeswift could make life easier for her team after seeing a full demo of Makeswift at a marketing conference.
"When I saw the Makeswift platform at the marketing conference and saw how easy it was to build a page, I knew that I could bring this service in-house and shorten my page development time to just 30 minutes or so compared to an entire day."
Makeswift provided Nikki and her team with the tools to create dynamic web pages and websites with ease without hiring an outside agency. Makeswift also made it easy to optimize new pages for mobile devices.
"Makeswift is dynamic in the respect that it’s a drag and drop builder, which is why it’s very designer-friendly because we can design a webpage like we would design a marketing flyer. It’s dynamic in the sense that we could build for desktop and then easily manipulate for mobile all within the same interface."
Nikki's team built the Virtual Dealer site in 24 hours to promote safe ways customers could still continue business with Carolina Cat due to Covid-19. The site has been shared as a best practice at Caterpillar globally.
Reducing outsourcing costs by 50%
Now that Makeswift is implemented, the team reduced costs by eliminating the need for an outside agency. Plus, Makeswift decreases the amount of time it takes to build web pages, freeing up time to focus on other important initiatives.
"We’ve saved thousands of dollars, cutting our spend by about 50% since implementing Makeswift, as we can do everything in-house now. Makeswift has also reduced my time building a web page from an average of eight hours to just thirty minutes."
Nikki and her team are now planning on building more websites with Makeswift.
"We can build entire websites and microsites with Makeswift without the need to hire an outside web agency. Because of the Makeswift platform, we are moving forward with building three new websites for our company in-house. Without Makeswift, it would be difficult to get leadership’s buy-in to build three new websites with an outside agency."
Start working with Makeswift to enjoy the benefits of an easy-to-manage and dynamic website builder.
Nikki Maple
Digital Marketing Manager at CTE
Challenges
- Existing website tool was not user friendly or flexible
- Needed to use a web agency for every website update
- Wasting too much money and time to manage the website platform
Solution
- Implementing Makeswift on many of their websites
- Easily edit websites or create new web pages
Results
- 30 minutes to create a new web page, as opposed to 8 hours
- Reduced costs by 50%
Go ahead and build.
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