When a global enterprise outgrows its website ecosystem, the real problem is not the website. It is the operating model behind it
This case study shows how a global heavy equipment dealer moved from fragmented websites and disconnected MarTech and overall digital strategy to a unified digital 'hub-and-spoke' operating model. You’ll see how website strategy, MarTech (Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Experience) governance, content, analytics, and regional execution came together to reduce complexity, improve control, and create the foundation for personalization, sales intelligence, and future growth.
Case Study: Global Website, MarTech, Content, and Performance Transformation
A heavy equipment dealer with a global footprint, and one of the largest Caterpillar dealers, had built a complex digital ecosystem across regions, languages, business units, industries, platforms, agencies, and customer journeys.
The business did not need another website refresh. It needed a global digital operating model: one that could consolidate MarTech, unify brand and content, standardize performance measurement, improve governance, and give regional teams the flexibility to execute locally within a shared enterprise framework.
At that scale, a website becomes more than a marketing channel. It becomes an enterprise asset: a sales channel, service gateway, product discovery engine, customer data source, and digital experience platform that helps customers do business on their terms — from self-service to high-engagement sales and service support.
Executive Snapshot
The organization moved from digital sprawl to a unified web, MarTech, content, and performance operating model.
Proof Points
- 26 websites consolidated to 6 localized websites.
- One enterprise architectur approach with one Adobe MarTech foundation standardized across website management (AEM), Analytics (Adobe Analytics), personalization and experiementation, and marketing script and tag management.
- One glocal (global + local) hub-and-spoke operating model with Centre of Excellence created across central and regional teams.
- KPI reviews established with framework to drive insights into the next best action.
- Community of Practice sessions created for training and knowledge sharing across teams.
KPIs
- Six-figure reduction in digital operating cost / OPEX.
- 3X improve speed, agility and output
- Seven-figure improvement in MarTech return on capital invested.
- High double digit increase in web-generated qualified leads MQLs, SQLs and pipeline speed to win/loss.
Contact to discuss more among other major KPIs and performance indicators realized.
The Current State
The company’s digital ecosystem had grown with the business, but the operating model behind it had not kept up.
It had 26 websites across regions, languages, business units, industries, and equipment categories. Different markets used different MarTechs and platforms, 7 agencies, 3 analytics tools, no standarized reporting models, content workflows, or customer journeys.
Brand voice was inconsistent. Messaging and positioning were inconsistent. Systems and MarTechs were not connected. Data wrangling was manual. Content was hard to govern and buit a plethora of SOV debt. SEO was not yet a shared enterprise discipline. Reporting took days, sometimes weeks, of manual data wrangling and PowerPoint production. The outputs often focused on vanity metrics instead of lead generation, funnel movement, pipeline influence, or marketing return.
The Opportunity
As part of a broader enterprise transformation strategy, the opportunity was to turn a fragmented website ecosystem into a global digital experience foundation and demonstrate it as an enterprise asset for customer and revenue growth, at a lower cost-to-serve, and scalable for growth.
This was not just about consolidating websites. It was about creating an internal digital accelerator: a shared operating model, MarTech foundation, performance language, and customer data path that could help the business scale digital capabilities across regions.
For leadership, the opportunity was tied to value realization for a sales and product-driven organization that had a 80 year legacy of operating the same way.
The business could reduce operating cost by removing duplicated websites, platforms, tools, reporting processes, and agency effort. It could improve the return on MarTech investments by standardizing the enterprise foundation around Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and tag management. It could also unify brand, content, SEO, analytics, GDPR and CASL consent, marketing automation, CRM integration, and customer data under one global framework.
The operating model was just as important as the technology as was the strategy had to demonstrate value across both COO and CMO metrics.
Underpinning the strategy, cost-savings, technology, etc. was a goal to centralize the standards and decentralize the execution with a hub-and-spoke model.
Central teams would own strategy, platforms and tech, lead the CoE, governance, compliance, analytics, best practices, and technical quality.
Regional teams would manage localized content, lead voice-of-customer and customer needs into the strategy, campaign execution while adopting global-driven programs simply requirying localization, language / market and compliance nuances, and business-unit execution within shared guardrails.
That model gave the business more control, agility, speed and flexibiltiy without slowing regional ‘I need it yesterday’ demands.
It also created a stronger foundation for growth, agility and scale. With the right website strategy, the digital ecosystem could support changing marketplace dynamics, lead generation tactics, product discovery and customer self-serve personalized preferences, online equipment insights and appointment booking, customer self-service tools, sales intelligence, ABM (account based marketing), personalization, and future CDP (customer data management) and AI (artificial intelligence) enablement.
The bigger opportunity was to make digital easier to govern, easier to measure, and easier to scale.
Instead of operating as disconnected regional teams and websites, the web ecosystem could become a global business platform: one that helped leadership lower cost, improve customer experience, commercialize data, better understand customers and adjust to their always changing demands and connect digital activity to revenue, service, and growth priorities.
The Solution
The solution was delivered in phases so the business could move from digital sprawl to a scalable global digital operating model without trying to fix everything at once.
Each phase had a clear purpose: build the foundation, capture quick wins, lay ground work for long-term big wins, reduce complexity, improve governance, gain immediate internal adoption, and create the conditions for future growth.
Phase 1: Digital Ecosystem Assessment
The first phase mapped the full current state across websites, MarTechs and platforms, agencies, regional teams stakeholders and needs captured in over 140 user stories, analytics tools, content workflows, reporting, governance, customer journeys, and MarTech overlap.
The purpose was to understand where complexity was creating cost, risk, duplication, and slow execution. This created the business case for consolidation and value realization.
Phase 2: Global Strategy and Operating Model Design
The next phase defined the global digital strategy and a new hub-and-spoke operating model.
Teams would collaborate and own strategy withing a given framework, roles and guardrails. The centrla team would lead the strategy ownership, among governance and compliance (GDPR, CASL), MarTech and platforms and integrations, data and analytics consumption and orchestration, KPIs frameworks, technical execution and quality standards, and lead a CoE (Centre of Excellence with regions and cross-functional teams for shared and best practices.
Regional teams would dedicate cross-functional individuals to partner and create shared-hybrid teams with Central, manage localized content, represent the voice-of-customer, execute on campaigns and adopt global programs with a ‘lift-and-shift’ approach for fast adoption and go-t0-market execution, and business-unit execution within shared guardrails.
Phase 3: Website Consolidation and Adobe MarTech Standardization
The business consolidated its website footprint from 26 websites to 6 localized websites and standardized its digital experience foundation around Adobe Experience Manager enabled with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe tag management.
The centralization of Martech didn’t just at Adobe. It embraced a tech-agnostic approach to select and integrate the tools that were ‘fit for business’, and not forced solutions that forced Macgyver a solution.
For example, Oracle Eloqua; Oracle’s enterprise marketing automation platform and Microsoft Azure as the data cloud to support and unify massive volume of the dispersed data from across the organizations; 6 x CRM’s ERPs, and the needs for MarTech’s data orchestration to Adobe Experience Platform (ex. personalization and content experiences). Overall, this transformational enterprise infrastruecture and data architecture initiative worked in parallel to the website strategy to unify volumes of customer data to enable orchestration across all digital touchpoints.
This reduced MarTech platform fragmentation and created a cleaner enterprise architecture for scale. The purpose was to lower operating complexity while improving governance, speed, and MarTech value realization.
Phase 4: Brand, Content, SEO, and Reusable Experience Framework
The business unified its global brand voice, messaging, content strategy, SEO discipline, and digital asset governance under the same team and a connected arm to the Digital strategy.
Adobe Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as the core CMS, Reusable templates and components acted like “Lego blocks,” helping regional teams build pages, web forms, campaign landing pages, tracking structures, and content modules faster without breaking global standards. This phase supported content and page production velocity, search visibility, inbound demand generation, and local market flexibility.
Phase 5: Product, Commerce, Portal, and GeoLocation Experience Integration
The website became more connected to the way customers actually do business. New, used, and rental equipment data was integrated through PIM and APIs, OEM product data was enriched for the business, rental eCommerce was connected for online bookings, and authenticated customer portals supported parts, service, billing, reminders, and appointments. Google Maps API helped tailor the experience to the visitor’s closest retail or service location.
Phase 6: Measurement, Reporting, and KPI Performance Management
The business moved from manual reporting and vanity metrics to centralized reporting, standardized KPIs, and recurring performance reviews.
Semi real-time dashboards created via consuming Adobe Analytics data and surface through Tableau, and bi-weekly KPI reviews helped teams translate data into optimization plans and next-best actions. This phase gave leadership a clearer view of digital performance tied to business objectives, OKRs, lead generation, funnel movement, and marketing return.
Phase 7: Integrations with Marketing Automation, CRM, and Sales Intelligence
SDK’s from marketing automation implemented with web forms connected to Oracle Eloqua, CRM systems (SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics and custom), lead scoring and routing, downstream integration to the Azure data lake for future enablement of a CDP pathway. Known visitors could receive more personalized or pre-populated forms, while marketing automation could support converting anonymous users to known users and customers for profile enrichment, visitor behavior could support lead scoring, and driving lead segmentation for lead nurturing programs, triggered email or SMS, and high-intent event tracking. This helped turn website behavior into sales intelligence, ABM signals, and better customer relationship conversations.
Phase 8: Centre of Excellence, Adoption, and Future Personalization Readiness
A Centre of Excellence and Community of Practice helped teams adopt the new model through training, best practices, mentoring, and knowledge sharing. The foundation also prepared the business for future personalization, experimentation, first-party data activation, and future customer data management solution (CDP) enablement. This turned the transformation from a platform rollout into a repeatable digital capability across the enterprise.
Results & Impact
The transformation created a leaner, faster, and more governed digital operating model.
The business unified its global brand voice and content strategy while allowing regional messaging to fit local markets. It improved MarTech value realization by making Adobe platforms the central enabler and tool for more connected, adopted, and usefulness across the organization. It created stronger compliance controls for consent, privacy, cookies, preferences, and web forms.
The web strategy also moved performance management forward. Improved cross-board teams and cross-functional teams collaborations, centralized critical disciplines (ex. web development, UX designers, Marketing technologists, strategy and roadmapping, data strategy and reporting, standardized KPIs, bi-weekly KPI reviews, and shared insights helped teams shift from manual reporting to action planning.
Most importantly, the foundation prepared the business for the next stage of digital growth: value realization that the digital capabilities are an enterprise asset, enabled teams to shift perceptation as a cost-centre to the organization to a hybridge revenue-centre like Sales, customer centricity thru hyper-personalization, experimentation mindset, ABM (account-based marketing) support Sales executives to scale account management, enabled new high-intent sales signals to spark timely and relevant sales conversations to close more deals, commercialized first-party data and its activation through marketing automation, and the groundwork to enable a future CDP to create a true Customer 360 and its Marketing activation and orchestration to act on the data and signals.
The Takeaway
For global enterprises, a website strategy is more than just a redesign or consolidation. It is a strategic business decision to unlock new value, grow new and incremental revenue, enhanced customer experience, and lower the cost to serve at scale and to more with less.
It’s not just about technology. The operating model along with the capabilities are critical to support its success.
This transformation shows what becomes possible when Digital strategy, business buy-in with cross-functional team participation, brand and content, MarTech, data and analytics, customer experience, governance, and regional adoption are connected through one global strategic framework and solution.
MJ Digital helps enterprise teams turn fragmented digital ecosystems into scalable growth engines — connecting strategy, customer channels, people, technology, data, and execution to measurable business outcomes and value.