Engineering digital solutions to represent a global brand
CLIENT
Eastman Machine Company
YEAR
2021
DELIVERABLES
Content Strategy
Digital Strategy
Search Engine Optimization
Website Design
Eastman Machine Company has been designing, building and perfecting cutting machines from its Buffalo headquarters since 1888. They serve customers in multiple industries and dozens of countries with innovative solutions. Last year, Parkway began implementing a multi-faceted digital marketing strategy for Eastman that includes search ads, technical SEO and content marketing. After some early success with both paid and organic search, it was time to tackle the biggest piece of Eastman’s digital footprint: its website.
Eastman’s website didn’t truly reflect the company’s global reach, reputation for quality, notable customers, or continued innovation. It also neglected to acknowledge the many different customer journeys occurring online: manufacturing facilities looking to streamline and scale production, current customers in need of parts or technical assistance, hobbyists curious about small machines, and more.
Parkway was tasked with building a website that showed, rather than told, these various audiences what Eastman has to offer. We also made the site easier to explore with a refreshed sitemap, and navigation and contact options that help users self-segment. Technical upgrades, including the addition of dynamic translation, a custom video management system and sorted search results, also help the website serve a variety of visitors.
Showcasing all that Eastman has to offer
Eastman offers customers innovative, customizable solutions backed by decades of experience and the values of a family-owned business. Yet, its previous website failed to communicate how unique the company really is. Parkway prioritized lifestyle imagery and video content within a clean, modern website design. We also built a collection of testimonials and reintroduced mid-level category pages, both of which help introduce Eastman’s machines to potential customers.
Improving experience with technical upgrades
A website can look incredible, but unless it works just as well, it’s not a great reflection of a company. Our development team made numerous technical upgrades to Eastman’s website to improve both customer experience and internal workflows.
When you visit the Eastman website, perhaps the most obvious technical update is the seamless integration of high-quality video. All of the video content on the website (and there’s a lot of it) is managed by a custom WordPress plugin we developed. Now, Eastman’s internal team can upload a video file, generate a thumbnail and place the video anywhere on the website. This solution allows for a private video collection—rather than, say, YouTube—that can be displayed in 4K. It’s also pretty darn quick.
Parkway used Google Cloud Translation to add dynamic translation functionality, which translates content based on a website visitor’s preferred language. This ensures users around the world can navigate through the site. While machine translation isn’t always perfect, Google’s neural machine translation technology provides instant translations without any manual effort.
Because of Eastman’s global presence, the company maintains multiple CRMs managed by dozens of team members. Parkway built forms to accommodate international submissions, with dynamic fields based on the country selected. The forms on Eastman’s website also pull live data from the company’s CRMs, enforce field requirements, and map submissions to the CRMs’ data models (which in turn trigger internal workflows at Eastman).
