For the past seven decades, The Lee Company has been designing and producing some of the most trusted miniature fluid control components in the world. Along the way, they’ve built a serious reputation across some of manufacturing’s most exacting industries—including spaceflight, aerospace, medical devices, diagnostics equipment, oil & gas extraction, power generation, and more.
That’s why, when The Lee Company partnered with us to create a fully reimagined digital experience, serving customers across multiple industries, in multiple languages, all across the world, we knew it had to be something special.
Enter one of our most complex website projects to date: a brand new theleeco.com, bringing all of The Lee Company’s products, specialties, and expertise into one highly personalized, easy-to-navigate website.
We designed and built an elegant solution that gleans the user’s industry, personalizes the website to speak the user’s language, and presents them with Lee products purpose-built for their industries.
This was an exciting project for us and a real learning experience. Of course, we learned a lot about engineering, but we also learned a lot about ourselves as an agency. The result: a complex site designed to provide everything both Lee and their customers need easier, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.
Miniature Components, Playing a Major Role
Precision fluid control is a highly specialized field of engineering. Think tiny, tiny components involved in critical operations of much larger machines: solenoid valves, plugs, pumps, nozzles, and more. The kinds of pieces you really, really don’t want to fail when operating a crucial (and highly expensive) piece of equipment.
Many of the parts are no bigger than the tip of a pencil, but they play an integral role in keeping massive machines running smoothly. As they say, it’s the inconsequential leak that empties the biggest reservoir, and The Lee Company’s mission-critical products are designed to ensure that there are no leaks.
Their innovative yet reliable solutions have been used in some exciting, frontier-pushing endeavors over the years. For example, Lee components, have been used in spaceflight since before NASA even existed—and they’ve been used in space programs ever since, including the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Owing to this long history of excellence, The Lee Company’s products have become the leading standard throughout a wide variety of industries. The average commercial airplane, for instance, uses an average of 4,000 Lee products—all critical to everyday flight, even if they’re unseen by most passengers.
Those aerospace engineers though? They know The Lee Company, and they know just how critical these tiny elements are to keeping systems running smoothly.
The Lee project represented a particularly complex ecosystem of needs- bringing the industry-dominating global brand into a modern digital space for the first time while speaking to engineers spanning many industries which all have their own vernacular, standard units, regulatory requirements, and sales cycles.
Knowing this is our audience, we built the website to take the same approach: a complex dance of intricate elements, all delivering a clean and efficient journey all the way from entry to sale.
Streamlining The Lee Company’s Digital Presence
Creating this new website was a unique project even by our standards.
The Lee Company is a highly specialized firm marketing to a highly knowledgeable audience. And yet, even a highly knowledgeable audience prefers an intuitive user experience. So, we set about building just that.
First and foremost: the site had to be easy to navigate for even the busiest engineers and fluid control systems designers. These are not the people who have hours and hours to spend struggling to find their way through websites looking for the products they need.
We knew the site needed to quickly and effortlessly guide users exactly where they’re going and provide all that good expertise and support The Lee Company is known for along the way.
Next, the site had to be beautiful. There’s a real elegance to a machine with all components humming along in unison, and the Lee site needed to reflect the same kind of reliable, efficient operation their products are known for. That meant no hang-ups or struggles for users, and easy operation on the back end for the Lee team to make updates and continue to grow their business.
Finally, the site had to be universal. With so many different users and customers coming in from countries all around the world, the new Lee site had to seamlessly consolidate all of its international audiences, sales channels, and subsidiaries under one “roof.” That would mean redirects, brand alignment, and even language translations to reach their international audience.
Stephanie Hughes, Digital Marketing Specialist at The Lee Company:
“The design and the overall experience of the website needed to be modernized to better reflect The Lee Company’s standard for innovation and to meet the expectations of what value our website should provide.
Our team recognized that not only does it need to be a great experience for our visitors, but it needs to be intuitive to navigate since we manufacture many different types of products for a wide range of industries.
In order for us to reach engineers who are searching for solutions or resources that we offer, we needed to focus on Search Engine Optimization factors to make sure we are appearing for the queries our target audiences are searching for.
Our website is the main destination for all of our marketing efforts, so we knew we needed it to be optimized as a lead generation tool to better assist our customers’ needs.”
Starting with Why
To effectively communicate their value proposition, we prioritized the end result of using the product The Lee Company produces—along with the overall value of Lee’s highly respected, industry-leading expertise.
“Purpose over product,” as they say.
Of course, details are important, and we included plenty of them. But the first thing that consumers should understand is what they can expect to get out of their interaction with a brand. So, on each landing page, we made sure to prominently display The Lee Company’s reason for doing what they do.
Vivid imagery, bold headlines, and unambiguous copy helped drive the core message home: by choosing The Lee Company, you’re choosing decades of expert problem solving for fluid control designs.
With that established, we then led the user into the specifics of how they achieve that purpose: by producing reliable, field-tested, and innovative products an engineer can trust in applications where there really is no room for error.
Mapping the Customer Journey
Another joint decision made regarding the site’s hierarchy was to find ways for users to self-segment by their industry, which would serve as the first step toward more robust content personalization.
Visitors would select their industry before exploring The Lee Company’s vast library of products, insights, and resources. Following this order of operations, each user is provided a clear, tailored experience showing the products and insights most relevant to them, without their having to search too hard.
This creates a more personalized experience by directing browsers to the solutions that best align with their business—the idea being that not every user knows exactly what they’re looking for (i.e., specific product names) but they know who they are and what they hope to achieve.
In some cases, presenting products as “industry agnostic” can be advantageous, and in some cases, that’s what a user is looking for. But removing as much uncertainty as possible from the user journey can be the best way to propel users along their path towards a conversion: leverage what they do know to help them discover what they don’t.
Establishing Thought Leadership
If being an “industry leader” is a part of your brand, it’s important to back it up by educating your customers and peers. Share your expertise.
Luckily, engineers at The Lee Company possess a wealth of knowledge regarding miniature, precision fluid control. Their assiduous academic interest in their work has led them to publish hundreds of pages of scholarly insights and resources about their products.
We took these helpful brochures and insights and placed them across the new website as either standalone articles or gated, downloadable content.
Chris Marchant, Manager, Business Development & Marketing, The Lee Company:
“Providing educational content that is easily accessible on our website is a way for us to share the practical knowledge our team has and the best practices we’ve established through our demonstrated successes.
We strive to always provide value to our customers, whether it’s designing a customized solution for their application or sharing insights and resources to help with their toughest design challenges.
Our partnership goes beyond just working on a specific project and we aim to make sure our website and the thought leadership content we create are among the valuable tools that our customers trust.”
On top of their written publications, The Lee Company has also compiled a library of engineering tools such as calculators, conversion tables, textbook-style overviews of important concepts, and product installation instructions.
From a lead acquisition perspective, these resources allow interested users to pursue further information about The Lee Company. From an SEO perspective, this expert-level content bolstered the website’s domain authority and enhanced its potential to rank for certain topics.
Translations and Foreign Domains
Since The Lee Company is a global enterprise, we needed to help them shore up and consolidate their foreign domains. This involved implementing URL redirects, translating English content to the necessary languages, and making it easy for a worldwide audience to access the information that they need.
Working with both the Lee team and a team of translators to pack a ton of highly technical and specific information into 5 different languages was a big challenge, and took a lot of teamwork between ourselves, our partners, and (most importantly) the international teams at The Lee Company.
Telling their Story
A company’s “about” section is often no more than a brief overview of who they are and how their firm came to be. But we felt that the story of The Lee Company was too fascinating to waste on a few short, bulleted paragraphs. So, we specifically focused on making their “about” section as compelling as we could.
Instead of a traditional company overview, we designed a visually engaging animated timeline of The Lee Company from 1948 to the present. In this section, users see how – over the decades – Lee parts have been used in everything from NASA missions to racecars to vaccine development.
Brian Feuerstein, Business Development, Marketing, & Inside Sales Operations, The Lee Company:
“Lee products performed critical functions during historic events over a half century ago and have assisted in the evolution of essential technology ever since. This new website highlights that history and signals to everyone that the innovation and resulting impact on the world will continue for decades to come.”
It’s a remarkable narrative and one that we were happy to help them share on their new website. After all, marketing is all about the stories you tell.
Key Takeaways
Collaborating with such a technically advanced partner was an immersive educational experience for our whole team. Most of us are writers, designers, and web developers, not engineers. But working for a marketing agency means you never stop learning. Every new client, every new project, and every new day brings not only an opportunity but an obligation to absorb something new.
At Digital Impulse, we’ve had clients who design surgical equipment and others who perform surgeries, clients who construct musical instruments, and others who conduct orchestras. And in the course of creating marketing content for this diverse range of organizations, we’ve long since abandoned the idea of a comfort zone.
This is fortunate because few companies could have possibly pushed us to learn more than The Lee Company. They do important work, and we’re honored that they tapped us to lend a hand with the marketing side of things.
And whenever things got complicated, we got back to basics and remembered that good marketing is universal, no matter who you’re working with. Quality, expertise, precision, reliability… these were the keystones of the Lee brand. Throughout the web build project, any time we had to put particular focus on the fine, technical details of the web build, it helped to remind ourselves of these guiding principles.
If reading this made you feel like diving deeper into the world of innovative miniature engineering, or you just want to check out a cool website, we encourage you to give The Lee Company a look.
