You Can't Market a Product You Don't Know (with Rich Ward from AcroMat) | Ep. 38

Most marketers in distribution and manufacturing can write a polished paragraph about a product they barely understand. Rich Ward, Director of Marketing at AcroMat, decided early in his career that path had a ceiling. So he made product expertise his first deliverable, before he built a single campaign.ㅤKyler Nixon sits down with Rich to talk about how that decision shaped his career and grew AcroMat. They get into how Rich learned the product by sitting in on sales calls, walking the production floor a couple days a week, and cold-calling ergonomics consultants with one line: this is not a sales inquiry, I just want to learn. They also cover why simple before-and-after content has been a steady lead driver for AcroMat against bigger competitors, and how the company thinks about retention when their product lasts five to eight years.ㅤ👤 Guest BioRich Ward is Director of Marketing at AcroMat, a 20-year-old custom anti-fatigue mat manufacturer based in Lakeville, Minnesota. AcroMat makes precision-cut mats to any shape and size for facilities run by companies like John Deere, Toyota, and Boeing. The company has doubled revenue each of the past three years. Before AcroMat, Rich came up as a writer covering healthcare, business, and engineering content, and he's now four years into industrial marketing.ㅤ📌 What We CoverWhy technical product knowledge is a real career multiplier in industrial marketing, not just a nice-to-haveThe exact moves Rich made in his first year at AcroMat to learn the product (sales calls, surveys with webinar gifts, shadowing the production team a couple days a week)How to cold-call therapists, ergonomics consultants, and 5S leaders without it being a sales pitch, and how those calls turned into blog content and customer relationshipsWhy AcroMat treats LinkedIn and Reddit as paid-channel substitutes when you can't outspend Uline and GraingerThe simple before-and-after photo format that became AcroMat's steady lead driver, and what makes it actually workCurling as the most common anti-fatigue mat failure mode, and why open-cell construction is the root causeRetention strategy when your product is built to last five to eight years (and why segmenting by buying window matters more than reorder cadence)Kyler's framework for B2B email retention: sales-focused content for buyers inside the buying window, education and nurture for the 90 to 95% who aren'tㅤ🔗 Resources MentionedAcroMat (Rich's company)Reddit and LinkedIn as primary marketing channels for AcroMatUline and Grainger as the larger competitors AcroMat plays againstOSHA and Canadian MSD (musculoskeletal disorder) prevention resources Rich studied to learn the ergonomics use caseJohn Deere, Toyota, and Boeing referenced as examples of AcroMat's manufacturing customer baseEpisode with Jeff Felton, Kyler's business partner at Forward Studios, where the buying-window segmentation framework was introduced