Expanding the Reach of Technical Marketing at Q-LabExpanding the Reach of Technical Marketing at Q-Lab

Expanding the Reach of Technical Marketing at Q-Lab Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: Delighted to be joining you today. How are you doing?

Jeff White: I’m doing great, thanks.

Carman Pirie: Nice. Look, another episode of The Kula Ring.

Jeff White: Today’s topic is an interesting one and there’s more manufacturers that struggle with it than you think. It’s a large swath of folks that really have trouble with this one.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. For an awful lot of things that are made out there, the core use cases can often be very obvious and then those people show up. But then there’s like a whole other section of people that could benefit from the innovation, the technology, whatever it is. But for them, it’s not in their world, and how do you get it into their world? I’m assuming our guests will likely do a much better job than I of teeing that up.

But I just find it a fascinating challenge and I’m looking forward to getting into it today.

Jeff White: Yeah. Me as well. So joining us today is Andy Francis. Andy is the Vice President of Marketing at Q Lab. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Andy.

Andy Francis: Thanks. I appreciate you guys reaching out and having me on the podcast.

Should be exciting.

Carman Pirie: It’s awesome to have you on the show. Tell us a bit about Q Labs. I’m curious to know a bit more about the firm. What do you do there?

Andy Francis: I would be happy to. So Q Lab’s business is materials durability testing, and that takes many different forms. We are a manufacturer as well as a provider of services.

So our core products are weathering test instruments. Our QUV accelerated tester, which uses fluorescent UV light. Q Sun Xenon testers, which uses full spectrum xenon light. And then for corrosion testing, we offer our Q fog, cyclic, corrosion testers. In addition to that, we have a variety of outdoor and accelerated laboratory offerings.

So not everyone wants to purchase a tester for their own facility. They’d like to have us do the testing. So we offer those services. And of course, the best way, if you have enough time to understand a material’s durability, is to put it outdoors for a long period of time. So if you want to know how something is going to last for 10 years outside, you should put it outside for 10 years.

But of course, we know that product development cycles are such that we can’t always afford that. We usually suggest a combination of natural, realistic outdoor exposures and accelerated laboratory testing. So that’s what our  business is all about: materials, durability, everything from the services to panels, to paint to laboratory equipment and so on.

Carman Pirie: And did I hear you correct that there’s a corrosion tool that simulates fog? Is that what you’re saying?

Andy Francis: Correct. Yeah. So you expose specimens to either continuous or cyclic conditions that they would experience outdoors. It’s going to  be some sort of electrolyte solution. So typically a salt fog, sodium chloride is the most common, but there are other chemicals used.

Carman Pirie: I’m laughing because here in Nova Scotia we just basically, our forecast for about six months of the year is salty fog. 

Jeff White: They’ll literally say the salt fog power grid will go down for a solid six hours a day.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know, we may be able to do the testing even faster than your instruments can do up here. I’m not sure.

Andy Francis: I hope that Nova Scotia doesn’t have salt fog at 35 degrees Celsius. because that could get unpleasant. That would be terrible.

Jeff White: Yeah. No, normally it’s more of a kind of winter, shoulder seasons sort of thing when. 

Carman Pirie: The one day a year where it gets that warm, there’s no fog. Yeah.

Andy Francis: Sounds good. It’s funny you mention that. The road conditions, a lot of cyclic corrosion tests these days use a salt solution or electrolyte solution that’s meant to mimic road salts. That’s one of the biggest hazards in corrosion testing is the calcium chloride and the sodium chloride used in road salt.

So recent tests have been tailored around that specific use case.

Jeff White: Yeah, it makes sense. It’s also why you can’t buy a used car more than 10 years old in Nova Scotia because it’s rusted to death.

Carman Pirie: Andy, tell our listeners a bit more about you. How did you end up there? What’s your background?

Andy Francis: Sure. So my background is maybe a little surprising for somebody in marketing. I studied material science and engineering. I have a PhD in material science from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

And I worked for GE for a couple of years in the research center up in Niskayuna, New York. So closer to your area. And then I worked for a company called Graphtec, that makes graphite materials here in the Cleveland area, for eight years or so. And then Brad Reese, who is the president of Q Lab, I had worked with him at Graphtec, reached out to me and said we have a position in our technical marketing department at this company Q Lab.

I said, I’ve never heard of it and I don’t do marketing. Why are we having this conversation? And he explained about the company, the business that we’re in is a niche, but very important business and how all the marketing that we do here is extremely technical. And that got me interested.

The phrase I use sometimes when I explain to people, I say, we’re not selling soda pop here. We’re selling scientific laboratory equipment that are used by test labs, engineers, scientists, and people like that. So it is marketing, but it’s marketing of a very technical nature. So that got me interested, and I’ve been here for 10 years now.

Carman Pirie: That’s really cool. And you’re quite right. We don’t talk to a lot of material science PhDs that are in marketing. You may be the only one, which is better to be the only one, rather than one of several thousand, that’s for sure. Andy, we kick this conversation off.

We talked about that challenge of reaching. People who should be testing, or should be using the products you make, but aren’t. And for you, of course, that’s people who should be testing. But I guess when you look at your overall, like the totality of your customer base, the ecosystem that is your target market, there are those core use cases that are obvious and those people are knocking down your door. And versus that, what are the ones that are on the fringes, if you will, that you need to make people more aware of? 

Andy Francis: Yeah, great question. I think our core businesses are pretty straightforward at this time. We have paint manufacturers, which have been our longest clients. In fact, Q Lab was founded as the Q Panel company back in 1956. So our original product were metal panels, maybe this big or so that paint companies would apply their paints to. And the service that we offered was the metal surface that was very reproducible and had very little variation to it, so that any difference that a paint manufacturer saw in performance, they knew it was because of their paint and not because of some random piece of metal they were painted upon.

So paints have been a huge business for us, for our entire history as a corporation and continue to be. Cleveland is the secret paint center of the world. PPG is not far from here. Sherwin Williams is headquartered downtown. Just a few minutes that away. Obviously, paints is huge for us.

Plastics and polymers are also a major industry for us of course, both in terms of strength, retention, loss of color and so on. So plastics is a huge industry. And I think the other one, which is I guess less a material than an industry is automotive. So we know that all of the major automotive manufacturers are potential customers for us.

So, I think those are probably the three easiest ones. Paints, plastic and automotive. There’s other ones like building materials, architectural rubbers and road building material, road materials, things like that. But the short answer to who needs to test though is anybody who has a product outdoors.

So, if something has to last outdoors for any significant period of time, it’s worth their time to do some sort of materials durability testing. Usually that’s weathering. Sometimes it’s corrosion. It just depends. And Carman, like you mentioned, sometimes the challenge is finding those industries that are outside of the big obvious core ones, like paints and plastics,and making sure that they see the value of testing.

Jeff White: How do you go about reaching those folks that need your services or your machines, but haven’t necessarily made the leap to see that it’s a thing that they should be doing? How do you show up on their radar?

Andy Francis: That’s a challenge. It’s something that we work at every day here. A couple of strategies we’ve implemented recently is one is we’ve tried to make more industry specific content.

So, we recently redid our webpage, and our webpage previously was very product centric. So it was all, here’s our QUV accelerated tester, here’s what it does. Here’s our Q Sun xenon tester. Here’s what all you can do with it. But there was very little for someone who came from a particular industry, say you’re in food and beverage or something like that, and you want your packaging to last, there was nothing really guiding them to what was best for them, what standard they would want to run, what equipment they might be best served by.

So, one thing we’ve done in particular with our new website launch is to try to have more industry specific content, and we still need to do quite a bit more on that. The other thing is to leverage the fact that almost everybody that does durability testing does so to standards. The standards are often ASTM standards, particularly here in the US and Canada, in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

They’re often ISO standards. In the automotive world, sometimes they are SAE standards, and of course countries have their own standards, and large companies like Auto Automator have their own standards. So almost everyone who’s testing for durability is going to test using one of those standard test methods, and we know what the big hitters are, the generic ones, the ones that people are looking for.

So we’ve recently started tailoring our whole kind of strategy around making sure that people that are looking for test standards get directed to us. So instead of focusing on people searching for weathering or weather testing, which could mean a whole bunch of different things. We know that if someone searches for ASTMG155to take a random example, that is one of our customers.

So, we’re targeting our searches around people that we know are looking for us, versus people that can be looking for a number of different things.

Jeff White: I have to think too, there’s just, like you said, especially if you’re buying keywords, with Google paid search or what have you, there’s going to be a fairly low search volume for those, compared to say, weather testing and you’re probably going to pay less for those keywords as well, because they’re going to be incredibly targeted with that. Have you found that? What’s been the best method in terms of people reaching your website? Has it been paid or organic or a combination of both?

Andy Francis: I think the short answer to that is organic, so we did do some paid campaigns both around, more general weathering keywords, but also more specifically on test standards.

And I think we found some limited value in that. It wasn’t quite the volume that we expected nor really the quality of leads that we expected. A lot of it was exploratory. But with organic search, we’ve seen a lot of benefit, especially with some new pages we’ve created specifically around people searching for standards. And we found that a lot of traffic does come to the site that way.

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting to consider this notion of getting in front of folks who don’t know they need to be testing, and try to encourage their use of the technology. I’m just struck by it. It’s often considered to be the wiser move, depending on where you’re at in terms of the market share, in kind of the pecking order of market share within your category.

It’s often thought to be the wiser strategy, to simply grab market share from the largest competitors, versus trying to be the missionary out there creating new users for the technology. Do you experience that tension at all?

Andy Francis:  I don’t know that those two things are mutually exclusive, necessarily. But, certainly, part of our marketing strategy is to gain market share in areas where we’re not as dominant. So I can say our QUV tester is dominant to the extent that it’s become kind of an eponym. Or there’s some term for when something gets a little generic, but when people speak about UV fluorescent testing, they talk about QUV testing, even though that’s our brand name, right?

So that’s an area where we’re extremely dominant. And honestly we spend, I think, less of our marketing activity there because people that are going to do that testing are going to find us easily enough.

Jeff White: The Kleenex effect.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, exactly. I’m curious about what category that jumps out in your mind, is one that you’ve really been successful in encouraging folks who are non-traditional testers, non-traditional users to to adopt the technology. Is there one category where you say, look, we’ve really had some success there?

Andy Francis: I can give one example. So xenon arc testing is the other dominant way to do weathering testing. The advantage of xenon testing is that a xenon lamp delivers the entire spectrum of sunlight, so it’s a very realistic light exposure.

We were not the first to that game. Xenon R testing has been around for, I think, a hundred years now, maybe a little over a hundred years. So it’s a very mature technology. We started making xenon testers, I think in the early nineties, so we arrived late to.

We needed a different angle. We needed some way to break in and get our name established. People knew us, but they knew us as the guys that make the QUV tester, not the guys that do xenon testing. And one way we did that was with a different form factor. If you look at a traditional type, if you wanna call it that xenon arc device, there’s a lamp located in the center. I know I’m drawing with my hands here. You won’t see this on the podcast of course. But imagine a very thin tube lamp mounted vertically and specimens mounted in a rack or a drum that rotate around that central lamp. 

That was the geometry for quite some time and that’s nice. It’s uniform. It’s very good for very thin materials like painted panels in particular. So, where we came in was we kind of reinvented the geometry there. And we offer what are called flat array type testers. So rather than having a vertical, centrally located lamp, you have lamps that are horizontal, that are above the specimens that they’re exposing. They shine light and then you can shine water down onto specimens onto a flat tray that doesn’t move. The advantage there is that it’s really easy to test three dimensional specimens, so it really expands your horizons where people were previously limited to just very flat specimens because of the kind of geometry and form factor of the rotating rack.

But on a flat tray or flat area, you can put whatever you want there and just shine light down on it. So attacking a non-traditional type of exposure got us to different people, who wouldn’t have been testing three dimensional parts, to start using xenon testing, and that was an effective way for us to break into that market.

Carman Pirie: I am sitting here. I’m listening to Andy. And certainly Andy, your PhD in material Science shines through when you speak. Is that a light joke? No. No. Oh, no, man. Who’s the dad in the room? Anybody have any guesses? Okay. But the question that jumped in my mind is, an awful lot of manufacturing and industrial marketers are marketing into very engineering centric organizations.

You are one and you work with them every day. And you guys are engineers. I could tell. What’s the most annoying thing that marketers do if you’re an engineer? What’s the thing that you guys see? That’s actually marketed towards you, that you’re just like, what are they on about? They just don’t get us at all. 

Andy Francis: This may not be exactly what you’re looking for but I’ll attempt an answer and if I’m in the wrong direction, then you can get me back on the right track. We frequently get marketing and treaties from organizations and companies that want to explain the weathering corrosion test marketing market to us.

So they prepare these elaborate reports that break down the world’s leading chamber manufacturers for weathering, for corrosion and offer to sell us these reports, like over and over again. I’ve actually had to send several all employee emails to the company to say. Thank you. Please do not send any more of these to me. They are not valuable.

In our opinion, we’ve done a pretty good job of seeing what we see in the field and gathering our own research. I think we know our competitors pretty well, and the approach of marketing to us by explaining our competitive space, I find a bit curious. That is not where I thought that was gonna go.

Carman Pirie: No, I know. But yeah, the root of my question is probably more of the whole marketers are from Venus, engineers are from Mars or vice versa type of a scenario. But I hear what you’re saying. It can be, especially the more niche a category gets, it’s really quite difficult for somebody on the outside to claim they know it better than the people that have been in it for 50 years.

Andy Francis: Thinking more about your question about marketing to us, I guess the business we’re in as a provider, marketing kind of is one way. There isn’t a lot of marketing that kind of comes my way that I have to interpret or process. It’s really a lot of us reaching out and pushing out.

So I guess I’m not exposed to a lot of different marketing tactics. I will say that, whenever we try to put content out, we try to put it out in a fashion that an engineer or a scientist working in a laboratory can understand. That they can look at and see, okay, this is something that makes my work life easier.

That’s, our motto here at Q Lab is we make testing simple, so we try not to present things in an overly complicated fashion. Every slide that I present, I try to make it so that it can be summarized in a single sentence. So I would say overcomplicating things, I think is a tendency of some engineers when they market, and it’s something that we work pretty hard to avoid.

Jeff White:  I think too, it’s also the tendency of marketers trying to speak to engineers in that they probably think that you want as much depth and content as possible. While  in reality, you should be trying to summarize it down, one slide to one core thought. That’s interesting.

Andy Francis: I think that’s right. I see a lot of technical presentations. We go to a lot of scientific conferences and meetings, and there’s so many of them where you can tell that the person is a brilliant scientist or engineer and has some interesting things to say. Then after 30 or 40 minutes of the presentation, I’ll think to myself what was the point of that?

What was I supposed to take away or learn from that? And we do a lot of webinars and technical presentations here, and I really try to focus on, what are the main takeaways? What do I really want someone to get out of this, and how can I explain it to them clearly?

Carman Pirie: You mentioned the industry specific content that you’re doing a number of webinars, et cetera. As you look ahead in the next 12 to 24 months, do you see the current format approach changing demonstrably, or do you see more of the same?

Andy Francis: I don’t think that the format will change dramatically for us. I think that we’ll still have a lot of the same type of content that we have. I do think that we need to do more with video and we need to do more interactive.

I think that’s the general trend in the world today. I know that, when we present webinars and technical presentations, I think having a more interactive component would be very beneficial. So that I think is probably the biggest change, but I don’t think it’s going to be a complete overhaul.

I will say, of course, we have to increasingly tailor our content to make sure that AI is picking it up. I’m sure everyone that comes on the podcast probably mentions AI these days for you, but we are doing a lot to make sure that the traditional search methods picks us up.  But also, when you go to Google and search for something, that first block at the top is all AI stuff, and there’s the AI explainers, and we work to make sure that what’s being explained in that is drawing from our content. And frequently it is, but it’s never something I had to worry about until, like last year.

Jeff White: What sorts of adjustments have you made in order to be seen in generative search?

Andy Francis: So the standard specific pages have helped. One thing we’ve done is we’ve run a lot of internal searches with an AI tool that we have.

When we see that we’re not being picked up, that’s an indication to us that we need to supplement our content there. It’s actually been quite a nice tool. I think we had one instance recently where I was asking this AI bot a few questions about our content. And one question it didn’t answer particularly well, it was not to my satisfaction.

My first thought was, what’s wrong with you dumb bot? How do you not know the answer to this question? This is quite clear. And then I went to our page and I was like, ah, I guess we didn’t put that. So then we went back and then added a page, a supplemental page, and now it knows the correct answer.

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting to hear people’s approaches to generative search optimization. There’s a friend of mine who owns a conversion rate optimization agency on the west coast of the US. He’s fond of saying, yeah, everybody talks like they’re someone out there trying to market themselves as a generative engine optimization expert. And then you ask them what experiments they’ve run and the answer to that’s almost zero. They can’t tell you, oh, we’ve tried it this way. And they’re basically just reading some best practic, that some other self-promoting marketer has put up on LinkedIn, and and they’ve implemented it and they’re hoping it’s going to work.

So I really appreciate Andy hearing you say look, this is what we’re doing. We’re using our own internal bot to try to mimic in some ways the searches that we are expecting to be found for, and then modifying our content to see how it adjusts. It’s candid, and you’re doing more than most in that regard.

Andy Francis: Oh, thanks. Yeah, you said very well what we’re trying to do. That’s the plan. We do benefit also as a Q lab from having a limited competitive space. Not that our competitors aren’t very good at what they do, but there just aren’t that many of them. So in weathering testing, manufacturing, here in the US we have just really one competitor.

There are some smaller brands in China and India, that have improved, I’ll say over the past decade. But they’re, arguably, not at our level of quality right now. We have one major Japanese competitor, so there’s really not that many resources for some of these. So we do have that advantage.

But I do wanna make sure that we remain at the top of those searches. Both, AI as well as traditional search.

Jeff White: That’s an interesting notion, to be the defacto leader in the space and then using that position as a leverage point. To be able to rise to the top of all those different types of searches.

Not everybody gets that opportunity because they’re potentially in a much more crowded space or, it’s maybe not as niche as you’re offering. So, yeah, it is interesting to consider that as the benefit of your positioning at Q Lab.

Carman Pirie: Jeff, I will say I think that based upon my understanding of generative optimization, the focus on regulations and explainer pages and things of that nature around specific standards and regulations. That is a square peg, square hole strategy here. And that’s something that I think a lot of marketers that are listening in can steal that tomorrow. Because every category has standards and regulations that they’re working within.

And there’s a level of authority, it seems, that the generative the aics in content that’s on that, versus just general industries centric content, et cetera. And on the AI as we bring the show to a close, it’s great that we’ve got AI out the way because it means you can’t use that as an answer for the next question.

But I just want to have an understanding of where you’re seeing things going, what changes you’re imagining as you think of your role. You’ve been there 10 years now. And let’s imagine that you’re still there five years from now. How do you think Q Labs goes to market?  How will you be approaching the task at hand? Will it be different five years from now than it is today?

Andy Francis: I think the main thing that we’re going to have to address, and that we have been addressing, is speed. So many of our customers want to run a faster test. We get that request all the time.

So you know, instead of running at a radiance level of 0.8, why can’t I run at a radiance of 1.2 instead of running at 50 Celsius? Why can’t I run at 70 Celsius? And I think the demand increasingly from international customers is how can I run testing faster and more efficiently? And we’re going to have to provide some good answers for that.

Unfortunately, in weathering and corrosion, you’re limited by the physics and kinetics of weathering. It doesn’t necessarily work just to crank up the I radiance of the lamps. The analogy we use is, you can’t bake a cake at 800 Fahrenheit for a shorter period of time and get the same cake.

You have to do it at a normal temperature for a longer period of time. And customers don’t always want to hear that answer. So I think finding new ways to accelerate testing even faster than what we have right now is going to be big as well. I think the other big thing, and a challenge that we face a lot, is getting people to run more realistic tests.

Right now a lot of our customers run very simple, older, established tests that are well known. There’s a database over a hundred years at least that supports that, but they don’t really correlate well to what happens outdoors, and encouraging them to run better and smarter. Testing is a challenge that we face all the time.

So I think encouraging customers to be smart about what they’re doing. How can we run faster tests? How can we run more correlative tests, and how can we go into testing with a better idea of what we actually want to learn? Those are really our challenges in terms of educating and providing for our customers.

Carman Pirie: Andy, I’m quite surprised that speed is on that list. It was the first thing off the tip of your tongue, and I’m like, you’re already doing it so much faster than waiting for 10 years out in the Florida sun. It’s interesting to me that even though the core benefit of what you deliver is speed,

Andy Francis: It’s all relative. If you imagine a typical accelerated test. There’s no general, this many hours in the lab is this many years outdoors or something like that. We’ve done case studies where those factors can range from three times as fast to maybe 20 times as fast. But there’s always gonna be customers that want 50 times as fast, a hundred times as fast.

Carman Pirie: Awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It’s been a real pleasure.

Andy Francis: Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Jeff White: Yeah, it was great to have you on. Thanks a lot.