Mastering Field Marketing: A Guide to Local Engagement
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown of 2020, individuals have realized the importance of a face-to-face connection with others, feeling its absence sharply when we were deprived from human interaction. Field marketing, a specialized marketing discipline, focuses on local engagement to create personal connections and boost brand visibility. In this blog, we'll explore the fundamentals of field marketing, its strategies, execution, and its ever-evolving role in modern marketing strategies.
What Is Field Marketing?
Field marketing is a marketing sub-discipline that centers on engaging with local audiences and communities. It takes marketing out of the boardroom and onto the streets, local events, and even into virtual spaces where we people connect at scale. It allows for a unique user experience that, if done well, customers will remember, making a positive association with that experience and your brand.
Let’s face it, if the key decision maker at a prospective customer company is a top executive, usually he still wants to be “wined and dined” while you are courting him to become a customer. You have to spend money to make money! And what better way to give your pitch than to do so at a swanky restaurant with a captive audience. In doing so, you are proving that this person’s business is worth the investment. This is where the casual conversations happen where a prospect might let down his guard. There may be a single lingering concern before signing a contract that can only be hashed out in an intimate setting without presentations and rehearsed scripts.
“Let’s face it, if the key decision maker at a prospective customer company is a top executive, usually he still wants to be “wined and dined” while you are courting him to become a customer.”
Key Objectives of Field Marketing
1. Building Brand Awareness – Field marketing helps create brand recognition and familiarity within local markets.
2. Generating Leads and Sales – It's a powerful tool for driving leads, sales, and revenue growth.
3. Creating Personalized Customer Experiences – By engaging directly with customers, field marketing creates personalized, memorable interactions.
Field Marketing Strategies
Local Events and Sponsorships
Local events and sponsorships are a staple of field marketing. Companies can host or participate in community events, gaining visibility and forging connections with local audiences.
Virtual Events and Webinars
Reaching your audience doesn’t have to be limited by geography because events can be virtual. The format can be a large trade show where visitors enter smaller chat rooms to hear specific speakers sequentially (just as they would at a large onsite conference), or smaller focused webinars that address a single presentation with live Q&A at the end.
Product Demonstrations and Sampling
Getting products into the hands of potential customers can be a game-changer. Field marketing often involves showcasing products in high-traffic areas, engaging prospects. There is something to be said about the hands-on experience that makes a product “real” when it is tangible.
In-Person Sales and Lead Generation
Field marketing teams engage in face-to-face sales activities, whether it's at trade shows, exclusive roundtable events, or customized visits to company headquarters where demonstrations are personalized for that account. This direct interaction can lead to increased conversions (moving leads further down in the sales funnel).
The Role of Technology in Field Marketing
Field marketing has evolved with the digital age, integrating technology for greater effectiveness with the following objectives in mind:
· Marketing Materials – There’s no need to kill as many trees by printing pamphlets prospects can take home when you can provide your marketing documents in digital formats, accessible with the scan of a QR code. Even your booth can have messaging displayed on monitors for more dynamic content that is also eye-catching to appeal to customers.
· Demonstrations – Regardless of what industry you are in, live events provide an opportunity for you to show how your product works in an explainer video or hands-on with tablets, gadgets, and other devices.
· Data Collection and Analytics – Technology is used to collect and analyze customer data, allowing for personalized, segmented marketing campaigns to follow with insights into local preferences. Getting customer data immediately entered into your CRM system through onsite digital capture assures timely follow-up so that your product is still top of mind.
· Mobile Apps and Tools – Field marketing teams often utilize mobile apps and tools for location-based services, team communication, and real-time data access.
Field Marketing Execution
I’ve always considered field marketing to be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing in general because it’s so logistics heavy. There are many moving pieces that all have to be tracked simultaneously and letting one detail slip through the cracks can derail the entire campaign and cause customers to be dissatisfied, which would be the opposite outcome of intended goals. Field marketing execution requires a high level of discipline and attention to detail. Here are some suggestions to help with planning, resource allocation, and measurement.
1. Campaign Planning & Research – All events need to have a theme and a campaign message that will make a statement about your products and your brand. It’s important to obtain buy-in among stakeholders at all levels to assure that the message and image conveyed aligns with business objectives. Research and targeting need to be conducted to make sure you are connecting with your ideal customer profile (ICP) rather than investing in the wrong audience.
2. Team Structure – This is a great opportunity for top executives to connect with customers and prospects at scale, so it’s imperative to determine who will be representing the company as a brand ambassador. Often teams at events can be interdisciplinary, with marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams all having a reason to interface with customers.
3. Budgeting – Events can be costly endeavors whether you are paying for space at a large conference or curating an exclusive dinner with customers. Furthermore, these include a whole bill of materials (BoM) to be distributed from print documents, branded swag, food, and contest prizes. Shipping these materials, and paying for T&E for attending staff should also be worked into the overhead for your budget.
4. Timelines – To execute a comprehensive field marketing campaign, you’ll need to design your BoM ahead of time, and then use some of those materials like emails and advertisements to promote the event online. To plan for all marketing materials to be ready at the right time, a field marketer has to think through the time it takes to write, design, print, manufacture, ship, and deliver everything by the time it’s needed. This is tricky when issues arise. It’s highly advisable to pad all timelines with room for setbacks. Sometimes setbacks are human-related, and others have to do with supply chain.
5. Day-of Activities – Typically, I prefer to document all activities expected of staff attendees, and I coach them in a “know-before-you-go” meeting ahead of time, so they know where to be, when. It helps to arrive early for setup, and another pro tip is to have facility management contact info on hand should packages be missing or setup does not match expectations.
6. Measurement & Evaluation – Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) ahead of time is vital to track campaign success and determine ROI. When new leads are acquired, documentation of conversations can help determine the sense of urgency needed for sales teams to conduct follow-up activities as well as to help bypass discovery conversations (establishing leads as qualified to enter your pipeline or not).
When done right, field marketing can be fruitful in the sense that activities help you reach large audiences in a short amount of time, and engagements can shorten the sales cycle through longer conversations when you are exposed to a captive audience. These aspects of field marketing drive up ROI.
Experiences stick with people. If you can tailor your field marketing activities to be creative, fun, innovative, and unique, customers are likely to remember your brand for those ideals even if the marketing experience you’ve provided really doesn’t have anything to do with your product. Successful field marketers are agile, adapt strategies to changing times and market trends, and think outside the box. I’ve had a lot of fun orchestrating these activities, and it gets people out of the office. The added adrenaline will even enhance enthusiasm about products!
“What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.”
About the Author
Allison has an international MBA in marketing and entrepreneurialism, and has built her career on developing strategic marketing plans. By working with Microsoft for nearly a decade, she honed corporate marketing skills before transitioning to the startup world to help companies grow brand recognition and subsequently revenue. There, she explored various SaaS industries including cybersecurity, DevSecOps, telematics, and industrial IoT (IIoT). All of these industries leverage automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, and various forms of data management. It has been Allison’s pleasure to bring these powerful tools to light and watch as companies grow their business.
Visit her on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/AllisonQDurbin
