Field marketing is an approach that takes several of the digital sales and marketing techniques’ guiding concepts—personalization, relationship-building and audience targeting—and applies them to real-world situations.
Nowadays, we frequently associate marketing with internet activities. This makes sense, considering how much of our work is directed toward interacting with individuals via social media, email and when they peruse their favorite websites or conduct information searches. Even if conversational & digital marketing account for the majority of the sales cycle, face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable.
We’ll examine this novel approach and how it helps the sales process in this section.
What Is Field Marketing?
The definition of field marketing is quite conventional in many respects. It’s a general term that covers a wide range of marketing operations done “in the field.”
Anything that entails direct interaction with prospective customers, such as fliers, billboard advertisements, pop-ups, street promotions and experiential marketing, is included in this category. There is more to field marketing methods than just giving samples to random onlookers.
Our Organization’s Scope Of Application For Field Marketing
Field marketers oversee events, messaging and field campaigns that support the primary goals of the brand in collaboration with sales teams, demand generation marketing teams and product teams.
To support the sales funnel, generate fresh leads and assist digital marketing teams in hitting revenue goals, this team creates marketing strategies.
In addition, field marketers are in charge of efficiently connecting with potential clients and customers and upholding brand positioning and representation in person.
To calculate campaign ROI in addition to sales and marketing performance data, field personnel must also uphold transparency regarding all marketing initiatives, record findings in the CRM, and take other appropriate actions.
Best Field Marketing Methods
Field marketing techniques cover a wide range of activities, as you may have inferred from the introduction. However, relationship-building and lead generation—which frequently occur in person—are central to these tactics.
1. Sampling & Demonstrations Of Products
Sample campaigns and product demos usually happen at trade shows or retail locations. While campaign objectives differ depending on the product, target market and other variables, here, marketers seek to interact with potential customers in person.
The most typical instance of product sampling is when a food and beverage firm distributes samples at a community gathering or in a supermarket. Getting customers to purchase the product will probably be the main objective in this case because consumer items normally fall into the “low consideration category.”
Food and beverage companies can concentrate more on providing samples as a means of establishing a rapport with buyers in a business-to-business setting. There, producing sizable orders or adding fresh leads to the system becomes the main objective. You might also concentrate on scheduling a meeting or phone conversation to discuss product details, costs, etc.
2. Personal Occasions
Events are among the most well-known instances of field marketing in action since most campaigns involve face-to-face interactions.
Field marketing and virtual event marketing are separate, despite potential similarities, as they each have a somewhat different primary objective.
Event marketers only work on planning, organizing and carrying out pre-, post-, and during-event promotions.
Once more, field marketers concentrate on locating possibilities for developing relationships based on certain sales and marketing objectives. In certain situations, this is organizing events; in others, it may entail attending trade exhibitions or major events like Salesforce Dreamforce.
Events can also include everything from small, unofficial get-togethers to seminars conducted online. The important thing to remember in this situation is that the result matters more than the event itself.
3. Marketing On The Streets
Teams of marketers are usually dispatched to busy locations to distribute flyers, coupons, samples, or other incentives that are related to the event experience as part of street marketing (think QR codes that allow you to download exclusive Instagram filters or hand-outs that act as a voucher or game-piece).
Similar to the product demonstration strategy, this kind of marketing frequently involves giving away samples, but its main goals are experience enhancement and improved brand perception.
4. Inside Store Marketing
Product demos use one strategy to drive in-person sales; in-store promotions use a different one. By encouraging customers to make relevant purchases, field marketers want to increase sales in this scenario.
This tactic can be observed in home improvement businesses such as Lowe’s or Home Depot, where sales representatives may offer consumers window or roofing installations based on the products they are working on.
While the objective of product demos is to persuade customers to sample a new snack in the hopes that they would add it to their grocery list, the usual purpose here is to generate leads for a high-consideration service.
5. Merchandising
Creating retail displays that persuade customers to enter the business or make a purchase is the goal of the field marketing strategy known as merchandising.
From the standpoint of field marketing, merchandising tactics entail collaborating closely with each retailer that purchases your product. For example, you may bargain for exclusive shelf space and distinctive displays to encourage in-store shoppers to buy your products.
To ensure that both the brand and the merchants prosper, field marketers collaborate closely with their retail partners to promote the success of their products.
6. Guerilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing : An Easy and Affordable Strategy for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business is the book that author Jay Conrad Levinson named after himself.
The following guidelines that characterize the approach are delineated by him:
- Time, effort, and creativity are the things you invest in the marketing process rather than cash.
- You are obsessed with following up with customers, as opposed to disregarding them once they have made a transaction.
- Guerrillas place a higher value on fostering relationships than closing deals because they recognize the value of long-term alliances.
- Guerrillas understand that only marketing combinations are effective, as opposed to thinking that individual marketing tools like advertising are effective.
Although guerilla marketing is frequently less expensive than traditional street marketing, it does require more mental effort.
According to some definitions, if a campaign employs a strategy that people have seen before, it isn’t considered “guerrilla marketing” because the idea is to persuade people to talk about your brand after they have experienced something novel.
Advice For Creating A Successful Field Marketing Strategy
Even though there are many different techniques used in field marketing, the most important thing to remember is to make sure that campaigns complement the rest of your company’s sales and marketing initiatives.
1. Set The Goals Of Your Program
Okay, so establishing objectives for your marketing strategy isn’t very ground-breaking. But you must proceed cautiously at this point. Oftentimes, field marketing campaigns are poorly thought out and unconnected to other sales and marketing strategies.
A 2017 Sales Benchmark Index article states that field marketing strategies ought to be exactly in line with what sellers are doing in the same market.
Field marketers create tactics to grab the interest of potential customers. Therefore, you should think about the following to guide your objectives:
- Who is the intended audience for you? Is this group already aware of your brand?
- Which talking points must you cover to move transactions along?
- What is the intention behind the conversion?
2. Recognize Your Audience
It’s also important to note that successful field marketing depends on having a thorough understanding of your target demographic.
Although that’s not quite the case, we often assume that in-person marketing tactics are all about reaching as many people as possible. Think about your target audience when you create experiences, content, and messaging. If you’re having a cocktail hour, for instance, allowing everyone to enter won’t draw in many C-suite executives.
Then, take into account if the people in your audience are novices in the field or seasoned professionals. If the former, you might want to consider a more exclusive “VIP” experience that includes carefully selected groups of influential people from the business world.
If the latter, you should concentrate on organizing a career session that culminates in a cocktail reception where attendees can mingle and network.
3. Generate Customized Content
A one-size-fits-all field strategy is unsustainable, as is the case with all things related to marketing and sales.
Although targeting certain segments with your campaign approach won’t be feasible without the use of Drift Audiences, you should still create content that speaks to each one of them.
Working with marketing teams to develop a collection of unique templates that you can modify as needed to meet the requirements of potential customers is one of the greatest ways to achieve this.
Conclusions
Product marketing teams, marketing, and sales should collaborate to develop region-specific campaigns that emphasize the buyer’s journey for field marketing to be most effective.
Many businesses make the error of believing that because field marketing initiatives are conducted in the “real
world,” they are exempt from using the same data-driven strategy as their internet ads.
In actuality, every marketing campaign—whether it operates online or offline—is a component of the same omnichannel engine. Furthermore, marketers can provide a seamless experience that connects the two worlds thanks to data.
