The accessibility to the internet by a large number of consumers favored digital marketing. This marketing concept is good and affordable, and most brands are blindly following it. But, if you want to surpass your competitors, you must try unique approaches. Field marketing is the one you can consider. Though it is nothing new. The popularity of digital marketing has overshadowed it.
What is Field Marketing?
Field marketing is a complete marketing practice that can help you build a brand, increase an existing business’s awareness among its audience, and finally improve direct sales. The word “Field” specifies that you operate marketing efforts in your business’s domain or locality. Hence, in the past, this marketing strategy was limited to a company’s main consumer market in its country. However, with the growth of global logistics and eCommerce, your products and services can now show up abroad. Thus, field marketing now involves both local and global markets. Field marketing is not itself a marketing strategy but a collection of marketing events. It could include any of the followings:
Door-to-door product Roadside demonstrations Hawking your products in transport hubs Distributing flyers Addressing a focus group meet-up Sponsoring cultural and religious festivals Real-world ads such as billboards, signages, etc.
Responsibilities of a Field Marketer
A field marketer or a member of such a marketing team will essentially carry out the following tasks:
Arrange business events, field campaigns, and consumer messaging that line up with the overall goal of the brand. Work closely with the business teams like products, sales, finance, leadership, digital marketing, etc., to develop and execute actionable field marketing campaigns. Your field marketing team will also take part in developing lead-generation campaigns, supporting the sales pipeline, and assisting the digital marketing team with frontline data. The team should also focus on maintaining your brand’s image in the market, and convey any new product/service information to existing customers, business clients, and prospects. Create weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports to give business managers real data on the market status, sales through events, lead generation via product demonstrations, and so on.
Popular Field Marketing Activities
#1. Retail Merchandising
Retail merchandising is all about positioning your brand/product/service within a retail environment. You can distribute retail shop merchandise like shelf barkers, shelf talkers, sign clips, sign grips, hand tags, label holders, etc., marked with your brand or product name. Build rapport with the retailers to showcase this stuff to the customers. Also, run promotional campaigns within the retailers so that they stock up on your product before the holiday season, special events, etc., and display your product in a captivating way. Not to mention, try to persuade the retailer to promote your products or services more than your rival brands.
#2. Wholesale Rapport Building
Regularly send field marketing agents, sales agents, etc., to various wholesalers. Your agents need to persuade the wholesalers to promote your brand when retailers are sourcing related products from them. Agents can also extract your brand’s market status from wholesalers and report that to the marketing team. It enables you to resolve any potential product or service issues.
#3. Direct Sales
You can set up pop-up stores in city centers to sell products directly from your own shop. You could do these occasionally to give the customers a sense that they are buying the product directly from you, and they could pass on any feedback they want.
#4. Distributing Promo or Free Samples
You can take the benefits of the word-of-mouth promotion of your brand or product by distributing free or heavily discounted samples. A big chunk of the consumers like free samples. They do not shy away from sharing the product usage experience with others and persuade their close associates to become your customers.
#5. Demonstrating Products or Services
Big brands put their products in the middle of a shopping mall or retail outlet for expert or self-service demonstration. If the user like the functionalities, they could buy the merchandise from a nearby retailer. Hence, do not miss out to disclose nearby retailers’ addresses when you are giving a product demo.
#6. Auditing Your Brand/Product/Service in the Market
Audit your product or service’s performance in the market frequently and work on that data to improvise the offerings.
#7. Experiential Marketing
In such field marketing activity, you organize an event involving prospecting and existing consumers of your brand. You let them participate in activities that create a long-term emotional connection with your brand. For example, if you are a chocolate manufacturing company, you could ask the participants to come up with novel flavors in a real-life food research laboratory.
#8. Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing involves the following activities:
Following up with existing customers, hearing their pain points, resolving their issues, and generating confidence. Creating long-term relationships with consumers, business clients, and prospects so that your brand can create sources of guaranteed sales orders weekly or monthly. Combining all the field marketing strategies to drive maximum brand engagement and sales.
Trending Field Marketing Events
#1. Customer/Prospect Meet-Ups
Invite customers, leads, and prospects for meet-ups. In such events, you can discuss the issues that your product resolves, find out consumer expectations, and encourage invitees to buy your product on the spot. You could also redirect interested clients to retailers if your company does not sell products/services directly.
#2. Webinars
You can organize webinars by inviting market experts, product experts, analysts, CEOs, customers, and leads. Then, your product team can demonstrate the functionalities of your product online. During the event, customers can sign up for on-site demonstrations to finalize the purchase. Such events are highly effective for business-to-business sales.
#3. Conferences
You can send your field marketers to various public and private conferences that are related to your product or service. The agents must mingle with the conference participants to create a network of leads. Sometimes, they can also present a short demo of products and collect lead data for deal finalizing.
#4. Roundtables
In such an event, a subject matter expert hosts a discussion by eminent industry members, VIP customers, and business magnets. The idea is to influence the audience by capitalizing on the popularity of the panel. However, you must apply guerilla marketing tactics to follow up with the leads until they become your customers.
#5. Expert Talks on Radios
You could sponsor radio talks where a few industry experts, influencers, etc., will talk about a real-life problem. Besides this, they will also propose your product as a viable solution to such problems. Do not forget to mention the store addresses (online or physical stores) where the customers could go to buy your products.
#6. Participating in Trade Expos
You could boost your field marketing strategy by participating in local and global trade fairs, expos, etc. It helps you to make a brand presence, collect leads, and convert visiting prospects to customers.
#7. Gala and Dinner Events
Big businesses often organize gala and dinner events. They would invite customers, prospects, and leads and engage with them in small discussions to make long-term business relationships.
#8. Organizing Consumer-Centric Events
As a part of your field marketing initiative, you can organize entertainment and sports events where prospects and buyers will directly involve with you in fun events. You could also give away brand merchandises that increase your brand presence in the public domain.
#9. Organizing Roadshows
You could also partner with artists, singers, and celebrities to organize roadshows where your brand gets immediate engagement with lots of prospects and leads.
Field Marketing After COVID-19
This marketing strategy explicitly relies on social gatherings. The more participants more leads and more sales. However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the norm. From early 2020 to late 2021, most countries were observing soft to aggressive lockdowns. Due to this, many businesses had to cancel all kinds of corporate gatherings including field marketing events. But, the scenario changed a lot in 2022 as many countries lifted lockdowns and COVID-19 regulations. Now, businesses can plan marketing events to promote their brand, product, and services. Field marketers have become suddenly busy with multiple campaigns. This is evident from an Allied Market Research report. It says, in 2020, the value of the corporate event market was $95.30 billion in the USA. By 2030, this value will become $510.90 billion, indicating a CAGR growth of 17.3%.
The Benefits of Field Marketing
Create Brand Awareness
This marketing approach addresses brand awareness creation effectively. When you meet your customers and prospects at different events, you can understand their genuine perception of your brand. If the audience has got any wrong ideas about your brand, you can correct that in person.
Managing Skeptical Customers
Skeptical and market-aware customers can be a real problem for your retailers to handle. Instead, you can organize an event for such prospects and answer their queries technically to address their doubts.
Assisting the Sales Team’s Efforts
The sales team is already following up with the prospects that your marketing team generates from many sources. They might be unable to manage these marketing events for brand awareness building. Here, your field marketing team can engage with new prospects directly until they are ready to close the deal.
Relationship Building
Your field marketing team can network with fellow marketers, prospects, product experts, industry leaders, and more. Ultimately, it increases your brand presence with new people who could do passive marketing.
Delivers Measurable Data
Your marketing team can gather actionable insights from such marketing events. You can draw a pattern from these data to improvise products, explore new audience regions, modify the marketing tactic, revise the pricing, etc.
Field Marketing: What You Need to Do
Keep the Event Attendees Engaged
When consumers participate in brand promotion activities and events, it means they are interested in the product. Hence, you need to collate the attendee data and pass that to the sales team for follow-ups.
Combine Digital and Field Marketing
You must run field and digital marketing campaigns synchronously. Because both campaigns can benefit from each other by sharing market insight.
Produce Vivid Marketing Collateral
You must develop marketing materials for different customer bases like businesses, governments, nonprofits, educational institutes, and general consumers.
Learn From Competition and Improvise
Attend field marketing events of your rival brands. Learn from their strategies and improvise yours over them.
Things to Avoid in Field Marketing
Generalizing Marketing Merchs and Materials
You should customize your marketing content and merch according to the culture and language of the audience. You may not get a good result by doing field marketing in English in French, German, and Spanish-speaking communities.
Lack of Cost-effectiveness
You must appropriately plan the return on investment (ROI) before allocating a huge budget for field marketing. If the field’s market share is 10% of your revenue, then accordingly dispense a marketing budget.
Procrastination
Ensure your field marketers are always ready to organize field events. The market trend could shift any second, and your team should be on the ground almost immediately to grab the opportunity of being a first mover.
Inconsistent Marketing Content
All marketing materials like brochures, flyers, adverts, posters, and more should be consistent and up to date.
Conclusion
Your success in the market depends on the robustness of your marketing team and its tactics. While most businesses have surrendered to digital marketing, you can create a blend of digital and field marketing to cover most ground than others. Marketing is all about data. Collect data through online marketing and apply that in real-life events, consumer meet-ups, roundtables, and more. Ultimately you are creating a platform where your company can have a one to one communication with your consumers, prospects, and leads. Field marketing tips mentioned above should help you in achieving better engagement than your business rivals. You may also be interested in Smartsheet templates to streamline your digital and field marketing campaigns.
