Agility is key to thriving in an uncertain world — even in the post-COVID era. The pivot from in-person field marketing to virtual experiences is no longer nascent, and virtual events are an integral part of any marketing campaign. Despite the shift to digital events, field marketing remains one of the most effective event formats for businesses looking to drum up demand and feedback for new products, services, and ideas.
Field marketing combines the best of sales and marketing to offer businesses a unique approach to building authentic relationships with their customers and prospects. Discover how you can adapt your field marketing strategy now and into the future to drive sustainable growth, win potential customers, and build brand awareness and loyalty.
Field marketing is an experiential form of marketing that includes onsite marketing activities like pop-up street promotions, merchandising, free samples and giveaways, product demonstrations, guerilla marketing efforts, and direct sales.
At its core, field marketing is the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) principle in action. Field marketing activities are designed to gain the target audience's attention, create interest in and desire for your offerings, and ultimately drive action, i.e., sales.
Field marketing typically involves multiple touchpoints, such as conferences, trade shows, and meetings. However, as more organizations have gone remote over the past few years, field marketing now includes interactive digital touchpoints like virtual events.
Think of field marketing as a combination of push-pull marketing. You connect with your buyers through meetings (push marketing) and adopt a more personalized approach to pull them in as they progress through the different stages of the purchase journey.
Simply put, field marketing specialists collaborate with marketing and sales teams to achieve business goals with or without traditional marketing efforts. Field marketing campaigns offer a myriad of benefits:
Field marketing allows companies to interact one-on-one with customers, allowing them to learn what customers think about brand offerings and understand if they have any complaints about your product. However, field marketing offers more benefits beyond these interactions. A successful field marketing campaign positions your company for success and provides new outlets to grow your business — including these advantages.
Organic digital marketing deserves a place in your marketing initiatives, but traditional banner advertising and social media campaigns can have mixed results. You aren’t interacting with customers, and you don’t receive feedback about why your marketing campaigns are ineffective.
Field marketing creates an opportunity for engagement marketing — a strong, proven winner in the marketing realm. It provides an open forum that encourages memorable interactions and helps strengthen brand recognition and perception.
Customer experience includes interactions at every marketing touchpoint. Field marketing serves as a key touchpoint because it allows customers to interact face-to-face with a business. Customers can learn how to use the product and share their stories and pain points, which can drive customer engagement and deliver a better customer experience.
Field marketing optimizes the nurturing process. From fresh leads at a trade show to customer-based lunch and learns, field marketing can help your sales reps bridge the gap between leads and conversions.
Field marketing is a consumer-facing activity that provides qualitative information from real people. You can learn why a product feature sells so well or why it's so difficult to use. When combined with quantitative data, you are better equipped to make informed decisions.
Field marketing activities, such as face-to-face interactions, product demonstrations, events, and webinars, provide a list of participants along with relevant details that you can tie into your CRM.
When a sale takes place, you can accurately map it to which field marketing activity prompted the sale. This allows you to track your ROI accurately, providing insight into the value of your marketing materials, brand ambassadors, and other marketing efforts. ROI is also a metric that’s integral to current or prospective investors, effectively scaling your business and growing investment capital.
Field marketing is extensive and spans a wide gamut of opportunities — events, merchandising, sampling, demonstrations, roadshows, webinars, and more. However, the core elements of field marketing include three quintessential activities, each with its own strengths.
Product demos are a field marketing favorite. They provide an ideal environment for personalized demonstrations and opportunities for customers to sample your products and services.
B2C companies use this at shopping malls and other high-traffic areas where they can ask customers to try out their products. B2B companies use product demonstrations at conferences and trade shows where they're likely to meet the most relevant audience.
An important difference is that B2C companies typically use product demonstrations during the awareness stage, whereas B2B companies use them at the consideration stage.
In-person events are perhaps the most powerful field marketing avenue. They're effective because marketing representatives can showcase products and help customers get acquainted with the company and its offerings throughout the event lifecycle. These events could be trade shows, conferences, workshops, meetings, and virtual events like webinars.
Ample time to build personalized relationships compels field marketing managers to invest heavily in virtual and in-person events. To reach a wider audience, B2C brands also invest in other event formats, such as roadshows.
Guerrilla marketing is the growth hacking side of field marketing. A creative guerrilla marketing campaign has the potential to create buzz and drive word of mouth among your ideal buyers. This tactic deploys ingenious or creative stunts to attract the audience’s attention within a short time frame — like IKEA furnishing subway stations with couches.
Although guerrilla marketing is often touted as a low-cost marketing tactic, creating a campaign is incredibly challenging because no fixed structure or framework guides the marketing campaign — as proof, take a look at these amazing but wildly different campaigns. In any case, having tried and tested field marketing strategies in place before considering a guerrilla marketing campaign is recommended.
Field marketing is largely about building relationships through in-person interactions. However, online events are still crucial for brands to adapt a virtual approach to field marketing strategies.
Implement these seven field marketing strategies in your marketing plan for focused, more successful results.
While in-person events are still vital to your field marketing campaign, virtual events can help you connect with a wider audience.
With the help of robust virtual event platforms, you can organize events as small as a virtual meeting and as large as a trade show. Consider various options such as webinars, lunch and learns, workshops, training programs, and full-on conferences. As a part of your lead nurturing program, you can also use small-scale events as a build-up for your large-scale events.
Keep a lookout for relevant virtual events in your niche that give you exposure as a guest speaker or sponsor. Either option is a low-cost, low-effort method to connect with your audience.
As we’ve mentioned, the in-person experience of field marketing is what makes it so compelling and memorable. For virtual events, companies recreating the same effect is cumbersome because people are essentially spending their days in front of their computers.
To break up this monotony, the best thing you can do is introduce the elements of experiential marketing. Use a platform like Hoppier to deliver that hybrid experience.
Hoppier offers virtual credit cards to help you engage your virtual attendees. Attendees can use these cards to order food, coffee, or drinks from their favorite restaurants and cafes, and you can also redeem them for other services.
Incentivize the registration process by allocating a card right after an attendee signs up, and gamify your event by adding more balance as they complete different activities.
To help your target audience make better decisions, put together customized content for different stages of their buying journey. You can go granular and break it down for different marketing channels. For instance, instead of sharing the link to a blog post on X (Twitter), post a tweet thread summarizing key points so that you're reaching every member of your audience where they spend the most time.
Street teams are not new. This team of hardcore fans takes pride in promoting their favorite underground bands and artists. Brands can also adopt this concept for roadshows and event promotion.
Community marketing is becoming a powerful marketing approach. Create groups and communities on relevant marketing channels, such as social media, Discord, or Slack. Interact with the group members and offer unique benefits to keep them engaged.
Leverage your street team to promote your offerings, events, content, and other promotional assets. The community can also help you with user-generated content, like testimonials and product reviews.
In short, word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing channel. Let your customers do the talking for your brand.
Partner marketing or co-marketing is a trusted strategy for scaling marketing efforts and reaching a wider audience. In co-marketing, two or more organizations work together to provide value to their audiences.
Field marketing managers can identify organizations in your niche that complement your offerings, giving them superb insight into a partner marketing program. Keeping your marketing goals in mind, launch a virtual event that allows you to connect with each other’s customers, prospects, and networks.
As a build-up to the event, try hosting micro-events like virtual lunch and learns and co-hosted webinars, then publish the recordings as gated content. Because you split expenses in partner marketing campaigns, you can get pretty solid results at a lower cost.
Along with your other field marketing strategies, take your product sampling to the digital world. To acquire new customers, promote coupon codes, discounts, and free trials via email, social media, and ads. For example, by targeting the list of event attendees, you can run an email marketing campaign offering them a free trial of your offerings. This approach may increase sales while also providing trackable metrics.
Not everyone will become a customer at the end of the trial period. To compel your audience to act, use retargeting ads and offer limited-time coupons and exclusive discounts as incentives.
Account-based marketing (ABM) takes a laser-focused approach to acquiring high-value target accounts by dedicating a group of resources. In intent-based marketing, you create content by identifying users who show purchase intent.
You can already see that you can combine ABM and intent-based marketing to turbocharge your marketing efforts. For instance, the intent data can provide you with the questions prospects are researching. You can create marketing campaigns based on these questions.
As part of these campaigns, your field marketing team can organize workshops or lunch and learns for high-value accounts. Once they enter your marketing funnel, you can continue nurturing them to get them sales-ready.
The essence of field marketing is building rapport with your prospects and customers. The common thread among these activities is that they all allow you to interact with your audience.
To get the most out of your field marketing efforts, align the strategy of your sales, marketing, and product marketing teams. Never miss a virtual field marketing opportunity again. Use these tactics to maximize engagement at your virtual field marketing events.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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