6 Key Elements of Field Marketing

Discover how to launch a successful field marketing campaign.

Ben Bitvinskas

Co-founder, Atlasmic

In this article, we’ll be going over the concept of effective field marketing and how you can curb this set of ideas for the benefit of your business. In total, we’ll go over 6 key elements of successful field marketing. We hope it will be useful and you’ll find some new, as well as practical information that you can use in the real world. So, without any further ado, let’s get to it.

First things first - what is field marketing?

The best way to describe field marketing is to call it a strategy of business communication & marketing, which requires services, ads, products, or other items being out in the field. The concept of field marketing revolves around businesses or organizations exposing their products and/or brand to a wide audience. It’s most effective when done in context with a broader range of circumstances, e.g., in a conference or an event, public locations, etc.

A lot of the time, the goal behind field marketing isn’t all about boosting sales. It’s mostly about brand awareness, market penetration, target audience engagement, or just doing things for a charitable cause. However, with the right approach, field marketing can boost sales both short and long-term.

Here’s a chart that shows the full potential of field marketing.

Every business can expect to see a lot of photos shared on social media labelled as branded content. This means that if you’re able to make visitors and potential customers have a nice experience, they’ll offer free advertising in exchange (by sharing branded content). Concerts, fundraisers, bar events, and rec activity seem to offer the most sharing value for organizers.

Now we can move on to how one might craft a successful field marketing campaign.

Element #1 - Visibility

You have to be sure that the field marketing campaign is visible and noticeable enough. Since you’re more likely to be doing it not for the sake of only boosting sales, you have to promote your brand/product/service with much more attention towards visibility.

So, your goal with this marketing campaign might not be to generate the highest return on every dollar spent but rather getting the most exposure from your campaign and similar benefits.

Element #2 - People

A lot of the time, when thinking about proper advertising, business owners and representatives look for innovation, cutting-edge design, most gimmicks, perks, etc., but fail to notice the importance of arguably the most essential feature of all - people who are working behind the scenes. If you have talented and knowledgeable specialists on board, your marketing campaign has a much higher chance of succeeding. What you want are talented, driven, and motivated individuals doing the work behind the scenes. Ambition is great, but you have to blend it with experience.

If you’re doing promo events or sponsoring an event, make sure that the people who will be handling the PR end (representing you in the event) are up for the task and know what they’re doing.

Let’s give an example. If a company sells fishing equipment and decides to sponsor a fishing competition, what would be their best bet?

Would they be better off by sending a serious executive in a suit to represent them?
Or would they receive better feedback if they were to hire a professional host for the event who would promote and sponsor their company?

Make sure you trust professionals in the field. It’s a no-brainer to pick the second option in this example. But for some reason, when the decision comes to their doorstep, many organizations fail to see which route to go and promote people who aren’t suited to do such a job. Make sure to carefully pick the individuals who will be dealing with the field marketing campaign as it’s very important to your reputation.

Element #3 - Positioning

In the world of marketing, positioning isn’t entirely everything, but it’s very close to it. If you’re able to place your campaign and ads in the right spots at the right time, you will see great results. Look at the chart below. It shows a few essential questions you have to answer before being able to find out the right positioning for your campaign.

If you’re able to determine the current market position of your organization, you can definitely have it easier to navigate through the obstacles of making a field marketing campaign. The information in the chart is applicable throughout the range of various marketing programs, including field marketing.

We always recommend doing enough research beforehand. If you gather enough data, it makes getting results a lot easier.

Element #4 - Measurement

During the campaign and after it, you definitely have to evaluate, measure and track the performance of various areas. If you want field marketing to bring any commercial benefit, either short or long-term, you have to carry out measurement consistently. There are a lot of areas to cover and a variety of methods to do that. Here’s a chart below which can point you in the right direction.

So, in order to run a successful field marketing campaign, you have to monitor these areas. Let’s look over them.

Brand perception
- your reputation and the perception of your brand have a lot to do with returning and new customer numbers. The best way to evaluate perception is to either carry out a survey. You can do that during the campaign or, for example, handle out flyers with great deals and offer discounts or other goodies in exchange for a few minutes of their time by filling out the survey/questionnaire.
Cynical customers
- this measure can be figured out by combining the tracking of new customers with brand perception evaluation via a survey. You can indirectly ask them what they were thinking about your brand and how their thoughts changed.
Sales increase
- field marketing can either stimulate sales for the time being or give a huge boost far into the future. Continuous monitoring will help you determine which one is it.
More accurate targeting
- by gathering some information about people who interacted with your campaign, you can gather intel for more accurate marketing targeting further down the road.

Element #5 - Analyzing the competition

It’s highly likely that you have competitors in your niche. Do you know what they are doing differently? Are you aware of which areas you have them beat and vice versa? If not, it’s time to do some recon work and evaluate the performance of field marketing campaigns, which are carried out by competing businesses.

You can do analysis by either sending someone to scout their campaigns (secret buyers/customers) or just look at the information that they’re posting and comparing it with what you’ve got.

Element #6 - A clear goal

Finally, you have to have a clear goal before doing any kind of marketing. If you’re devising a campaign just for the sake of it, you can’t expect to succeed. Only a precise and on-point goal can help you find a strategy that works. Examples of clear marketing goals:

Attract at least 1,000 recurring subscribers for our service during the 3-day-long event
Increase market penetration by 15% with the 16-25 age demographic in a particular area
Boost the number of followers on our Instagram page by 5,000

And that’s just some very basic goals. Remember that the goal is the key element that drives every department and every individual, to move forward. If they’re just doing the job without a vision or a long-term goal, the job won’t create added value. Such negative circumstances can make your field marketing campaign run into a dead end. And you definitely don’t want that.

Conclusion

So, here’s how it works and the most important parts, as well as elements of successful field marketing:

You have to have a clear goal.
After setting out a goal, you have to find measures to achieve it. The measures are determined after consulting with the right people who are in the know on your product niche and field marketing, in general. Analyzing your competitors is a must if you wish to outperform them both short and long-term.
Once competent experts and driven individuals are on board, you can proceed to devise a field marketing plan and strategy.
You have to be confident that your advertisements and campaign efforts will be visible. As we’ve established, visibility helps generate good results.
You achieve good visibility and brand exposure by doing proper marketing positioning. Choose the best spots to advertise on and do it consistently. Make sure everything is tactful and done in a way to appeal to the audience and not just to please the executive branch of your business.
Finally, do thorough monitoring of the data which you gathered. Continuously track various data points and try to accumulate as much information from your audience, as you can. This will help refine marketing campaigns and choose the most efficient routes.

We hope this article was useful. Check out the rest of our blog for awesome, entrepreneur-oriented content!

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