Field marketing, often called event marketing, emphasizes direct, face-to-face engagement with customers to build relationships, boost brand awareness, and drive sales. Through activities like trade fairs, product demos, and sampling, it offers a unique edge in today’s competitive landscape.
In today’s competitive business landscape, standing out from the crowd is more crucial than ever. While digital marketing dominates the conversation, an often-overlooked strategy - field marketing - offers unique opportunities. Whether you’re looking to boost brand awareness, drive sales, or gain customer insights, field marketing can be the game-changer you need.
Field marketing is a marketing strategy that involves direct, in-person engagement with potential customers. This term is also known as event marketing, and it promotes your products, services or brands directly to your target audience at a specific location.
The primary goal is to build relationships with potential leads and have face-to-face interactions with them. It is often observed in the form of trade fairs, product sampling and demonstrations, and experience based activities which all help to build brand awareness and drive conversion.
A field marketer is the person responsible for executing direct marketing activities that engage these potential customers in person. Some of the duties they execute are:
Field marketers play a crucial role in creating memorable experiences that drive brand awareness and sales.
With the prevalence of online marketing, it’s a strategic choice for companies to create and use multi-channel campaigns that include both online- and offline channels to maximize reach. Field marketing is used to influence buying behavior and brand experience directly. It enables your business to create one-on-one interactions with their target audience in the most ideal setting possible - a staged one.
There’s a plethora of benefits to classic field marketing, these 4 benefits stand out the most:
Field marketing allows brands to engage with customers on a personal level. This type of interaction provides a firsthand experience with your products or services, creating a deeper connection and trust. Let’s be honest, we all prefer to do business with someone or something we like!
The goal of field marketing is to embed your brand into customers' minds, ensuring that your product remains top-of-mind and readily available when they are in need. Whether you do this via impactful storytelling, supporting a specific charity, or creating a fun and memorable event. By creating these emotional connections you can significantly impact brand perception.
Forming a personal connection with a brand helps customers to feel more secure and connected with a brand. This leads to growing customer retention and it will increase your repeat purchase rate.
It is your responsibility to be consistent in delivering quality to maintain this relationship. In the long term, these personal interactions will lead to a bond of trust and will result in building significant brand loyalty.
This type of marketing campaign provides measurable ROI through metrics such as direct sales tracking, lead generation, customer engagement, and event attendance. This enables you to allocate marketing budgets more effectively and continuously improve strategies based on other successful outcomes.
Clear metrics justify continued or increased investment in field marketing, while direct interactions and feedback enhance understanding of customer needs and preferences. This approach not only differentiates a brand from its competitors, it creates a stronger market presence, fosters brand loyalty and increases customer retention through positive, memorable experiences.
Field marketing is not perceived as intrusive, as people can decide whether to participate or not. It offers you more opportunity to start a dialogue with the right audience, and this fosters honest and sympathetic relationships. The key here is to focus on honest and pleasant interactions.
When done correctly, a brand can benefit from increased conversion rates, enhanced customer satisfaction, stronger brand loyalty, higher customer retention, and gather better customer insights. All of these metrics contribute to a more successful and sustainable business strategy.
There’s a plethora of different events and activities you can plan. Depending on the goals you want to reach, you can decide what type of event is right for your brand. I’ve picked out the 7 most common field marketing strategies to get your creative gears going.
Product sampling and demonstrations are often seen in stores. This strategy involves giving potential customers a firsthand experience of a product, by allowing them to try it out or see it in action. This type of field marketing is perfect for business-to-consumer brands.
A brand that frequently sets up demonstration stations in stores is Dyson. Customers can test their vacuum cleaners and other products while experienced sales staff can answer all their questions.
Trade shows are often targeted at the professional crowd, meaning the focus lies on networking with other businesses - known as B2B field marketing. You can decide to participate in such industry-specific events to showcase your products or services, or attend for the sole reason of making connections.
Think about companies like Salesforce that attend tech conferences where they can demonstrate their CRM software to other companies and engage with potential clients. This is a great way to turn cold leads into warm ones!
A pop-up shop is a temporary retail space that’s designed to create a unique, engaging experience around a brand. Everyday we register the names of the stores we pass by subconsciously. When we want to buy something, these brands are often the first that come to mind.
Since online shopping has opened up the playing field for retail, pop-up shops are a good way to achieve the same fame as online brands without making long-term investments.
Roadshows are traveling events that bring the brand experience directly to different locations, allowing for widespread outreach. The idea is to create a buzz around the brand and engage with potential customers in a meaningful way.
Roadshows can be a great way to reach a broader audience and build brand awareness. At Attack! we call this type of campaign a mobile marketing tour - which shows tremendous success among our clients.
Virtual events are online events that provide valuable content and interact with potential customers remotely. This is not as easy to do for consumer goods, but it’s a great alternative for companies to connect with their existing audience and new customers.
HubSpot frequently hosts webinars on marketing, sales, and customer service. This attracts a wide range of participants interested in their software solutions. Not only can you educate people with webinars, you can combine it to promote your own products. This means you’ll build relationships and build authority on the topics you are talking about.
Street promotions engage potential customers in public places to create awareness and drive interest. Red Bull does this by hiring street teams to hand out free samples of their energy drinks in busy urban areas, creating immediate brand exposure.
If you’re lucky you have come across a guerilla marketing tactic before. I’m saying lucky because these campaigns are usually very fun and unconventional. These campaigns are designed to achieve maximum exposure and impact with minimal costs. The campaigns are often surprising, memorable, and designed to create buzz and word-of-mouth.
IKEA used guerilla marketing by setting up pop-up living rooms in public places like bus stops and town squares to showcase their furniture in everyday settings. This was done in such a way, no one knew when the furniture was placed. The goal is to engage the audience in unexpected ways, often in public spaces, to leave a lasting impression on them.
In short, field marketing is all about in-person engagements, which involves direct and personal interactions. In contrast, digital marketing relies solely on online channels, traditional marketing focuses on mass media and channel marketing works through partners to distribute products.
At Attack! Marketing we have years of experience creating elaborate field marketing solutions. Don’t take our word for it? Have a look at some of our happy customers.
To support Nascar legend Jimmy Johnson's move to Indy Car racing, Attack! partnered with Carvana to manage a mobile marketing tour. This included an Indy Car, a giant toy car vending machine, and live Indy Car trivia to engage crowds and generate leads. The tour visited 14 Indy Cup races and 14 Carvana corporate locations, covering over 5000 miles in 9 months and generating over 18,000 leads.
Inspired by our work for Merrell Footwear, we created a 14-foot tall EggNog container for Southern Comfort to visit holiday events. The giant container attracted large crowds eager to try the two holiday flavors. Visitors were able to enjoy our photo wall and props to capture moments and share. After serving 24,000 product samples, it became an annual phenomenon people look forward to each year.
First and foremost, it’s essential you build an extensive customer profile to ensure you have a detailed understanding of your target audience. Think about what problem you are solving for the customer and build from there. It will be a wasted effort to communicate all the benefits your product offers, if it doesn’t solve the actual problem.
Once you've defined the problem you're solving, look at people's basic motivations. What drives them to act? The hope of more status, wealth or security? Appeal to this and you will encourage the customer to take action.
Answering these questions will help tailor your marketing efforts to meet specific needs and preferences of your audience, thus improving engagement and conversion rates.
This step involves selecting and utilizing various types of marketing materials to support your field marketing efforts. Consider developing high-quality materials such as brochures, flyers, banners, and product samples that are visually appealing and informative. Use all the materials at events, trade shows, pop-up shops, and any other field marketing activities you have in mind to enhance your message and for consistent communication.
Don’t forget to tailor all the content and messaging to your specific target audience to resonate with different segments. Try to describe how your customers will benefit from purchasing your product or service in ten words or less. The point is that you immediately have the attention of the (potential) customer. After all, you are not the only player on the market.
Keep an eye on your competitors to understand their strategies and identify opportunities for differentiation. It’s never a good idea to copy exactly what your competitor is doing, you must be original and better! Study field marketing activities of your competition, including messaging, tactics and customer engagement strategies. This helps you assess what they’re doing well and where they are falling short.
Subsequently, use these gained insights to refine your own campaigns. This helps you stay competitive, avoid common pitfalls, and capitalize on market gaps.
If you’re not already using a Content Management System (CMS), I’d highly recommend you do so. Using a CMS helps organize, manage, and distribute your marketing content efficiently. Select a CMS that fits your needs and supports multiple types of content (text, images, videos, etc.).
Enable your team to collaborate on content creation and share materials seamlessly. Organize and store marketing materials in categories for easy access and retrieval, and to avoid mixing up different campaigns.
Using a CMS will ensure consistent, up-to-date, and easily accessible marketing materials, which in turn improves efficiency and effectiveness in your field marketing efforts.
After your event has passed, follow up on any leads with personalized emails, calls, or messages and maintain continuous engagement. Use all the available communication channels to stay connected with your audience, share updates and respond to inquiries.
Keeping your promise and getting back to people builds stronger relationships, increases customer loyalty, and keeps your brand top-of-mind.
Marketing is a broad term that encompasses all activities that aim to promote, sell, and distribute a product or service. Field marketing is simply a subset of marketing that focuses on direct, in-person engagement with customers.
Besides having a passion for marketing, the following is important to:
Yes! Field marketing campaigns can be highly effective for businesses when planned and executed in the right way. These campaigns will improve brand awareness, build relationships and improve customer retention.
Some field marketing examples are shown in this blogpost. Our favorite is the use of a pop-up shop to increase brand awareness and drive sales for e.g. a new product line. Have a look at some of our other field marketing campaigns to learn more.
No. There are some similarities between these marketing fields, but they are not the same. Field marketing focuses on in-person interactions via product demonstrations, sampling, trade shows etc. Which targets a wider audience. Whilst direct marketing communicates to individual consumers with e.g. email campaigns, telemarketing, or SMS marketing.
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Christian Jurinka serves as the CEO and oversees the business development and strategic vision for the agency. Attack! connects brands with consumers, driving loyalty, purchase and velocity through comprehensive, ROI-focused field marketing services.
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