Field marketing may sound like another B2B industry jargon, but it's likely you’re already experienced in the area.

Sell a product. 

Distribute promotional material. 

Connect with target buyers.

The fundamentals of field marketing have stayed intact post COVID, but it has undergone a big change in another aspect: it’s virtual now.

In this guide, we’ll explore the term in greater detail and share effective tips to create an effective virtual field marketing strategy for your business.

What is field marketing?

Field marketing is a marketing strategy that helps generate higher quality leads for a company through brand building and customer relationship management efforts. It comprises a series of activities that involve marketers getting their products in front of customers at “in the field“ events and places like college campuses, retail stores, and trade shows.

5 benefits of field marketing 

Field marketing is the easiest way to get your target audience to see/understand your product’s values — provided you do it right. 

Here are the other advantages of effective field marketing:

Creates brand awareness 

Field marketing makes it easier than ever to register your offer in your target audience‘s mind, reminding them of your product’s existence and availability whenever they need it. 

It lets you cut through the noise and reach your target audience faster, allowing them to experience your brand first-hand — see how you’re better. You can deliver a personalized experience to prospects, helping you catch their attention and make a positive impression. 

The fact that you can also instill brand values and increase brand loyalty until they finally convert and become customers is another significant advantage.

Improve customer understanding and relationships

If you want access to deep customer insights, you have to try field marketing. After all, what better way to understand how your target audience feels about your brand than by seeing their facial expressions in real life?

Engaging directly gives you valuable feedback that you can use to improve your company‘s messaging and price point — or even optimize your offering. You get an excellent opportunity to create a great customer experience wherever and whenever the customer connects with your brand, which is exactly why field marketing is considered a form of experiential marketing.

Additionally, customers expect you to know everything about your brand and its products and services. When your reps give them consistent answers for all their queries live, it increases their trust in your brand.

Reassures cynical customers

Customer cynicism is real — and it’s hard.

Today, your target audience is more informed, intelligent, and savvy. Instead of drawn-out negotiations, they want instant gratification and are aware they can easily find companies willing to give them exactly that. 

Field marketing activities like product demonstrations, webinars, onboarding, and POS interactions are the most effective way to deal with cynical customers because it answers their questions in real-time, quickly giving them the answers they want and clarifying queries.

Boosts sales

Field marketing gives you the platform to deliver a “wow“ moment that results in an immediate purchase. When done right, prospects will see your product or service's value over your rivals and, therefore, feel more inclined to choose your brand — or at least schedule a call to discuss further.

Also, field marketing augments sales efforts. 

Converting qualified leads into customers is the sales team‘s top priority. This often leaves reps with little time to focus on customer onboarding and nurturing to help them familiarize themselves with a product or service. 

That’s when someone like a field marketing manager or marketer can take the lead, taking the pressure on the sales team and getting prospects comfortable on their own. The more comfortable the prospect is using your product, the more likely they are to buy from your brand.

Facilitates accurate targeting

Field marketing activities like sales promotions, nurturing, sampling, and events give you full control over how you reach out to and connect with your target audience. 

You choose the locations, formats, and marketing collateral after thorough research that not only helps you accurately identify your target audience, but also better understand the approach you need to target and cater to their needs.

Different types of field marketing events

Field marketing events provide an excellent platform to leverage customer relationship management and face-to-face brand development plans. Based on your goal of creating brand awareness, accelerating lead generation, and nurturing customer relationships, it takes the form of the following events:

Product demonstrations

Product demonstration refers to showing your product in action (“demonstrate“) to potential customers, introducing the latter to your offering in the hopes of getting them to buy it. 

It’s the most common field marketing event that includes activities like giveaways and free sample distribution. For non-consumable goods, product demos are engaging hands-on experiences where potential customers can use or see your product live in action.

In-person events

In-person events like trade shows, workshops, conferences, and virtual events like webinars let marketers pitch their product or service to potential customers directly at the point of interaction. Customers get acquainted with the company and its offerings, making them more likely to convert.

These events also give you ample time to build personalized relationships, helping you win their loyalty and boost sales. This is one of the main reasons why sales experts recommend companies invest heavily in virtual and in-person events.

Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing is a series of innovative and unconventional marketing techniques to promote a product or service by evoking surprise, wonder, or shock among customers. The idea here is to attract the target audience’s attention within a short span of time to create buzz and drive word-of-mouth publicity.

If you think this field marketing activity is easy, think again.

It’s incredibly challenging to create an effective guerrilla marketing campaign because it lacks a fixed structure or framework. If your idea sticks, your campaign will go viral. If it doesn’t, it’ll get lost in the noise and give no benefit. It’s wise to try out tried-and-tested strategies before creating a guerrilla marketing campaign.

5 tips to deliver an effective virtual field marketing experience

Finally, to the main part!

Here are a few ideas to help you spice up your field marketing strategy:

Prioritize personalization during interactions 

Inviting someone into your virtual meeting room is similar to inviting them into your living room, kitchen, or backyard. It’s an intimate affair. 

To make the most of this opportunity, personalize interactions to truly get to know your audience.

What challenges are they facing at the moment? What do they want to achieve? What can you do to make them spend their time with you?

Answering these questions will ensure everything falls into place.

The following are a few ideas to personalize your virtual field events:

• Make your virtual field events more interactive. Asking fun, relevant questions is an excellent way to encourage attendees to interact. You can do this through live polls, social media contests, and surveys.
• Let attendees invite friends. When holding a small virtual event, encourage attendees to bring a plus one. This will make them feel more comfortable, plus give you access to another potential customer. We also recommend limiting the number of attendees to avoid a crowd and enable free-flowing and open discussions.
• Skip the PowerPoint. Give your audience an interactive experience by ditching presentations and boring lectures. Encourage everyone to have their Zoom video on for face-to-face interaction.
• Make events timely and relevant. The audience today is pickier with how they spend that time. Make your events specific to their use case to capture their attention. Keep your virtual field marketing events relevant and short; focus solely on your target audience and their challenges, purchasing behaviors, and relevant topics.

Leverage experiential marketing

One of the reasons why field marketing clicks is because all activities are compelling and memorable. Delivering a similar experience virtually can be difficult for companies because people are already spending long hours in front of their computers.

So how do you break up this monotony? Introduce elements of experiential marketing through Hoppier.

Hoppier can help you deliver a hybrid experience that excites and impresses users. Use the platform’s virtual credit cards to engage your virtual attendees and let them order from their favorite restaurants and cafes. If you want to go further than food and beverages, you can also have them redeem these virtual cards for other services. 

That’s not it….

You can allocate a Hoppier card immediately after an attendee signs up for your virtual field marketing program to incentivize the registration process. Gamification is also possible, where you can add more balance to the cards as attendees complete different activities during the event.

Regularly measure results and adapt

Although markets are recovering, times are still uncertain. It’s important to measure success against your pipeline goals. 

Here are a few metrics to keep in mind to determine whether your field marketing efforts are paying off:

• Influenced and net new pipeline. Your field marketing campaign should drive more pipeline — prospective customers — for your sales team. 
• Number of unique attendees. This indicates whether your discussion topics and marketing resonated with your target audience.
• Content enablement. This indicates the total pieces of content — social posts, videos, and blog posts — you can create based on these events.
• Make up of account-based marketing (ABM) target account attendees. This signals who among your target audience engaged actively during the virtual event.

Go small and short

Being virtual allows you to reach out to more people, but that doesn’t mean holding elaborate, long, or large events is always the right choice. On the contrary, organizing shorter and more intimate field events can significantly enhance your customer engagement strategy.

93% of event attendees think virtual events shouldn’t be longer than 60 minutes. In fact, 55% of them want them to be 30 minutes or less. Additionally, smaller and shorter events help you create organic connections with your audience, allowing you to work more closely with your attendees.

Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to deliver an intimate virtual field marketing experience:

• Host a virtual game. Playing engaging games like icebreakers, trivia, and virtual escape rooms enables guests to work together and achieve a common goal. This will nurture an intimate connection and establish a sense of community and trust.
• Organize a fun workshop. Think outside the box when organizing workshops. Have a spiritual expert lead a guided meditation. Or invite subject matter experts to help attendees find the answers to their hardest questions.
• Hold a fun live show. Get a single or comedian to liven up your virtual field marketing event. This will help create a one-of-a-kind moment and leave a lasting impression on attendees.

Make sampling virtual and easy

Take your sampling activities online by promoting coupon codes, free trials through channels like email and social media, and discounts. Not only will this help you acquire more new customers, but also create more brand awareness. 

For instance, you can run an email marketing campaign targeting event attendees where you offer a free trial of your product or service.

Not everyone will become a paying customer at the end of the trial period. In such cases, use retargeting ads and offer limited-time coupons and exclusive discounts as additional incentives to get your audience to act.

Take steps to get more from field marketing

Field marketing takes the buyer-seller relationship to the next level. 

It gives prospects and customers a chance to experience your product or service in unique and exciting ways to make a lasting impression that can lead to favorable results. It also makes it easier for field marketers to understand how customers and prospects will engage with the brand. 

Make the most out of your field marketing efforts by aligning your sales, marketing, and product marketing teams. Take your first step towards field marketing success by signing up with Hoppier and enhancing your virtual events.

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