What Is Field Marketing? Tactics, Benefits, and Metrics

From content and email marketing to webinars and social media, many B2B marketing tactics focus on online channels. But as useful as these activities are, they lack opportunities to connect face to face.

With its focus on in-person events, field marketing adds a new dimension to your B2B marketing playbook. Learn why you should invest in field marketing and find out how to make it work for your business.

What is field marketing?

Field marketing is a strategy that involves hosting in-person events and making face-to-face connections. It refers to marketing activities that take place in the field. In other words, events in physical locations.

On the surface, it's all about engaging with customers and prospects. But a typical field marketer is also responsible for goals like building sales pipeline and driving revenue.

The definition of field marketing includes everything from conferences to guerrilla marketing. We'll explore these and other common tactics in depth below.

Event marketing vs. field marketing

B2B event marketing generally focuses on promoting products and services to potential customers. Typical goals include brand awareness and lead generation.

In contrast, field marketing prioritizes engaging with your target market. Although brand awareness is a nice perk, revenue generation is more important.

Plus, event marketing isn't limited to in-person happenings. Some event marketing examples include online conferences, webinars, and other virtual events.

Customer marketing vs. field marketing

Both field and customer marketing aim to create connections with prospects and customers. However, relationships are just one part of the equation for field marketing specialists.

For customer marketers, relationships are a much bigger focus. Customer marketing uses tactics like upselling customers and incentivizing loyalty to increase customer lifetime value.

Digital marketing vs. field marketing

Digital marketing includes online activities only. Some common digital tactics for B2B marketers include building email lists, leveraging SEO, hosting virtual conferences, and running search ads.

Field marketing focuses on in-person activities. However, many field events also include digital components. And they often include online follow-ups, such as email sequences or remarketing ads.

Why should your business invest in field marketing?

Curious if this strategy is worthwhile for your team? Here are five benefits of field marketing.

Enhance brand perception

If your demand generation efforts are successful, your target audience already knows about your brand. But how well do they really understand your product or service?

And how seriously are they considering your solution? Field marketing gives your team a chance to improve prospects' perception of your brand and guide them toward a conversion.

Establish customer relationships

B2B customers don't want to be yet another faceless closed/won deal. Instead, they want to feel valued.

Field marketing activities create personalized experiences that deepen customer relationships. As a result, they can boost customer acquisition and improve loyalty.

Engage prospects in real time

For many marketing teams, async marketing activities are the norm. While they're often a better fit for prospects' busy schedules, async efforts may leave attendees wondering.

A key perk of field marketing is real-time engagement. Prospects can ask questions, raise objections, and get personalized advice in the moment so they can move forward in their decision-making process.

Target specific segments

Online marketing channels certainly allow audience targeting. But when you host events in the field, you can get even more specific.

With field marketing, you can easily target certain accounts. Then, you can plan personalized activities that are likely to deliver a high return on investment (ROI).

Measure and attribute ROI

Even the most advanced marketing attribution tools can leave you guessing about the source of a new lead or the success of a digital or traditional marketing campaign.

With field marketing, measurement and attribution are much easier. Once you define your metrics (see below), you can assess results and calculate ROI in real time.

7 Tactics to build your field marketing strategy

To develop a successful field marketing strategy, start with these activities.

1. Conferences

Often intended as educational events, conferences include keynote speeches, hands-on workshops, and networking sessions. As a host, you can turn any of these activities into personalized customer events.

For example, Adobe MAX is a three-day conference with interactive events like photowalks, lab sessions, and Adobe certification testing opportunities.

2. Panel discussions

While conferences can easily welcome thousands of attendees and span multiple days, panel discussions tend to be shorter and more intimate. They're ideal for sparking engaging conversations about hot topics.

Because these events often include industry experts, they offer unique value to attendees. And since they allow time for networking and one-on-one conversations, they make it easy to connect directly with customers.

3. Trade shows

Trade shows create space for multiple companies to showcase their products and services. These events let businesses organize memorable experiential marketing events for their target customers.

For example, SaaStr is an annual trade show and conference event for B2B software companies. It includes sponsored booths, VIP dinners, and dozens of workshops and networking sessions.

4. Product demonstrations

Product demos are some of the quickest and easiest field marketing campaigns to plan. However, they're much more than a chance to demonstrate how your product works.

The most effective demos also include samples and giveaways. For B2B field marketing teams, demos also create opportunities to collect prospects' contact details and book calls with your sales team.

5. Guerilla marketing

Many field marketing activities require big budgets, but guerrilla marketing takes the opposite approach. Guerrilla marketing is all about launching low-cost marketing efforts with potentially big payoffs.

For example, Chili Piper stenciled the company's logo and tagline in and around Dreamforce, a major B2B conference. The software company encouraged attendees to snap and share photos of the stencil online.

6. Merchandising

With merchandising, marketing teams work closely with retail partners to display products. They often involve eye-catching displays that grab shoppers' attention and invite them to make a purchase.

Best suited for B2C businesses, merchandising tends to be a partnership that benefits both the company and the retailer.

7. VIP events

VIP events are great opportunities for connecting with executives from your team's most important accounts. They typically have limited capacity, offer high-end experiences, and allow for plenty of facetime.

For example, Retention.com hosted a VIP retreat at a private oceanfront estate. The event required an application, allowing the company to vet potential attendees and design personalized activities for them.

How to create a winning field marketing strategy

Follow these steps to get the most out of your field marketing efforts.

Get to know your audience

Successful field marketing is all about personalization. This means you need to know your audience.

Start by getting clear on your ideal customer profile (ICP). Define their:

• Demographics, including their location
• Psychographics, including goals and values
• Firmographics, including industry and company size
• Technographics, including their typical tech stack

B2B sales teams typically sell to larger buying committees. Create buyer personas for each decision maker and learn about their challenges and objectives.

Give away branded swag

Don't let prospective customers leave empty-handed. No matter what type of event you host, plan to give away something memorable.

Common field marketing giveaways include:

• Product samples or free products
• Branded swag and merchandise
• Marketing materials that buyers can share with their colleagues

Create interactive spaces

Field marketing isn't about broadcasting branded messages to your target audience. Instead, it's about creating engaging events that delight, entertain, and educate potential customers.

This starts with organizing interactive spaces. Prioritize opportunities where attendees can do hands-on activities and talk directly with your sales and marketing teams.

Encourage ongoing conversations

The conversation doesn't have to stop when the event is over. Instead, create opportunities to continue speaking with leads and helping them make the right purchase decision.

In many cases, this means turning contact lists over to marketing and sales teams for follow-ups via phone, email, or video conference.

Share on-demand content

Make field marketing activities even more memorable by incorporating a virtual event marketing component. With Livestorm, you can stream live events to include both in-person and virtual audiences.

After the event wraps, use Livestorm to share links to the recording so viewers can watch the event on demand. Livestorm's email follow-ups makes it easy to stay connected with leads.

Top field marketing metrics to track

Field marketing managers typically track the following metrics to measure campaign results.

To measure the impact on demand generation, track:

• Number of registrations and attendees
• Amount of real-time engagement during the event
• Number of follow-up actions taken

To assess the impact on sales pipeline, track:

• Number of attendees converted into qualified leads
• Percentage of attendees in each funnel stage
• Number of closed-won deals

If you use an account-based marketing (ABM) approach, apply an account-level filter to these metrics. In other words, track the number of attendees and the amount of engagement per account.

Livestorm for field marketing

Let Livestorm bridge your field marketing and online events. With our virtual event software, you can:

• Live stream online conferences, panel discussions, and other events
• Share event recordings so viewers can watch on demand
• Follow up via email sequences to build relationships with leads
• Use Livestorm integrations to connect our software to your marketing tech stack

Ready to try our software for yourself? Sign up for Livestorm and organize your first event in minutes.