Field marketing is today, still one of the most relevant marketing strategies used by brands to drive sales in stores. It has the potential to help you cut through the noise and make a home in the hearts of your target audience through interactive field marketing practices.
In this blog, we have covered the A-Z of field marketing, so you know what it is, its potential benefits for your business, and the different types of field marketing activities you can practice for your business.
Let’s begin.
What is Field Marketing?
Field Marketing is an umbrella term for marketing activities that encompasses merchandising, sales promotions, auditing, and sampling, etc. Amongst other things, the goal of field marketing is to get a brand’s product in the radar of its target customers and generate sales. It aims to build brand awareness, customer relations, and generate leads.
What are the Benefits of Field Marketing?
The benefits of field marketing is a long-standing one. Here’s how field marketing can help you achieve your business goals:
Improves Brand Perception
The beauty of field marketing lies in its customer-facing approach. Since field marketing generally happens at events over a point of sale, it helps a brand establish an intimate relationship with its target customers through face-to-face interaction.
Field Marketing allows people to interact with the brand and assess its qualities closely. People get the chance to know the brand, thus improving brand perception and driving brand awareness.
Enhances Customer Relations
Field marketing generally helps a brand establish a cordial relationship with its customers through face-to-face dialogue and engagement.
By interacting with customers and providing expert tips and sharing product knowledge, field marketing reps help increase a customer’s brand knowledge. In the long run, it raises a customer’s trust in the organization because of the hearty assistance provided by field representatives on-site.
Bolsters Sales Effort
Your target audience will not become your customer if they don’t have product awareness or trust in your brand. By taking care of both, field marketing indirectly helps you bolster your sales effort.
Addressing & Managing Customer Cynicism
21st-century customers are informed. They are cynical and want a quick redressal to their problems and swift attendance to their queries.
Field marketing has proved to be a blessing in this department because field marketers can efficiently address customer questions and address their cynicism in real-time.
Be it through webinars or POS interactions, pop-up shows in events or product demonstrations – the beauty of field marketing lie in the quick service and grievance redressal a field marketer can provide.
Accurate Customer Targeting
Field Marketing is a process that is born of data-backed customer research and demographic targeting. Post identification, the location is set for various field marketing activities such as product demonstrations, sales promotions, sampling, nurturing, etc.
What are the different types of Field Marketing Campaigns?
Field marketing is conducted by highly trained field marketers s who specialize in one or a combination of these field marketing activities:
Merchandising
Merchandising refers to the process that goes into ensuring the optimal positioning of marketing material or a product in a retail store. Here are some examples of merchandising:
- Ensuring that a given product is well-stocked by the retailer, strategically displayed in window displays or shelves in a visually appealing manner, and thoughtfully promoted.
- Assessing the performance of the product in the retail store. You can evaluate the performance of a product based on the performance of similar items offered by different brands, and the longevity of the time that particular product has stood unsold in the retail outlet.
Conducting Audits
Simply put, auditing refers to the practice of compiling information about a brand’s position in the marketplace. Here-in, the field marketer collects information about a brand’s product and its market performance. It takes into account the distribution of that product among stores, mapping of product stock levels, facings, and order sizes; and a measurement of how the products are displayed.
Sampling and Demonstrating
Sampling or Product Sampling refers to the practice of offering products as samples to potential customers. The idea is to give them a sense of what your product is.
You might have noticed that brand employees may offer you food samples in malls. Similarly, cosmetic stores may offer a lipstick sample or perfume sample to try on. When you sample the product, you get a sense of how the product tastes (food item) or what it looks like (cosmetic product).
After this close inspection, there’s a good chance that you might buy the product then and there if you like the product. Even if you don’t purchase the product, you will know what the product is, thus building brand awareness.
Sales Promotions
Generating sales is a field marketing activity conducted by sales representatives during a field operation. Sales reps generally make sale promotions at pop-up shops and promotional tables at high footfall events where they expect their target audience to be available in large numbers. Since the target audience is already present in the target location, it becomes easier for them to make a sale.
Conclusion
In this blog, we have outlined the benefits of field marketing for your business and how you can make the most of it using different field marketing techniques. We hope that this blog has opened your eyes to the window of opportunities that exist in the arena of field marketing.