Field marketing creates appealing, positive face-to-face interactions with consumers to build relationships and drive sales. It’s a powerful strategy that can reap incredible rewards for brands, but it also involves a whole lot of moving parts — research, planning, and preparation — working together smoothly. Increasingly, as consumers’ expectations climb, brands large and small are looking to the expertise of field marketing agencies to tell their brand stories in a way that brings the brand to life and connects with consumers.
What Is a Field Marketing Agency?
“Field marketing” as a term covers a broad swath of locations and activities, including
- product sampling and demonstrations
- promotions and displays in stores, in malls, and at outdoor shopping centers
- booths/tables at trade shows, conferences, and similar events
- activations at sporting events, concerts,
- street team and sandwich board campaigns
- guerilla marketing
- food trucks and pop-up shops
- wild posting and outdoor advertising
Like other marketing efforts, field marketing uses audience targeting, personalization, and relationship-building to connect with the target consumer group.
What differentiates field marketing agencies from in-house marketers is the field marketers’ ability to apply those time-tested marketing practices across a variety of settings and locations, in environments that feature variables like weather, logistics, permitting, consumer behavior, and other hard-to-control elements.
While it’s certainly possible for a brand to run its own field marketing efforts internally, many brands find that bringing in the expertise of a field marketing agency more than pays for itself.
What Does a Field Marketing Agency Do?
As a specialist agency, a field marketing agency creates and executes marketing campaigns that involve direct interaction with consumers in the "real world." A field marketing agency focuses on bringing brands to life through in-person experiences, building relationships with potential customers on a personal level. A field marketing agency’s work runs the entire lifespan of an activation, a pop-up shop, or another experiential marketing event.
Campaign Development
A field marketing agency will work closely with the client to understand their marketing goals, target audience, brand personality, and message. Does the client want to increase brand awareness, or gather feedback about its products and image? Collect contact information from potential customers for future marketing efforts? Expand into a new market, or launch a new product? The agency will develop innovative and engaging strategies that align with the client's objectives and resonate with the brand’s ideal customers.
Considering brand-specific factors like product, personality, and budget, as well as the target audience, the agency will determine the best combination of activities, locations, and timing for the campaign. Part of this process includes not only identifying the target audience but also finding them, so the event reaches the people most receptive to the brand’s message and products. The field marketing agency can help the brand reach its specific target audience through strategic location selection and tailored activities.
Campaign Execution
For events that require on-the-ground staff such as street teams, field marketing agencies recruit, hire, and train the personnel who will interact with consumers on behalf of the brand.
Field marketing agencies also handle all the logistical aspects of the campaign, including securing venues, acquiring permits and licenses, managing equipment and materials, and coordinating transportation.
Once the event is under way, field marketers execute all planned activities, such as product demonstrations, sampling, street promotions, immersive elements, and more. Along the way, the agency can offer promotional support to generate and sustain excitement about the event, using digital marketing platforms like social media to magnify impact and engagement beyond the scope of the physical event.
Costco Sampling CampaignMeasurement and Analysis
Measuring the effectiveness of experiential marketing can be difficult, but field marketing agencies, through their experience, know how to plan and implement event-related data collection. The agency will determine key performance indicators early in the process, then track key metrics throughout the campaign, such as interactions, leads generated, engagement metrics, and feedback. They analyze the data to assess the campaign's effectiveness, identify areas for improvement, and measure the return on investment (ROI).
Post-event, the field marketing agency provides the brand owners with data-driven insights — detailed reports on the campaign's performance, highlighting key findings and offering recommendations for future marketing efforts.
Field marketing agencies have deep expertise in navigating the challenges inherent in experiential marketing. They’re knowledgeable about measuring ROI on field marketing endeavors, from how to plan for KPI tracking to understanding how the event affected sales performance during and after. And they can often achieve better results with a more efficient use of resources compared to in-house efforts, making these specialized agencies valuable partners for brands looking to connect with consumers on a personal level, build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales through engaging real-world experiences.
Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing firm based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Want to discuss your next project? Reach out below.
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