Combining Digital and Field Marketing Strategies

It might be tempting to think of digital marketing as somehow separate from your brand’s real-world marketing presence — but if you choose not to cross-pollinate your marketing efforts across both realms, you’re likely missing out on some powerful synergies.

Digital marketing and field marketing are indeed two distinct marketing approaches, but when used together, they can form a powerful strategy. Digital marketing can support, promote, and expand the reach of your field marketing efforts, and your live, in-person field marketing events and advertising can be used to promote your digital presence. In an ideal world, wouldn’t your customers be tuned in to your brand on all channels? Following are some tips for building the synergy your brand needs to grow to the next level.

Digital vs. Field Marketing

A Powerful Tool for Building Brand Awareness: Digital Marketing

Digital marketing comprises everything your brand does online: web, social media, email, SMS. It utilizes channels like your own website, your email newsletter, your social media presence, and advertising you buy on web and in social media. Digital marketing’s appeal is that its reach is vast — conceivably, a social media ad could reach millions of users; almost anyone in the world can access your website to learn about your products and services; and an email sent to your subscribers arrives directly in the inbox of thousands of current and potential customers, most of whom chose to receive it. That makes digital marketing a powerful tool for building brand awareness across a large number of consumers.

And it’s relatively easy to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing: often, measurement tools are built into the technology. You can engage with consumers by sending them content, and they can choose to engage back by leaving comments on your social media channels or responding to your emails. Whatever they do, it’s measurable: website analytics, social media insights, and email campaign analytics tools give you detailed information about how many users are viewing your content, who they are, where they are, what devices they’re using, and how they’re responding to it.

Where Relationships Are Made: Field Marketing

Field marketing, on the other hand, happens in the real, live, bricks-and-mortar world — and while its scope and reach are limited compared to digital media, field marketing is where connections are formed between brand and consumer.

Field marketing is experiential, personal, and interactive, and it includes sampling, demonstrations, pop-ups, activations, guerrilla marketing, and other onsite marketing activities, says a blog post on hoppier.com. Field marketing is the concrete, real-life manifestation of your brand — it’s where, sometimes literally, the rubber meets the road in terms of how your brand interacts with its consumers. Yet, like its digital counterpart, field marketing is “designed around gaining the target audience’s attention, creating interest in and desire for your offerings, and ultimately driving action.”

How They Work Together

Case Study: Klondike

While there are many ways to use digital marketing to support field marketing and vice versa, the greatest benefit comes from creating clever synergies between the two. One useful case study: ice cream brand Klondike, which created an ice cream truck tour with stops in three major U.S. cities. The premise: to challenge participants with the perennial question, “What would you do for a Klondike bar?” Promobile and Klondike invited guests to use props to show their Klondike spirit, then share the results on social media. Visitors completed group challenges and enjoyed free ice cream — some 7,500 samples were given away during the event. Meanwhile, QR codes scattered throughout the activation sites invited participants to join the online fun and subscribe to Klondike’s newsletter, helping to build the brand’s online following. Sixteen brand ambassadors and four social media influencers hyped the tour stops in person and online, creating an event that was equal parts virtual and real-world.

Case Study: Trojan

For a recent WorldPride parade, Promobile and condom brand Trojan created an outrageous, on-theme, impossible-to-ignore backdrop for its brand activation: a colorfully decorated food truck serving free ice cream to promote a “penis pride” theme. A hashtag — #prideinmine — tied the live event to the brand’s online presence and functioned both as a promotional tool and as a built-in metric for the campaign’s success. The activation drew a great deal of media attention and over 1 billion impressions on social media, along with 41,000 engagements, making it a resounding success for both the event and the brand’s online presence.

The most successful marketing strategies often combine digital and field marketing efforts. Your brand can use digital ads to drive traffic to a booth at a trade show, or leverage social media to promote an upcoming event. By using both methods, you can create a cohesive marketing experience that reaches a wider audience and fosters deeper brand connections.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.