If you’ve ever wondered what field marketing is, you’re not alone.

In the modern world of marketing, there are many specific types of marketing within the broader “marketing umbrella”—including digital marketing, social media marketing, and traditional marketing, like billboards and direct mail.

With long purchasing timelines and a growing reliance on peer recommendations, field marketing gives brands the opportunity to connect with customers and prospects face to face.

And with the right approach, it can lead to more revenue in less time.

In this article, we’ll discuss what field marketing is, the role of a modern field marketing team, and examples of field marketing strategies that can boost your company’s revenue.

Field marketing is a marketing method that emphasizes the buying journey for prospects and customers within a particular market or “field”. It focuses on forging personal connections, using experiential marketing to generate interest in a company's products, services, and brand.

Common field marketing goals include market research, brand awareness, customer engagement, and increased sales and revenue.

Field marketing can look remarkably different from one company to the next. When defining the role of field marketing within your own organization, it’s important to make sure everyone knows exactly what their responsibilities are, including where certain tasks might intersect with your other marketing teams and activities.

Depending on an organization’s structure, it’s not uncommon to see field marketing sitting within the demand gen team. However, it’s important to note that field marketing and demand generation are not the same thing.

Field marketing aims to generate interest in a company's products, services, and brand through experiential marketing, such as digital events and product demos. Demand generation has a broader focus. It aims to attract and nurture leads via methods such as content marketing and lead generation campaigns.

Field marketing managers may have the following responsibilities related to demand generation:

• Working closely with demand gen stakeholders to develop, execute, and optimize strategies that create and grow demand
• Managing campaigns throughout the lead lifecycle—from awareness and lead generation to nurturing and sales acceleration
• Telling the brand story through various types of event and non-event content, including emails, landing pages, webinars, case studies, and blog posts
• Working in multiple marketing channels, including (but not limited to) digital, media, email, paid and non-paid social media, and reporting on results

📚Learn More: 9 Ways Digital Events Are Transforming Demand Gen Teams

Field marketing and event marketing often go hand-in-hand, but there are important differences in their focus, goals and objectives.

Field marketing includes multiple campaigns focused on engaging directly with your target audience, such as account-based marketing (ABM) through direct mail and gifting. It tends to be more strategic and revenue-focused, with at least some ownership over the sales pipeline. Event marketing focuses on leveraging events to promote a brand, product, or service to a target audience.

Here are some common field marketing activities that you may or may not see in an event marketing role:

• Planning, implementing, and tracking virtual, in-person, and hybrid events
• Defining event goals and metrics, including targeted lead flow to maximize pipeline generation and acceleration
• Monitoring event metrics, conducting post-event evaluations, analyzing and reporting on results, and making recommendations for optimization
• Evaluating third-party opportunities and building vendor relationships to drive market penetration
• Continuously bringing new, revenue-driving ideas to the table

Field marketing is a full-service marketing function that can also be used to keep customers happy and increase recurring revenue—however, it is not the same thing as customer marketing.

Customer marketing focuses exclusively on building long-term relationships with existing customers. It involves strategies and activities aimed at upselling current customers, enhancing customer loyalty, and maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV).

While it’s common to find field marketing roles where customer marketing is a key responsibility, not every customer marketing role includes a field marketing component.

Field marketing teams can have customer marketing responsibilities, such as:

• Working with business development representatives (BDRs) and account managers (AMs) to find revenue gaps and growth blockers within the customer journey
• Analyzing data from pre-existing customer events to understand the reasons for revenue decline or low product adoption
• Collaborating with product and development teams to bridge those gaps
• Utilizing customer events to improve product knowledge, upsell new products, and increase brand-to-customer face time

📚Next Up: 6 Ways Goldcast Helps Customer Marketing Teams Drive Renewals

One of the major benefits of a high-impact field marketing strategy is that it can elevate your existing demand gen, event marketing, and customer marketing goals.

Here are just some of the advantages field marketing can offer.‍

Field marketing can improve brand perception by providing firsthand experiences to potential customers and creating a personal connection with your brand. With more prospects demanding deeper personalization, field marketing is an effective way to tailor the brand experience and win their trust.

By providing personal and memorable experiences with your brand, field marketing helps transform customers into brand advocates. This can include events, product demonstrations, and promotions designed to engage customers in direct and meaningful ways.

Field marketing gives you the opportunity to gather valuable feedback and insights directly from prospects and customers. By encouraging open discussion around industry challenges or emerging product use cases, brands can use market insights to guide product development, increase customer satisfaction, and build stronger relationships.‍

Field marketing plays a crucial role in executing ABM by providing opportunities to nurture relationships with key decision-makers face to face. With the right data, field marketing can support account-level engagement and provide deep audience insights to help you personalize sales conversations and follow-ups.

Field marketing can help build and accelerate your revenue pipeline in several ways:

• Host events, activations, or promotions in targeted locations to attract new customers and drive sales
• Generate new leads by actively engaging with potential customers in-person and capturing their contact information
• Nurture relationships with key decision-makers at high-value accounts
• Showcase your products or services directly to customers to increase interest and conversions
• Leverage face-to-face interactions with customers to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services
• Present relevant offers or complementary solutions to increase average transaction value and revenue

One of the biggest advantages of field marketing is that there are endless opportunities to get creative with your approach.

Here are some powerful field marketing strategies that are relevant to almost any product, service, or industry.‍

Digital field events are an excellent way to get in front of your target market at a fraction of the cost of a traditional field marketing event.

Starburst’s Datanova Virtual Summit brought together more than 2,500 attendees. The team used interactive features like live chat, booths, and breakout rooms to replicate the same atmosphere of activity attendees were used to seeing at in-person events. The result was nothing less than impressive with a whopping $13 million in influenced revenue attributed for Q1.

Roadshows are a classic field marketing strategy that still hold a lot of value. In fact, 98% of consumers feel more motivated to buy after attending a live activation.

For the field marketing team at Aurora Solar, their regional NYC roadshow included a chance to learn from solar industry leaders, spend an afternoon networking with peers, and see a live demonstration of Aurora's AI solar design platform.

Providing a five-star customer experience is a powerful way to drive product adoption while increasing opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and renewals. To boost customer advocacy at Clari, the team hosts exclusive Customer Advisory Board events in addition to their regular webinars and demo-based event series.

These invite-only events include a small group of pre-selected customers for focused discussion that helps inform Clari’s product roadmap. Each event is highly interactive, including multiple breakout sessions and opportunities for one-to-one engagement.

Fireside chats are a great way to foster a personal connection by offering prospects the opportunity to get to know a key industry thought leader.

Webinars have rapidly evolved from a “sit back and watch” format to a highly engaging field marketing channel.

In addition to their in-person trade shows and conferences, the field marketing team at Weave host a robust lineup of webinars. This includes monthly customer training webinars aimed at keeping customers up-to-date on recent releases, as well as live thought leadership webinars.

The team then repromotes each webinar on-demand to bring the content out of the digital abyss and drive further brand awareness.

It hasn’t always been easy to measure the ROI on field marketing. However, with the right metrics and tools, you can prove the impact of your strategy.

Here are some key metrics to help you track your success.‍

• Number of registrations
• Number of qualified attendees
• Time spent in event
• Engagement with on-demand assets
• Actions taken post-event

• Number of VIP attendees (e.g., important leads, customers, etc.)
• Real-time engagement (e.g., questions asked, polls taken, content downloaded during the event, etc.)
• Engagement with on-demand assets
• Total engagement score for each attendee (time in session, content downloaded post-event, questions asked, polls completed, etc.)

• Prospect stage of each attendee (lead, prospect, MQL, SQL, or customer)
• Percentage of each type of prospect
• Percentage of customers in attendance
• Minute-by-minute attendance rates (including best sessions and drop-off areas)
• Number of private discussions with VIP attendees
• Conversions into a qualified lead
• Conversions to number of qualified meetings
• Pipeline (both sourced and influenced)
• Closed-won opportunities
• Closed-won revenue

Pop-up shops and other branded pop-ups are one of the most common field marketing tactics for a reason. If you need inspiration for your next pop-up, look no further than Glossier.

Glossier organized its first pop-up store in New England, featuring nine shipping containers filled with their best-selling cosmetics and skincare products. Customers had the opportunity to try out new products and engage with Glossier consultants to get more information.

When it comes to experiential marketing, no one does it quite like Lego. The mega toy brand is known for its epic omnichannel approach including outdoor exhibitions like Sean Kenney’s Nature Connects®.

The promotion featured 13 sculptures made completely of LEGO bricks, including a mother polar bear and cubs, an eleven-foot rhinoceros, and a zebra and wildebeest display that took 875 hours to build.

Done right, event swag can be much more than the baseline “stuff we all get”. Your swag bags can provide strategic product placement opportunities, elevate the attendee experience, and increase brand recall.

For example, the team at Qualified hosts an event called Taste of Qualified. Each attendee is gifted two bottles of wine before joining an educational tasting session, which then organically transitions into a peer-to-peer networking event.

It’s no secret that most event attendees come for the networking. Depending on the format of your field event, you can elevate your networking opportunities via an exclusive VIP dinner, action-packed giveaway, or even a live training event with time for group sharing and feedback.

The marketing team at Figma uses tools like Braindate and Remo to offer attendees new ways to connect. Braindate creates a networking marketplace for topics, where attendees can choose what they want to talk about. Remo is a VR-like tool that lets attendees choose a table, where they'll watch a virtual keynote and mingle with others.

Event hashtags, selfie-sharing, and referral competitions are just a few of the social media tactics that can take your field marketing campaign to the next level.

To keep the excitement going, the team at Demandbase makes the most of their post event content on their social media channels by sharing enticing video clips, key takeaways, and eye-catching event photos. They also encourage attendees to share their own insights and experiences using the event hashtag. This helps keep attendees engaged long after the event ends, while paving the path for more registrations at their next event.

The road to high-impact field marketing isn’t always straightforward, but with the right tools, tactics, and techniques, you’ll have everything you need to launch a winning strategy.

Goldcast is the modern event platform purpose built for results-focused field marketers. Showcase your brand at every step of the registration process, use a complete panel of interactive engagement features to keep your audience in your events, and track all the right ROI metrics to prove the value of your campaigns. 

Tomorrow’s field marketing events look a whole lot different from yesterday’s. Stay ready with the Event Marketing Playbook 3.0.