When you think of field marketing, you might think of roadshows and evening galas. 💃🏽

But field marketing isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago. Event strategies have shifted from annual flagship affairs to year-round events serving as a brand’s essential mouthpiece.

What exactly do successful field marketers do in 2023 and beyond? In this guide, we’ll cover proven strategies for the modern field marketing team, the benefits of a strong strategy, and our favorite real-world examples.

First, let’s level set. What is field marketing, exactly?

Field marketing focuses on building personal connections with a target market. Field marketers make those connections by creating memorable experiences that also serve to generate interest in their brand, products, and services.

And yes, field marketing happens in — you guessed it — the field. But over the past few years, the “field” has changed. It’s expanded to include the vast, virtual realm. That’s had some exciting implications for the types of events and experiences you can include in your field marketing plan.

1. Leverage your network
2. Diversify your event formats
3. Make the most of your tech
4. Create interactive experiences
5. Follow up
6. Build a community
7. Measure and iterate

Now that field marketing extends far beyond one-and-done summits in a specific place and time, we’ll be discussing strategies that apply to both virtual and hybrid events by using the term “digital events”.We hear you: What about in-person events? Today, even in-person events often include some kind of virtual element—think livestreaming during the event and sharing content on-demand after the event.

With that perspective in mind, let’s dive into the strategies.

Field marketing is all about building relationships and your network is full of open doors. Start by cranking up your employee advocacy machine to promote your events on LinkedIn, Instagram, and anywhere else your audience hangs out.

Then, reach out to niche influencers within your network that also target your audience. Find out about opportunities for sponsored posts, email blasts, or content collaborations that support your goals and the influencer’s.

As a field marketer, you know your audience like the back of your hand. Prove it by conducting events in the formats that resonate the most. Whether it’s webinars, workshops, product demonstrations, digital unboxings, virtual award shows, or something else—tailoring events to your audience is key.

The right martech is a powerful ally to have in your corner. To make the most of your digital field events, you need an event platform with robust features like email sequences, engagement tools, and analytics.

Once you’ve established a solid foundation, start exploring emerging trends like apps, plugins, and augmented reality to differentiate your events and give your attendees an experience they won’t forget.

Event marketers are over passive seminars—we’re in our interactive era now. 🤝

For maximum memorability, you’ve got to immerse your prospects in your brand experience, not just pull them through it.

For virtual and hybrid events, these engaging experiences look like:

• Q&A sessions
• Real-time polls and surveys
• Live chats
• Networking sessions
• Gamification
• And more

It might sound obvious, but effective follow-ups take a lot of thoughtful planning. It can be easy to drop the ball while basking in the glow of a successful field marketing event. Keep the momentum going by nurturing prospect relationships, whether new or longstanding.

Send attendees exclusive content or special offers. Collect feedback with a post-event survey. And for the love of pipeline, send account-level engagement insights to your sales team so they can personalize their outreach immediately after the event.

📚Learn More: Your Guide to Successful Post-Event Follow-Up

Community building is an excellent way to leverage your field event interactions into an ongoing relationship with key accounts. You can build community via online forums, social media groups, messenger apps—wherever your audience congregates.

The goal is to become a meaningful part of your audience’s lives, and that means giving, giving, giving. We’re talking actionable resources. Exclusive research and insights. Facilitating fruitful connections between members. Give them something they can’t get anywhere else.

All the strategies we’ve discussed are tried and true. They work. But which will work bestfor your specific audience and goals?

Ultimately, that’s up to you. No matter which strategy you choose, collect all the data you can to measure the performance and ROI of your field marketing efforts. With the right event ROI metrics, you can identify opportunities for future improvement and keep growing. 🌱

You know it’s important to experiment with different marketing tactics. But why start from scratch?

By implementing the proven strategies above, you can be sure you’re coming out of the gate strong. And starting strong has huge benefits.

Field marketing is not a “spray and pray” approach. It’s targeted to specific audiences and accounts. Effective strategies boost your results within those defined audiences — giving you a much higher return on your investment.

The best field marketing activities help you forge connections on a personal level. An up-front investment in these long-term customer relationships yields increased trust and loyalty, brand advocacy, and invaluable word-of-mouth referrals. Basically, any marketer’s dream come true.

Data collection is crucial to every modern marketing strategy. With the right tools in place, the data you gain from your field marketing campaigns can be applied to more than just future campaigns and sales outreach. Deep account-level data provides insight into customer preferences and behaviors that can inform product development, customer success, and more.

Best of all, the field marketing strategies we’ve discussed have tangible ROI measures. And by “tangible” we mean a little more compelling than collecting 114 business cards in a fishbowl. We’re talking MQLs, influenced pipeline, and revenue. These insights empower you to do more of what works and prove your impact on your company’s bottom line.

Now that we’ve covered some battle-tested field marketing strategies, let’s bring it home with a few of our favorite examples of these strategies in action.

The e-commerce pros at Bloomreach know a thing or two about personalized customer experiences. They help clients scale personalization across the entire e-com customer journey. So it’s no surprise that their field events are hyper-personalized (and amazing).

Their one-to-few account-based marketing (ABM) events provide exclusive experiences like a whiskey tasting or cookie decorating workshop. And to support the brand’s focus on product-led growth, they also run live product demos featuring real use cases for Bloomreach.

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• A small, highly-engaged audience is better than a large, passive one. Invest in special field events to bring those red-hot accounts across the finish line.
• With the right audience, your product can speak for itself. Never pass up an opportunity to show your product in action.

After taking its Code One conference virtual during the pandemic, software behemoth Oracle reimagined the entire affair to form its current flagship event, CloudWorld.

While the event is back to being held in-person, it has kept key virtual elements including on-demand sessions. And having gotten a taste of the global reach a virtual event affords, Oracle now holds CloudWorld as a “tour,” with events in eight cities worldwide. (We love it!)

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• Don’t ignore your audience’s geographic diversity. Whether your target audience is global, coast-to-coast or regional, aim to make it accessible to all.
• Show and tell. CloudWorld left attendees marveling at what’s to come on Oracle’s roadmap. Involving your most engaged customers in product development is an excellent way to hit the bullseye on new features and increase retention.

Content localization company Smartling has been hosting its Global Ready Conference since 2016. During 2020’s massive shift toward virtual, the team refocused its energy to create a flawless, Netflix-like experience for its audience.

Smartling’s relentless dedication to experience has made their virtual Global Ready Conferences successful ever since. By leveraging pre-recorded and live content, they were able to build an action-packed digital event with zero downtime.

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• Experience is paramount. Tech glitches and sloppy branding simply don’t fly for today’s virtual and hybrid field events. Plan for a seamless virtual event experience.
• In a virtual environment, distractions are everywhere. Prepare airtight, engaging content for your event to keep attendees locked in.

Starburst is the data activation platform with a powerful field marketing team that hosts over 50 events per year. With volume like that, they knew they needed to ensure a consistently stellar attendee experience across each and every gathering.

Using a virtual event platform that made it easy for attendees to flow seamlessly from one session to the next, Starburst created a digital “lazy river” experience for their Datanova Virtual Summit. Attendees were able to break and rejoin whenever they wanted throughout the day, without missing a beat. The result was a 10% increase in attendance for a total of 2,500+ attendees and $13 million in influenced revenue.

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• Do what works for your attendees. Today business professionals are busy. Make it easy for them to drop in and out of sessions and you might even see a substantial uptick in attendance.
• Platforms matter. For a powerful field marketing event, don’t settle for an out-of-the-box platform like Zoom. Use a modern digital event platform that lets you customize every element to provide a truly immersive experience for your attendees.

For years, marketers have known that Facebook holds a “treasure trove of data.” But translating that data into practical strategies can be overwhelming. Facebook understood and responded to this challenge for its audience with Facebook IQ Live, an experience that brought to life the stories data can tell.

Marketers got to walk through physical build-outs of a home, cafe, and retail store where actors illustrated the role Facebook plays in users’ experiences and the kinds of insights those experiences create for marketers.

This is an example of a go-big-or-go-home hybrid event that had a budget to match. But there are lessons here for brands of any size.

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• If your audience isn’t crystal clear on how they’d use your product, start by building that understanding in a hands-on way.
• The most memorable stories are quantitative and qualitative. Share your social proof and performance stats — and then show potential customers what success with your product looks like.

The expert field marketing team at subscription management platform Zuora has an event for every part of the field marketing funnel. From awareness boosting thought leadership campaigns to driving product demos, they use data to inform every element of the field marketing strategy.

After a Zuora event, event data goes straight into Marketo to further optimize their programs. No manual entry or missing account insights. If a hand-raiser is logged in at an event and matches the ideal customer profile (ICP), it becomes an MQL for Zuora’s business development reps (BDRs). 🙌🏻

From there, the sales team is able to swoop in with, ‘Hey, I saw you engaged in this way’ and kick off conversations that are relevant, not cold.

📝 Field marketing takeaways:

• Documents downloaded, poll and survey responses, hand-raisers and Q&A. The best field marketers use all the available data to understand what prospects want and be that resource for them.
• To get deep insights without the manual data wrangling, make sure your event platform is integrated with the rest of your tech stack. Whether your tool of choice is Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot or a combination of high-powered platforms, your data should flow seamlessly throughout the stack to enable fast, needle-moving sales and marketing.

As you continue hitting it out of the park in the new digital “field,” is your virtual event platform ready to keep pace?

Modern field marketers need a platform with features designed to facilitate deep, personal connections with your ideal customers. And that’s exactly where Goldcast comes in.

Goldcast is the modern digital event platform built from the ground up specifically with field marketers in mind. You’ll get engagement tools like 1:1 chats, video Q&A, real-time polls, content hubs, and deep account-level analytics you can’t find anywhere else. And it all flows seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack.

Our new Goldcast Field Events tool has all of this and more. Join the waitlist to get the first look our latest field marketing functionality. Want to check out what Goldcast can do for you today? Get started with a no-commitment demo.