If you’re looking to get into the field marketing game, you probably have a few questions! It’s an extremely lucrative tool when utilised correctly, known for benefiting the sales arm of businesses across many sectors.
At Tactical Solutions, we’re a data-led field marketing agency, so you know we’re the very best in the business. We work with the UK’s biggest brands and have had a lot of success during our time in the marketing industry, making us experts at what we do.
We’ve created this handy guide to run you through everything you could possibly need to know about field marketing, so you can really use it to your advantage. And if you find that you need a little more help, we’re only a phone call away!
Marketing Defined
Before getting into the nitty gritty, it’s important that you have a basis in marketing to look back on. Marketing is a term used in the advertisement industry to refer to the process of driving more leads and sales to a business.
There are many different forms of marketing – field marketing is just one avenue you can use. Digital marketing strategies use online tools such as content management and social media platforms. This form of marketing is becoming quite dominant within the field due to the advent of modern internet technology.
Conventional marketing focuses more on traditional marketing initiatives like television adverts and magazine advertising. Despite the rise of the internet, traditional marketing initiatives are still significant within the marketing sector.
When developing a product or service and strategising how to best market its launch, you should utilise a range of different tools in order to effectively capture your chosen audience’s attention.
What is Field Marketing?
That brings us to the next question – what is field marketing?
Put simply, field marketing focuses on building up customer relationships and brands, whilst also creating leads and sales as part of the campaign goals. Typically, a field marketing strategy is based on drumming up sales in a field location – for example, a supermarket or retail store.
At Tactical Solutions, we work directly with brands to ensure that your products are well-placed and promoted, encouraging further sales and company engagement along the way.
Because of this, you’ll often find our trained territory sales managers working within the location itself. As well as increasing sales, other field marketing aims include increasing brand awareness and overall engagement with the company.
What Do Territory Sales Managers Do?
The role of working within a field marketing initiative can be a rather varied one, with lots of different strategies involved to make the campaign an overall success.
At Tactical Solutions, our territory sales managers work hard to ensure your goods have the best chance of standing out. There are many things we do to successfully promote products in the field, combining several different techniques together to beat the competition.
Common activities include:
- Representing the brand and communicating with other members of the team and customers
- Using insights to audit stores and other retail environments
- Gathering data in order to boost customer engagement and loyalty, as well as in-store presence
- Providing product recall solutions if the situation arises
- Launching new products and re-launching older brands
- Ensuring promotion compliance and making sure your promotional displays are used effectively in order to boost sales
- Visiting stores and conduct detailed, in-depth research and analysis
As you can see, our field team has a very variable job, keeping them on their toes throughout the process. You can find out more about what our territory sales managers do here.
What Are the Benefits of Using Tactical Solutions to Market Your Brand?
One of the main things you’ll want to learn about before utilising our field marketing services within your business is how they can be used to increase your sales and brand engagement.
Field marketing has lots of advantages for any brand looking to increase its sales within a retail environment.
At Tactical Solutions, our territory sales managers are highly skilled at what they do, making us the perfect organisation to handle all your in-store marketing needs.
Our team uses their finely honed skills to provide a bespoke, premium service that should increase the stature of any business that chooses to work with us.
To help give you the upper hand over your competitors, we’ve listed some of the key benefits of field marketing below.
Increased Brand Awareness and Customer Interaction
One important thing to consider when trying to market your business is brand awareness – if people aren’t aware of your company, your brand will not spring to mind when they’re looking to buy something you happen to sell.
However, even if your brand is well known, a negative perception of your business could prevent people from engaging with you. By utilising a field marketing campaign you can change this, by making more people aware of your products, as well as increasing the way you’re perceived.
Product placement is extremely important for any brand – psychological studies have shown that where an item is placed in a store can have a direct influence on the sales of the product in question.
At Tactical Solutions, we use a variety of different analytic, data-led tools to ensure your brand will be highlighted within a store, leading to more sales as part of the process. This will increase both brand awareness and customer engagement, making your business a success.
Our representatives can create a positive, customer-focused face for your brand, which should increase leads and revenue as a whole.
Greater Reach to Your Target Audience
One of the main advantages of field marketing is that it allows you to effectively reach your target audience.
When running a business, you need to identify a target market for your product – these are the people who are most likely to buy the goods you’re selling.
Researching your key demographics will allow you to discover who your core customer base is, allowing you to then focus the resulting marketing on that base in order to drum up further business. Targeting is extremely important for any brand, as it means you won’t be wasting time and resources on people that aren’t likely to buy from you.
Once you’ve discovered your target market, you can start utilising field marketing as a way to reach your chosen demographic. For example, if you run a business selling fitness supplements, you could start by promoting your items in the fitness or health and wellbeing aisles.
Different businesses have unique customer bases. In the supermarket world, shops such as Waitrose or Marks & Spencers tend to attract shoppers with a higher budget when compared to other shops like Aldi or Lidl. These supermarkets are likely to have very different target markets from one another, which field marketers working for these organisations will use to their advantage.
When using field marketing correctly, you can also interact with prospective customers in person, which will allow you to work out whether they’re likely to buy from you or not. You can then discuss their product preferences and work out how to reach your target audience more in the future.
Retail analytics can be used to identify your loyal customers, tailoring your output to a chosen demographic. This will allow you to identify the needs of your target audience and how to meet them, giving you the opportunity to target prospective customers more effectively.
Your ROI Is Measurable
One of the most important things for any business to consider is your ROI (return on investment). An ROI is a way of measuring the performance of your business, which compares the cost of the business to the returns and profits received from your sales.
It’s extremely important to measure ROI when running a business – using field marketing efforts can help you to do this. When starting a new marketing campaign, you can directly measure the outcome of your efforts, using this to your advantage the next time you decide to start a similar initiative.
This ultimately allows you to allocate the correct resources to your future endeavours, so you can tweak your campaigns to maximise profit as your business progresses. For an example of how this can work, check out our ‘Maximising ROI for GU Pads’ case study.
Grow Your Business with Expert-Led Field Marketing Services
As you can see, field marketing can be an extremely effective way to market your business, whilst also increasing leads and sales revenue across the board.
Our team of field marketing professionals are extremely skilled at what they do, having worked in the marketing sector for many years collectively. We’ve worked with a huge number of brands across the UK, so whether you’re a market leader or you’re just starting out on your business journey, we’ll be able to help.
We offer a range of retail solutions to get you started, including promotion compliance, distribution and availability, NPD launch and range reset, data-led calls, product recall and retail/store audits. This makes us perfectly suited to help you get your business off the ground, no matter what you’re selling.
If you’d like to find out a little more about how Tactical Solutions can help your business on its way to stardom, get in touch today!
