Field marketers are the unsung heroes of sales and marketing. Serving as chief liaisons between marketing and sales teams, these dynamic workers help build brands, manage customer relationships, and generate new business leads. They’re constantly switching gears between sales, marketing, and customer service functions — sometimes as quickly as hour by hour.
Although their role may not always seem glamorous, what field marketers achieve is critical to their employers’ success. That’s because the work they do has a direct impact on organizational revenue. Field marketers play a crucial role in driving sales as well as influencing and generating pipeline opportunities for the teams they support. They do this by juggling multiple responsibilities, from building brand awareness and improving perception to enhancing customer relationships and ultimately delivering measurable ROI.
So, what happened to these supercharged, multi-tasking field marketers when pandemic health restrictions upended in-person events? Did a large part of their day-to-day strategy suddenly become in-actionable?
Field Marketers are Flourishing with Hybrid and Virtual Events
The very nature of the field marketer is that of a highly adaptable and unstoppable force. Rather than see the pandemic as a stop sign, these resilient marketers laid new communication paths. While adapting to the altered landscape was challenging, it also inspired them to find new ways to create, maintain, and grow connections with event marketing.
Field marketers are now relying more, not less, on events than they did before the pandemic began. In fact, data from Splash’s platform shows that our customers created 7 percent more events during the pandemic than in 2019. Events have always been a central part of a field marketer’s tactical planning, but instead of fading away during the pandemic, they transitioned to entirely virtual and hybrid. Hybrid events allowed attendees to choose to attend live or remotely, or even a combination of both.
The in-person portion of these hybrid events have become notably smaller during the pandemic, allowing for more meaningful interactions between field marketers and attendees. While large in-person events can be inflexible and anonymous, these smaller events also have the advantage of getting decision-makers together in relevant, targeted situations, promoting engagement and generating better ROI.
Field marketers have seen the benefits of virtual and hybrid events that virtual components bring, leaving many reluctant to revert to a fully in-person model. From a logistical standpoint, event content is easier to replicate and adapt for future events when it’s hosted digitally. Sales and marketing teams are also better equipped to convert attendees into customers when they have data insights like which event topics were best attended and which inspired the most audience participation.
The Takeaways That Will Carry Field Marketers and Their Businesses into the Future
While the pandemic forced field marketers to do more with less, the challenges created unforeseen opportunities for companies to better leverage the power and impact of their field marketers with virtual and hybrid events.
Although the playing field looks considerably different from a pre-pandemic world, field marketers are not only playing the same game they’ve always played, but they are playing more efficiently and finding new ways to win. For example, field marketers who once relied heavily on large-scale conferences and conventions have found that hybrid events with smaller field marketing components can improve attendance and ROI. It turns out that smaller, in-person events experience almost twice the attendance rates and can deliver a return of more than 10x over their super-large counterparts.
Increasing the number of virtual and hybrid events may have been born out of a crisis, but field marketers have embraced them as a strategy for future success. And as the field marketer’s role continues to evolve, the lessons learned during the last 18 months will inform their strategies and tactics and continue redefining their importance within every organization.
So, if you haven’t recently given a shout-out or a thank-you to the field marketers within your organization, now is a great time to do that. As they continue to find new ways to do their integral job, letting them know they’re essential and appreciated members of the team can go a long way.
The author, Billy Bahnsen, is the Senior Field Marketing Manager at Splash, an event marketing platform that provides event and field marketers the tools they need to design, create, and execute virtual, in-person, and hybrid event programs.
