Maximizing Field Marketing Through First-Party Data Collection.

One word that I am happy will be leaving my lexicon for four more years is “ground game”.

Over the past few months as I ramped up my consumption of political podcasts, shows, and sound bites, I kept hearing about each party and their ground game - which is why I wanted to spend some time on field marketing today.

Similar to the Grinch, I loathe entirely, when “thought leaders” try to take abstract current events with no relativity to business and make it into content.

This is not that…I promise…this is just an introduction to a broader point and nothing more *ducks*

Outside of knocking on doors, both campaigns employed similar tactics - rallies, more commercials than we all could collectively bear, and lots and lots of text messages.

I found it fascinating to see the blend of older traditional get out the vote efforts mixed with a clear and obvious plan to spam your text and email inboxes into oblivion.

As campaigns continue to evolve and the voting demographics continue to shift toward younger voters, funneling potential voters into an active email and SMS lists will only become more and more important.

With that, I want to look at how to marry online and offline strategies. Specifically the reason why you have to have digital acquisition points throughout all your in-person marketing efforts.

CPG is an expensive game and you can get bloated quickly with shopper marketing and trade spend programs that you might feel are moving the needle, but when you can’t measure the ROI of those efforts, you end up making decisions based on vibes.

It’s the feeling you get after Expo West when dozens of buyers promise you future placement, but then you get back home, and it’s radio silence from that once interested buyer.

It’s the same vibe you get after a demo, when you have spoken to actual customers, shared your story, they tell you they love the product, and you generate a handful of sales in that three hour period. Only to check the trailing lift two weeks down the road and the numbers remain unchanged.

You feel validated in the moment and that high that the in-person feedback provides guides your confidence that your on the right track and that shoppers resonate with your product, but just like that buyer who ghosts you post-Expo, that customer’s excitement was most likely artificially heightened due to the fact that you were right in front of them.

Trade shows, events, demos - they all have their place in your playbook, but they are all expensive, difficult to measure, and don’t necessarily scale if your not constantly acquiring shoppers through those efforts.

Contrast that with brands who prioritize owning their messaging and owning their audience.

These are brands that you are constantly getting texts and curated emails from. You consume their content on social media and when they have a new initiative, flavor, or announcement that they want you to hear about, you're hearing it directly from them via their digital platforms.

You still see them at events, tastings, and demos - but the strategy is blended with direct and consistent communication to the customer. They view these in-person marketing efforts as first-party data collection occurences.

We all know you can measure, test, and iterate much easier through digital marketing, but similar to how an investor approaches compound interest, you have to slowly build that audience over time. There are no shortcuts.

The message of this issue is not to scrap your in-person marketing initiatives, it’s to outline that in-person marketing initiatives without a plan to capture first-party data is a waste of time and money.

A customer interaction that you have at a demo or event that goes uncollected and is simply left to the feeling that the person had on how that interaction went, is unhelpful to the brand.

It’s important that any and all customer touch points that you have are customer acquisition opportunities to add to your owned audience. Whether it's a Google form or an industry specific platform, you have to capture that information.

Then moving forward you can look back at the demo you ran, see that you captured 35 customer emails, 20 of which purchased, and start to nurture them in your email and SMS sequences. The next month you might deliver an in-store rebate or promotion, only to see that 2 take advantage of it or maybe you deliver a survey where only 4 respondents say they would buy the product again.

You can now compare those results with the tasting you did at the runner’s expo last week, where those customers showed they were much more likely to buy again, and adjust your budget to prioritize sporting events over demos the next quarter.

It’s easy to look at a strategy in hindsight and critique it. It gets harder to poke holes in that strategy if the focus is the same from day one.

For me, the top brands have a few things in common from day one…

They know the channels that work for them, every interaction is a customer acquisition opportunity, and they still participate in traditional field marketing, but with a focus to transition those customers to their owned channels.