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A few ways to create extraordinary business impact, punch above your budget and stay sane  Fulfilling a Field Marketing role, especially in a region far from HQ and in a different language than the corporate one can be both a daunting and amazing task. You are the person who “just makes it happen” locally, at the same time as you provide feedback and guidance around media, messages and more to the organisation. Not seldom is this a position that requires the personality of a cheerleader, a coach and a referee at the same time. And that’s also what makes it so rewarding! We are sharing a few of our lessons learned here, in the form of tricks to this role, when you want to make sure Field Marketing is fulfilling both for the organisation, and for you! Become a market expert Make it your business to understand the local market and the local business beyond the traditional marketing scope. We have all collected, read and analysed public data about the market, reports about competition and found them useful. But there is also a real value in ensuring visibility of sales and pipeline data and taking part in sales calls, updates and reviews. Build relationships with sales, create a regular dialogue and build your insights into your plans pro-actively. Combine this with analysis of your database, and you can start a segmentation and targeted campaigns. It will seem a bit like magic, and you might also pick up on some customer references at the same time. Create a virtual team of contributors and stakeholders How many times have we asked a technical expert for “a favour” when it comes to reviewing marketing material with short notice? That might still happen… but there is great benefit in pro-actively creating a small virtual marketing team of people from different parts of the business around you. In addition to those who are trained spokes people, recognised speakers etc, invite colleagues who can provide feedback from clients. Formalise it with short monthly update calls, ensure that recognition is given and dialogue is encouraged. You might be amazed by how willing others are to contribute, given some notice. Pick a few, integrated campaigns It might sound obvious, but if you are in a region, or just a team of one or two, the importance of sticking to a few focused integrated campaigns can hardly be exaggerated. Make sure you are plugged in and collaborate with centralised functions across the organisation, leverage platforms and test automation tools. Review the impact of your campaigns against objectives on a regular basis and share the results internally. If you are part of the central team, or leading a group across regions, ensure that there are KPIs and campaigns goals related to local achievements.Raise your hand to be an early-adopter as long as it aligns with your chosen message and is based on your market knowledge. That extra support and structure might give you some room for flexibility to support a last-minute request or two and “make it happen”. Build and maintain partnerships To create impact and scale, partner with the best, the strategic and those that have as much to benefit from collaboration as you do locally. If you work for a vendor, expectations are usually high for Channel Partners to be main contributors to demand and pipeline. Whilst managing the channel engagement is someone else’s fulltime job, we can plug in and ensure marketing is included in sales plans, that channel partners are supporting our messages to market on websites, in newsletters to their database and via events. Communicate, communicate and communicate is the name of the game. Just as impactful as channel, let’s not forget alliances where marketing can play a significant role especially early in the sales cycle, as part of account based work and for branding. Alliances can play a significant role in marketing objectives and achieving targets – and the benefit is usually mutual. Everybody wins! Be selective about content localisation You’re the expert on communicating in your region. You understand the mentality, know the suitable tone and see what competitors and partners are saying. If your local language is not English, you are both in a good and a tricky situation. Spending too much time on localisation is an easy trap to fall into – as well as an opportunity to get the content “just right”. We need to consider the true local impact, especially in regions where English is accepted and sometimes even preferred. Having a landing page translated to local language can be important, but put this into comparison to taking that time for a discussion with clients or prospects. Thinking twice can help even when we are experts. Read more about content localisation Change the way you perceive your role, and your role in the business might change Field Marketing can sometimes feel like being at the receiving end of content, campaigns, reporting requests and a “long list of implementations” to get done. When we represent an organisation in a region we can really use this to our advantage and turn this on the head – become a contributor of content, customer references and feedback on activities, a subject matter expert in specialised parts of the marketing portfolio and provide business impact by aligning with sales locally and be bold as an early-adaptor within the organisation. This might sound more like hard work than magic, but we believe the results make it very worthwhile. And at Yellow Spider we welcome hard work for the right results, and will be happy to provide some magic to your organisation too. Contact us to find out more about how we can support you in shaping your team, establish and hone your processes or fulfilling roles in the field.
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