Digitalizing Field Marketing with Luzmo at Field & Concept

Although more & more marketing is happening online, field marketing is still a big thing. Think of those booths in supermarkets that promote a new drink, a new taste of chips,… Or promo teams handing out samples & merchandise for their brand.

We paid a visit to Field & Concept, an agency specialized in field marketing & brand activation.

Although the experience of field marketing happens ‘offline’, Field & Concept is an innovative player in the market. They heavily invest in the right digital tools to digitalize their field marketing services. So what’s the role of data & analytics in that story? Let’s dive in!

Field & Concept: the rapidly digitalizing field marketing agency

Being in business for more than 30 years, Field & Concept has become an established value in the field marketing sector. The agency works with big brands like Nespresso, Mondelez, WorldLine,… to increase their brand awareness, visibility and sales by supporting them in brand activation, merchandising and outsourcing of sales forces, but also field logistics & event installations.

Innovation is one of the key drivers at Field & Concept:

“Our ambition is to truly digitalize the field marketing sector. Backed up by powerful data, we strive for maximal business intelligence & aim at bringing AI expertise to the market. We’ve developed the necessary digital tools & apps in-house to make the full experience flawless for all of our customers.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

Now, all of those digital tools generate a lot of data. When used in a smart way, it can enrich the experience for their customers even more. So, how dó they actually benefit from that richness of data? How does it create added value for their customers?

These questions led Field & Concept to Luzmo, and a new fruitful partnership was born! Learn how they added interactive dashboards to their own customer portal.

Interactive dashboards, integrated into Field & Concept’s customer zone

1. Reporting: life before Luzmo

As more & more data became available, clients of Field & Concept expressed their need to stay on top of their activities at a fast pace. So, the company felt the moment had come to incorporate a faster, more interactive & intuitive way of reporting.

“Transparency to our customers has always been important to us. Customers have always had access to their datasets, but it took a lot of manual effort to do a proper analysis. Complementary, we planned monthly or quarterly ‘business reviews’ with our partners. However, this considerably slows down the pace of taking action on the data, from both sides.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

The integration of Luzmo’s interactive reporting module enables Field & Concept to – as Cyr describes – “offer the best of both worlds to our customers”. They get insights in real-time, while still being able to drill down for deeper analysis.

2. What’s inside the customer dashboards?

So, which kind of insights on their field marketing activities are brands looking for? Cyr explains:

“What we visualize in our dashboards varies highly depending on the customer. We ensure we show the KPIs that réally matter to our partners, instead of creating dashboards for the sake of it. Every customer has his own goals & way of reporting.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

Although their customers’ needs are very diverse, there is some overlap at times. Dashboards can range from project management related data to the performance of field marketing teams. A couple of examples:

• Evaluation of sales results
• Follow-up of attainment of certain sales quota
• Field marketing team performance (e.g. quality surveys)
• Budget follow-up, travel costs, number of hours worked

These dashboards help Field & Concept to maintain a transparent relationship with their customer. Clients have insights into their budget pacing at any time, and they know exactly where the money goes. The dashboard with sample data below will give you a glimpse of what this could look like.

3. The integration process

So how did the integration journey go at Field & Concept? From raw dataset to an interactive dashboard, directly embedded inside their customer portal?

For Field & Concept, it was of utmost importance to find a tool that was flexible enough to connect with their existing IT stack:

“Programming custom dashboards ourselves would have been an option too, since most of our tools are built in-house. However, the integration of an existing tool that is performant, user-friendly ánd seamlessly integrates within our existing platform made Luzmo the perfect solution for us. It allows us to centralize everything in 1 platform for our customers: from raw data to strong visual dashboards.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

The overall integration ran very smoothly at Field & Concept. In only 1 month time, they had their first dashboards operational inside their ‘customer zone’. Initially, they were built on Excel/CSV exports as a first test, but quite soon after, they connected their in-house tools to automatically feed the dashboards with real-time data:

“Our sales ambassadors make use of our app when they are on the field. When they add information to the app, our servers sync automatically with our Luzmo dashboards. In that way, the brands we work for can follow up – even in real-time – what is happening on the field.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

Initially, syncing those custom tools with Luzmo was the only potential challenge to make this partnership truly successful. However, the integration of Luzmo with the Field & Concept tool stack went smoothly, thanks to the flexibility provided by the plugin API.

4. The result: happy customers

The dashboard integration is now active for many of Field & Concept’s large accounts. The first customer feedback was unanimously positive:

“The dashboards are a true added value. We can get a better grip on our field marketing activities múch faster. The filtering options also give us a lot of flexibility, to really drill down on the insights we are looking for.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

“With Luzmo, we strengthen our brand promise of transparency”

For Field & Concept, this partnership brings new added value on many levels. Both for their customers and internally:

“Being 100% transparent has always been our brand’s promise. With the help of these dashboards, we can bring that transparency even more visually to our customers. In addition, it’s yet another confirmation towards our clients & network that we heavily invest in digitalizing our services.”

Cyr Provost, Commercial Director at Field & Concept

In the end, for Cyr, the most valuable thing is that these dashboards make business more efficient on every level. Clients can immediately take action on the latest state of business. Business reviews need a lot less preparation, because the dashboard does a large part of the work for you.

Because these dashboards expose new insights directly when they occur, they can better optimize investments together with the client. And this is how Field & Concept really builds trust with their clients, resulting in strong & lasting partnerships.

Are you ready to take your customer-facing reporting to the next level with embedded analytics? Our product experts will gladly give you a guided product tour!