The Field Guide
The Field Guide is practical marketing education for agricultural and regional businesses. No assumed knowledge, and no marketing jargon for the sake of it. Just useful guidance to help you understand what matters, what you could be sharing, and how the pieces fit together.
Start here · Free
You know your business needs to show up online. So how do you actually put it all together?
The Starter is a good place to begin if you’re not quite sure where to start. It is free, it is short, and its job is to give you the bigger picture before you worry about any single channel.
It will help you:
It will not turn you into a marketer. It will make marketing make sense, which is a more useful place to start.
The series
Each Field Guide takes one part of marketing and makes it easier to understand. What it is. Why it matters. And, importantly, what to actually do with it.
Start with what your business needs now. Each guide stands on its own, but together they’ll help you understand how the pieces of your marketing fit together.
KNOW → SHAPE → FIND → TELL → BUILD
Coming soon
Before you say anything, work out what you want to be known for.
Before you decide what to post or where to put it, get clear on who you are talking to, what matters to them, and what you want your business to be known for.
This guide walks through your audience, where you sit in the market and what makes your business different; and put words around the things you’ve probably always known about your business, but never had to explain.
You’ll come away clearer on who your marketing is for, what you want to be known for and how that should shape what you do next.
Coming soon
Look and sound like the same business everywhere people find you.
Your brand is more than your logo. It’s the words you use, the way you speak, how you look and the feeling people get when they come across your business.
This guide helps you bring those pieces together and create some simple rules to follow, so whether someone finds you on your website, social media, signage or in their inbox, it all feels like the same business.
You’ll come away knowing how your business should look and sound, with a clearer guide for keeping it consistent wherever you show up.
Coming soon
You are sitting on your best marketing. This is how to see it.
Customer questions. The way you do something, and why. Your people, your place, your process, your knowledge and your results.
The things that feel ordinary because you see them every day are often exactly what someone outside your business wants to know. This guide helps you look at your business with fresh eyes and start noticing what’s actually worth sharing.
You’ll come away with a clearer idea of where your stories come from, and a list of useful things your business can talk about.
Coming soon
One good story, doing more than one job.
Once you know what’s worth sharing, the next question is how to tell it, and where it belongs.
This guide helps you turn your stories and knowledge into useful marketing, whether that’s a photograph, video, social post, website article, email, print collateral or something you share face-to-face. You’ll also learn how to reuse and reshape good material, rather than starting from scratch every time.
You’ll come away knowing how to choose the right format and place for a story, tell it clearly, and make good marketing travel further.
Coming soon
Marketing is built, not switched on.
Good marketing takes time. It’s what happens when people keep seeing, hearing and experiencing the same business, and slowly come to know what you do, what you stand for and why they should trust you.
This guide helps you build a rhythm you can actually maintain, put simple systems around your marketing and understand what your results are telling you. So when things get busy, your marketing doesn’t disappear altogether.
You’ll come away with a more workable way to keep your marketing moving, measure what matters and build recognition and trust over time.
Start with the free Starter. Then go further when you need it.
Join the list and we’ll let you know when new Field Guides are released.
How we think about it
If you take one thing from this page, take this. Almost everything worth putting online falls into one of three jobs. Once you can see which is which, deciding what to share gets much easier.
Share what you know.
Answer the question you get asked every week. Explain why you do it that way. Help someone choose between two options. You know things your customers may not, and explaining them plainly is one of the fastest ways to be trusted by someone who has never met you.
Show what you do.
The work, the people, the process, the place, the season. The parts of your business that feel completely ordinary to you are the parts nobody else gets to see. This is where most businesses realise they already had the material.
Show why people can trust you.
Results, experience, the job that went well, the customer who came back, the thing you have been doing for twenty years. Not boasting. Evidence.
You’ll probably find one comes more naturally than the others. Together, they give people a holistic picture of your business.
Where this can go
The Field Guides are there when you want to understand your marketing better and put more of it into practice yourself.
But every business needs something different. Sometimes you need a little direction. Sometimes you need a plan. And sometimes you need someone alongside you to help make it happen.
That’s why there’s more than one way to work with Hamlet & Fields.
I want to understand it.
Field Guides, workshops, and practical marketing education to help you understand what matters and how it all fits together.
I need to work out what we need.
Audits, The Regional Edit, and strategic guidance to work out where you are, what’s missing and what needs to happen next. Explore planning →
We want help putting it into practice.
Ongoing marketing partnerships, with Hamlet & Fields working alongside your business to plan, create and keep your marketing moving. Explore partnerships →
Learn it. Plan it. Or bring us in to work alongside you.
For groups
The thinking in The Field Guide can also be delivered through workshops, field days, conferences and industry programs for producer groups, councils, Local Land Services, government programs, industry organisations and agricultural companies.
It works because we do not assume everyone in the room already understands marketing. We start with their business, their customers and the knowledge they already have, then show them how to put it to work.
Sessions are built for the audience in front of us, so a group of producers gets something different to a room of agribusiness managers. People leave with something they can use, and a clearer sense of what to do next.
If you are responsible for a group, a cohort or a membership that would benefit from this, we would like to hear about it.
Questions
The Field Guide is Hamlet & Fields’ marketing education for agricultural and regional businesses. It starts with a free guide called the Field Guide Starter, and extends into a series of paid guides that each take one part of marketing and explain it properly. It is written for people who are very good at their own work and would like marketing explained in language they can use.
Producers, business owners, tradespeople, managers, agricultural professionals and people working in and around regional industries. If you have looked at your own marketing and known there was more you could be doing without being sure what, it is for you. You do not need any marketing knowledge to start.
No. It is written with agriculture in mind because that is where we work, and the examples come from that world. The thinking applies to any business that knows something specific and needs it understood by people outside it. It applies just as well to businesses operating in regional towns as those working directly in agriculture.
No. The guides assume no prior knowledge. If we need to use a marketing term, we will explain what it means and why it matters.
No, and that distinction matters more than almost anything else in the guides. Social media is one channel. Your online presence also includes your website, what appears when someone searches your business name, your Google listing, your photographs, your email and what other people say about you. A business can be active on social media and still be hard to find, hard to understand and hard to trust.
The Starter helps you find what is worth talking about in your own business. It covers how to recognise the marketing already sitting inside what you do, how to turn everyday knowledge into something other people find useful, how the different parts of your online presence work together, and how to use Teach, Show, Prove to decide what to share. It is free and it arrives by email.
The Starter gives you the bigger picture and a place to begin. The paid guides go properly into each stage: knowing what you stand for, shaping how you are seen, finding what is worth sharing, telling it well, and building something people remember. The Starter is enough to get moving. The series is for when you want to go further.
Not yet. The guides are being written and will be released one at a time. Join the list and we will let you know as each one comes out. A bundle is likely once the full set exists.
Yes. The same material is delivered as workshops and sessions for producer groups, member organisations, councils, government programs, field days and conferences. Organisations engage us to teach it to their people. Get in touch with the group, the setting and roughly when, and we will tell you what would work.
That is most of our work. Hamlet & Fields is a marketing agency, and The Field Guide is our education arm. If you would rather have someone working on it with you, we offer marketing strategy and planning, and ongoing marketing partnerships where we work alongside your business. Start a conversation and we will tell you honestly which one suits.
The Field Guide is created by Hamlet & Fields, a marketing agency specialising in agriculture and regional business. Based in Bathurst in Central West NSW, we work with agricultural and regional businesses and organisations across Central West NSW, the Riverina and regional NSW. Our work covers marketing strategy, brand positioning and brand story, online presence, content, photography and video, social media, search, email, print, campaigns and practical marketing education. The Field Guide is our education arm, written by the same people who do this work for clients.
What The Field Guide covers
Who reads it
How to use it
Hamlet & Fields · Crafting country brand stories